The big demographic story of the day is the Census Bureau’s news release reporting that more than 300 counties are now “majority-minority”. Predictably, my beloved New York Times ran the story in a very readable analysis of this latest data. Out of character, the NYT didn’t provide a GIS map to match the story.

But USA Today did, and then some, as part of its story in its Nation section entitled Hispanic growth extends eastward. The story includes an interactive flash-based map of the Impact of USA’s diversity that visually extrapolates the newly released demographic data from the Census. The maps offers three views: one mapping the patterns of the new “majority-minorities”; another illustrating migration patterns of Hispanics, with the fastest rates of growth of Hispanics occuring in the Midwest and the East Coast; and a third showing a trend among Blacks of moving toward the South. Plus, you get an interesting audio commentary from the demographer at the Brookings Institution.

Back to the Census Bureau for a second. Here’s a tip for all you demographic data geeks out there, something you may overlook in Census news releases: The Census usually embeds links to the underlying data on major stories like this, making it a breeze to find the source data. If you take a look at the Census news release linked above, you’ll notice links to both a detailed explanation of the underlying methodologies used, as well as a link to a page where you can download the entire data sets used. Your tax dollars at work, people.