March 28, 2024

Your Money Adviser: Assessing the Costs of Caring for an Aging Relative

Faced with the high cost of in-home care, many Americans end up providing care themselves for an aging parent or relative with a chronic condition. But by doing so, you may be putting your own finances, and even your health, at risk.

The number of adults caring for someone with a serious health problem is on the rise and is likely to continue growing as the population ages. Nearly 40 percent of American adults are caring for someone with a significant health issue, up from 30 percent in 2010, a recent survey from the Pew Research Center finds.

Those who care for an older family member are more likely to report poor health themselves, and to shortchange their own financial future, according to studies from the National Alliance for Caregiving and the MetLife Mature Market Institute.

“You take time away from work to make doctor calls, check on Mom or Dad, leave early to take them to a doctor’s appointment or stop by the pharmacy,” said Sharon Roth Maguire, the vice president of quality and clinical operations at BrightStar Care, which provides home care and health staffing services. “You’re not focused, because you’re really focused on what’s going on with your loved one at home.”

The relentless demands can drive you to leave your job, at least temporarily, but that has financial repercussions beyond the short-term loss of wages. The Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires certain types of employers to grant personal leave, doesn’t apply to all workers, and the leave is unpaid.

The impact is particularly significant for women. The average caregiver is a 49-year-old woman who works outside the home and spends almost 20 hours a week providing unpaid care to her mother for nearly five years, according to a study from the caregiving alliance and AARP.

A female caregiver who leaves the work force to care for a parent will lose, on average, more than $324,000 in wages and Social Security and pension benefits over a lifetime, according to a 2011 study from MetLife and the caregiving alliance.

“So many people, particularly women, say, ‘I’ll quit my job for six months to take care of Mom, and we’ll work out the finances,’ ” said Gail Hunt, president and chief executive of the caregiving alliance. “What they don’t think about is the impact on their Social Security and benefits down the road, as well as losing actual dollars from their income.”

Mary Anne Sterling, 47, a health care consultant in Ashburn, Va., understands firsthand the career and financial implications of caregiving. She became a consultant, she said, in part because she needed greater flexibility to deal with the needs of aging parents.

Ms. Sterling’s father died in 2001 of advanced dementia, after spending most of his financial resources before qualifying for Medicaid, the federal-state health program for low-income people. That meant little was left for her mother, who is now 83 and frail (and who had left her own career as a nurse early, to care for her husband). She lives in an independent-living apartment paid for by Ms. Sterling and her husband, but has at times required in-home care.

The cost of providing round-the-clock care was so high, Ms. Sterling said — as much as $500 a day — that she and her husband took more than a week off work to care for her until they could arrange for her to enter an inpatient rehabilitation center. Her mother is now doing well, but that could change with another fall, Ms. Sterling said.

Ms. Sterling estimated that over the last decade or so, she and her husband had spent roughly $250,000 to provide for her mother. That is money that they are not saving for their own retirement, she said. “At this point,” she said, “we’re very concerned about what this is doing to our future financial picture.”

Here are some questions to consider when deciding how to handle care for a family member:

1. Does Medicare cover home health care?

Only in limited circumstances, after a patient is discharged from a hospital stay; it generally won’t cover home care on an extended basis.

2. Does long-term care insurance cover home care?

Most policies do, if your family member has purchased a policy, which can be quite costly. Coverage varies, so check the policy for specifics.

3. Doesn’t Medicaid cover home care?

Yes, but eligibility requirements are usually narrow, and income limits are quite low. Some states have special waiver programs that cover care in an assisted-living facility; contact your state Medicaid agency.

E-mail: ann.carrns@gmail.com

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/your-money/assessing-the-costs-of-caring-for-an-aging-relative.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Facebook’s Redesign Hopes to Keep Users Engaged

Company executives have broadly said they want to make the News Feed, the first page every user sees upon logging in, more relevant.

In an earnings call with Wall Street analysts in January, the company’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, offered some hints of what a reimagined News Feed might look like: bigger photos, more videos and “more engaging ads.”

“Advertisers want really rich things like big pictures or videos, and we haven’t provided those things historically,” Mr. Zuckerberg said at the time.

Facebook declined to comment on the redesign, which is scheduled to be announced at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. But the adjustments will reflect the tricky balance Facebook faces now that it is a public company: to keep drawing users to the site while not alienating them with more finely targeted advertisements, which is Facebook’s chief source of revenue.

The pressures are acute, given Facebook’s still anemic performance on Wall Street. It came out of the box last May with an extraordinarily high valuation of $38 a share, which slumped to half last fall, and has remained for the most part under $30.

“They have to walk a fine line between the user’s needs and advertiser’s needs,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst with IDC. The user, he went on, could use “better, more intelligent filtering,” while the advertiser needs “smarter, more flexible advertising formats.”

Facebook’s challenge is all the more important considering some warning signs of boredom.

Earlier this year came worrying news that 61 percent of users had taken a sabbatical from the social network, sometimes for months at a time; boredom was one of the reasons cited in the survey by the Pew Research Center. Even worse, 20 percent had deactivated their account entirely.

Advertisers have for years wanted to find new ways to show targeted ads to Facebook users, based on the vast data that the social network has about them. But Facebook has at times run into problems with new advertising products.

For example, last year, just before it filed for its public offering, it began to show advertisements in the News Feed, largely in the form of the controversial Sponsored Stories, where one user’s “like” for a brand was deployed to market that brand to a user’s Facebook “friends.”

Last fall, again in an effort to drum up new revenue, Facebook offered brands and individual users a way to pay Facebook to promote a particular post on the News Feed. Those who did not pay could expect an average post to reach about a third of their Facebook friends, according to the company’s own analysis. That immediately drew criticism, including from Mark Cuban, a technology investor and owner of the Mavericks basketball team, who wrote in an angry post on his blog (http://blogmaverick.com/) last fall that Facebook had made it too expensive for a brand like the Mavericks to reach its fans.

This week, responding to fresh criticism, Facebook said it did not “artificially suppress” content to feature paid posts.

The social networking giant has tweaked its News Feed over the years. Since 2009, Facebook has filtered what every user sees on the News Feed, based on the wisdom of its proprietary algorithm, called Edge Rank, which determines which posts a particular user is likely to find most interesting.

In 2010, it allowed users to chronologically filter the contents of the scrolling feed. The next year, it introduced a separate right-hand-side ticker — Twitter-esque, some said — of everything that every “friend” and brand page had posted.

At the heart of Facebook’s business is to hold the attention of its one billion users worldwide. That means keeping them entertained and on the site as frequently as possible.

It seems to be losing this battle somewhat with its youngest users. Teenagers are increasingly turning to other services, including Instagram, which Facebook now owns, so much so that David A. Ebersman, the company’s chief financial officer, said last week in a conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley that Facebook considered the photo-sharing site a competitor.

Instagram is not its only worry. Americans are increasingly turning to Pinterest to share shopping desires with their friends; Tumblr is a popular forum for self-expression, and Twitter continues to grow as a platform for news and entertainment.

Many people may no longer know all their “friends” on Facebook, which makes it difficult for the company to stuff the News Feed with posts that users will find relevant. Then there are ads.

“The bigger opportunity for Facebook is in cracking the relevance nut,” said Travis Katz, founder of an online travel service, Gogobot, that is integrated with Facebook.

“The noise-to-signal ratio in the feed has increased dramatically,” he added, “to the point where I often miss stories that were important to me.”

At the Morgan Stanley conference, Mr. Ebersman said the company’s filtering algorithms get “smarter” the more a Facebook user clicks on what is displayed on the News Feed.

“So of all the information we are able to show you on Facebook, we are trying algorithmically to pick out which pieces of content to put at the top of your News Feed because we think you will find them most engaging.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/technology/facebooks-redesign-hopes-to-keep-users-engaged.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Economix Blog: Americans Want to Cut Spending. They Just Don’t Know What to Cut.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

As the sequester looms, it’s worth noting that there’s no significant federal spending category that a majority of Americans wants to cut:

Survey was conducted among 1,504 adults. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. Survey was conducted among 1,504 adults. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

That chart comes from a Pew Research Center poll conducted Feb. 13-18. In every category except for “aid to world’s needy,” more than half of the respondents wanted either to keep spending levels the same or to increase them. In the “aid to world’s needy” category, less than half wanted to cut spending.

This is part of the problem with heeding any public concerns about getting the budget under control. According to Pew, 70 percent of Americans say it is essential for Washington to pass major legislation to reduce the federal budget deficit this year. But they can’t identify anything worth axing, and it’s not as if tax increases are so terribly popular, either.

By the way, Pew asked similar questions about what categories of government spending to cut in 2011. There has been little change since then, with the exception of attitudes toward military spending. In the most recent poll, 24 percent said the government should cut spending for the military, compared to 30 percent two years ago.

Note that the military would bear a major share of the sequestration-related spending cuts, and as a result much has been written in the last few months about the scary consequences that such cuts would cause. So it’s possible public attitudes have shifted in response to greater coverage of this spending category.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/americans-want-to-cut-spending-they-just-dont-know-what-to-cut/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Economix Blog: So Much for the Growing Class War

CATHERINE RAMPELL

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

Despite all the talk of the lazy 47 percenters, the scruffy 99 percent versus the entitled top 1 percent, contentious proposals to raise taxes on the rich, and the uncapped political donations of billionaires, the “class war” apparently abated last year, if you believe the American public.

Based on two surveys by the Pew Research Center. The latest survey is a telephone poll conducted Nov. 28 to Dec. 5, 2012, with a nationally representative sample of 2,511 adults ages 18 and older. Margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2 percentage points. The previous survey was conducted Dec. 6-19, 2011, with a nationally representative sample of 2,048 adults ages 18 and older. Margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. Based on two surveys by the Pew Research Center. The latest survey is a telephone poll conducted Nov. 28 to Dec. 5, 2012, with a nationally representative sample of 2,511 adults ages 18 and older. Margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2 percentage points. The previous survey was conducted Dec. 6-19, 2011, with a nationally representative sample of 2,048 adults ages 18 and older. Margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Asked by Pew Research Center about conflicts between rich and poor, Americans were less likely to say there were “strong” or “very strong” conflicts at the end of 2012 than they were a year earlier. In 2012, 58 percent of Americans believed there were significant conflicts between rich and poor, compared with 66 percent in 2011. The biggest conflict Americans perceived was along partisan lines, not economic ones.

Here are the numbers from previous years Pew asked about conflicts between rich and poor, showing that Americans perceive about as much class warfare today as they did in 1987:

Source: Pew Research Center. Latest numbers are from a survey conducted Nov. 28 to Dec. 5, 2012, with a nationally representative sample of 2,511 adults ages 18 and older and a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Source: Pew Research Center. Latest numbers are from a survey conducted Nov. 28 to Dec. 5, 2012, with a nationally representative sample of 2,511 adults ages 18 and older and a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

There was no statistically significant change in perceived conflicts between the young and the old (29 percent in 2012 versus 34 percent in 2011). Perceived conflicts between these two age groups is actually relatively low compared to some of previous years for which Pew has data:

Source: Pew Research Center. Latest numbers are from a survey conducted Nov. 28 to Dec. 5, 2012, with a nationally representative sample of 2,511 adults ages 18 and older and a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Source: Pew Research Center. Latest numbers are from a survey conducted Nov. 28 to Dec. 5, 2012, with a nationally representative sample of 2,511 adults ages 18 and older and a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

From an economic standpoint, it’s actually a bit surprising that Americans don’t see greater tensions between the generations. Medicare and other public spending on the elderly (such as public pensions at the state level) has been gobbling up an increasing share of government budgets, which crowds out spending on the young and raises their future tax burdens.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/so-much-for-the-growing-class-war/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Economix Blog: Older to Wed, if They Marry at All

The median age of first marriage is at an all-time high, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center based on United States Census Bureau data.

DESCRIPTION

In 2010, the median age at first marriage for women was 26.5 years, and for men it was 28.7 years. Fifty years ago, the comparable ages were about six years younger for both genders.

The total number of new marriages was also at a record low last year, perhaps in part because the poor economy was causing couples to delay forming new families. (The connection between economic conditions and marriage rates is murky, however.)

DESCRIPTION

The biggest declines in new marriage rates was among the youngest Americans. As a result of the declining number of weddings in recent years, just 9 percent of Americans age 18 to 24 had a spouse in 2010, about a fifth of the share for this age group in 1960.

DESCRIPTION

With the overall declines in marriage rates, it is unclear if young people are simply delaying marriage or rejecting it altogether. But given how many unmarried Americans say they are not interested in matrimonial bliss, there is reason to think it is largely the latter.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d9b965ee29296f58b46d97b5ad7b1bc1

Occupy Wall Street Puts the Coverage in the Spotlight

But in almost every other respect, mainstream news media outlets have been put right in the middle by the movement.

Newspapers and television networks have been rebuked by media critics for treating the movement as if it were a political campaign or a sideshow — by many liberals for treating the protesters dismissively, and by conservatives, conversely, for taking the protesters too seriously.

The protesters themselves have also criticized the media — first for ostensibly ignoring the movement and then for marginalizing it.

Lacking a list of demands or recognized leaders, the Occupy movement has at times perplexed the nation’s media outlets. Press coverage, minimal in the first days of the occupation in New York, picked up after amateur video surfaced online showing a police officer using pepper spray on protesters. On several occasions, video of confrontations with the police, often filmed by the protesters, has propelled television coverage.

In the initial coverage, “I saw almost nothing that talked about our reasons for being there, and that trend has largely continued,” said Patrick Bruner, an organizer for Occupy Wall Street in New York. He said the group welcomed investigations of “our ideas, why we’re here, what we’re saying and talking about.”

Alicia Shepard, who was until recently the ombudsman for NPR, said most news coverage of Occupy “hasn’t been about the issues, it’s been about who’s up and who’s down,” likening it to the “horse race” style of coverage prevalent in political campaigns.

An analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism indicates that the movement occupied 10 percent of its sample of national news coverage in the week beginning Oct. 9, then steadily represented about 5 percent through early November.

Coverage dipped markedly, to just 1 percent of the national news hole, in the week beginning Nov. 6, supporting Ms. Shepard’s assertion that it had “died down” before the early morning eviction in New York last Tuesday. It has since rebounded strongly.

Throughout the protests, Occupy Wall Street has become something of an ideological litmus test, with accusations of media bias from the left and the right. Days after the protest began in New York, the liberal filmmaker Michael Moore appeared on MSNBC, asserting that the mass media had a tendency to play down left-wing protests.

Conversely, L. Brent Bozell III, the president of the conservative Media Research Center, appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox telling other media outlets to “put their pompoms down for a minute.”

Now, any time there are misstatements of fact — on Thursday the Fox News affiliate in New York falsely reported that protesters planned to “shut down” the subways, and “CBS Evening News” reported that hundreds had turned out for an afternoon rally when in fact many thousands had — questions about bias are raised.

Even as some protesters have complained about the media, others have courted coverage, and still others have taken matters into their own hands. For more than a month, Tim Pool, a 25-year-old from Illinois, has been attending Occupy Wall Street events in New York and live-streaming them to the Internet from his cellphone. “I just wanted to see an accurate portrayal of what was happening without internal or external bias,” he said.

Mr. Pool clearly sympathizes with the protesters but considers himself independent from the group. At the peak of the protests in New York on Thursday, 30,000 people were watching his shaky video feed at any given moment, according to his host site, Ustream. Mr. Pool said the police officers treated him like a protester, not a cameraman, raising questions about who qualifies as a reporter in the Internet age and what rights they should be afforded, if any.

The questions are relevant in part because 26 reporters and photographers have been arrested at protests linked to the movement, according to a count by Josh Stearns of the media advocacy group Free Press. A significant portion of those arrested were freelance workers, students and writers for alternative publications. “As journalism is changing,” Mr. Stearns said, “it’s going to create new friction and conflict over what we mean by the First Amendment.”

Many journalists were blocked from Zuccotti Park as the eviction took place on Tuesday morning, leading to accusations of police suppression of media coverage.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the restrictions were put in place “to prevent a situation from getting worse and to protect members of the press.”

Journalism groups have filed complaints about the restrictions and arrests, resulting in renewed scrutiny of how the Police Department processes requests for press credentials. Of the 10 reporters arrested in New York on Tuesday, half had credentials. Discussing the arrests, Mr. Stearns said, “In the heat of the moment it may be very hard to tell who is and who isn’t a journalist,” though he said that was no excuse.

Some reporters have reported being threatened by protesters in the last two months, but for the most part the criticisms have been confined to signs and shouts, particularly when Fox News cameras are nearby.

Attesting to the opinionated tone of much television coverage, Fox hosts and guests have described the protesters as a “group of nuts and lunatics and fascists” (Karl Rove), “demonic loons” (Ann Coulter) and “a bunch of wusses” (Greg Gutfeld).

On MSNBC, meanwhile, optimism reigns in comments like “it is what working people are talking about” (Ed Schultz) and “it has the support of tens of millions of Americans” (Michael Moore).

A number of journalists have been pilloried for their perceived opinions, including the CNN host Erin Burnett, who mocked the New York occupation on her broadcast. Critics seized on the fact that she was engaged to a bank executive.

The public radio host Lisa Simeone was dismissed by one of her employers, Soundprint, after she was reported to be a leader of an Occupy camp in Washington, and a freelance journalist, Caitlin Curran, was fired by “The Takeaway” radio show after she was photographed holding her boyfriend’s sign at a protest. In an essay for Gawker, Ms. Curran wondered what ethics codes she had violated since she said Occupy Wall Street lacked a single “message and focus.”

The absence of broad media attention initially gave protesters a shared grievance. Since the Vietnam War, there have been many instances when protest movements have criticized the media over perceived slights, said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia who helped to organize the first national antiwar protests in the 1960s.

But there is less of an “obsession” about that these days, he said, “because they’re making their own media.”

There is The Occupied Wall Street Journal newspaper, for instance, and the “We Are the 99 Percent” group blog.

Priscilla Grim, who has helped produce both, said she was “hoping to see a real resurgence in independent media, to not just cover the issues of Occupy, but to cover the issues that all people are dealing with.”

Mr. Bruner, the Occupy Wall Street organizer, echoed that. Early on, he courted CNN, The New York Times and other news outlets by e-mailing reporters and editors with daily protest updates. But, he said, “we’re fighting a system, and this media is a part of the system.”

He added, ”And when this media doesn’t cover us in a fair light, the desire isn’t to shame them, it’s to create an alternative.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=68efc80f922dcc23b5d474f537759f10

Bucks Blog: Need to Save Money? Move In With Relatives

Here’s a way to save money: Move in with relatives.

pewsocialtrends.org

Lots of Americans have done just that during the economic downturn, an analysis of census data from the Pew Research Center finds.

In fact, the trend helped touch off the largest increase in the number of Americans living in multigenerational households in modern history, the report says. From 2007 to 2009, the total spiked to 51.4 million, from 46.5 million. Such households might include a couple and their parents or in-laws, adult children, younger children and grandchildren.

The unemployed, whose numbers are growing, are much more likely to live in multigenerational households — 25.4 percent did in 2009, compared with 15.7 percent of those with jobs.

Living in mixed-generation households appears to be keeping many out of poverty. Although their adjusted incomes over all are lower, Pew found, the poverty rate among people in multigenerational households is substantially smaller than the rate for those in other households — 11.5 percent in the mixed-generation households in 2009 versus 14.6 percent in other types of households.

Plus, the potential benefits of such living arrangements are the greatest for groups that have been most affected by the recession. Among the unemployed, the poverty rate in 2009 was 17.5 percent for those living in multigenerational households, compared with 30.3 percent for those living in other households.

Members of other economically vulnerable groups — young adults, Hispanics and blacks — who live in multigenerational households also experience sharply lower poverty rates than those in other households.

Have you ever lived with relatives? Did it help you save money?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a3452a4212ce7e7bb2b9933c56c7c228

Pew Media Study Shows Reliance on Many Outlets

The report, by the Pew Research Center and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, surveyed news consumers and concluded that while television is the main source for three popular topics — weather, traffic and breaking news — newspapers and their Web sites are the main source for 11 other topics, like local government updates, zoning news and crime reports. It also found that word of mouth, most likely including text messages and Twitter posts, is the second most common meansof news distribution on the local level.

“There really is a nuanced ecosystem here with very old and very new sources blending,” said Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which collaborated with another arm of Pew, the Pew Internet American Life Project, to conduct the study.

The researchers set out to map the sources of news and information in local communities, and came away with encouraging and discouraging signs for local television and newspapers.

Television is the most common medium for local news, with 71 percent of people watching for local information at least once a week, according to a survey of 2,251 adults. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points. But younger adults “rely on local television less,” and more on the Internet, the report says, “a fact that suggests more vulnerability for the medium in the future.”

In recent years many experimental newscasts and talk shows — usually with a soft-news bent — have popped up on some local stations in an effort to attract younger viewers.

The survey found that 50 percent of people read newspapers or their Web sites for local information at least once a week. People tend to get a much wider array of information from newspapers than from television — yet 69 percent of those surveyed also said they believed that the death of their local paper would have at most a minor impact on their news diet. Younger adults, the report states, “were especially unconcerned.”

Mr. Rosenstiel said the finding could be attributed to cognitive dissonance (the tendency to hold two clashing views at the same time), or to an assumption that the news and information would be available elsewhere if the newspaper were to close.

“There’s a feeling, I think, that in the digital age, information is a commodity that’s just available — and there’s not always a sense of how it’s generated or produced,” he said.

Starkly, the report asks, “If television has focused on covering weather, traffic, and breaking news, and that is what people look to this platform for, will television begin to cover taxes and zoning and education if the local newspaper no longer exists?”

Separately, Pew’s annual survey of news media performance, released last week, reaffirmed public distrust of the news media as an institution. By several Pew measures, the public perception has never been lower. Of those surveyed, 80 percent said they thought the news media were often influenced by powerful people and groups; 77 percent said the media tend to favor one side; and 72 percent said reporters try to cover up their mistakes.

But in a twist this year, Pew, a nonprofit group, asked about the news sources people use most. The public seemed to have a more favorable view of those sources, much as the public overwhelmingly disapproves of Congress, but individuals approve of their local members of Congress.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d1170b0818a463529c16759633a0d1cc

Bucks: Living Together Pays Off More for the College-Educated

Living together outside of marriage can carry economic benefits. But the payoff seems to be much higher for those with college degrees than those without, says a new study from the Pew Research Center.

The prevalence of cohabitation has doubled among 30- to 44-year-olds since 1995, even though marriage has long been associated with a variety of benefits, financial and otherwise.

But the Pew study, based on federal Census data, found that when measured by household income and poverty rates, the college-educated cohabitors compared favorably with similar married couples, and were better off than adults without opposite-sex partners.

Cohabitors without a college degree, in contrast, were worse off than comparable married adults and barely surpassed those without opposite-sex partners in terms of economic well-being. (The study focused only on opposite-sex couples.)

Here are some numbers: Among college-educated adults, the median adjusted household income of cohabitors in 2009 was $106,400. That’s a bit higher than that of married adults, at $101,160, and far above that of adults without opposite-sex partners. But among adults without college degrees, the median adjusted household income of cohabitors was $46,540 — well below the $56,800 of married couples, and barely higher than the income of adults without opposite-sex partners ($45,033).

Differences in employment rates and household living arrangements of those with and without college degrees can help explain the gaps in economic well-being, the study says. For instance, cohabitors without college degrees are much more likely than those with college degrees to have children in the home, which affects the ability of both partners to earn income.

“For the most educated, living as an unmarried couple typically is an economically productive way to combine two incomes and is a step toward marriage and childbearing,” the report says. “For adults without college degrees, cohabitation is more likely to be a parallel household arrangement to marriage — complete with children — but at a lower economic level than married adults enjoy.”

What’s your view? Is living together primarily an economic arrangement?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a6c7eceb68233a0d78c2bd5730ca3170

The Media Equation: How Drudge Has Stayed on Top

By far, most of the traffic from links comes from the sprawling hybrid of Google search and news, which provides about 30 percent of the visits to news sites, according to a report released last week by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of the Pew Research Center. And the second? Has to be Facebook, right? Nope. Then Twitter must be the next in line. Except it isn’t.

Give up? It’s The Drudge Report, a 14-year-old site — a relic by Web standards — conceived and operated by Matt Drudge. Using data from the Nielsen Company to examine the top 21 news sites on the Web, the report suggests that Mr. Drudge, once thought of as a hothouse flower of the Lewinsky scandal, is now more powerful in driving news than the half-billion folks on Facebook. (According to the study, Facebook accounted for 3.3 percent of the referrals to news sites, less than half as many as generated by The Drudge Report.)

“When you look at his influence, it cuts across all kind of sites, both traditional news outlets and online-only sites,” said Amy S. Mitchell, the deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism and one of the authors of the study. “He was an early and powerful force in setting the news agenda and has somehow maintained that even as there has been a great deal of change in the way people get their news.”

With no video, no search optimization, no slide shows, and a design that is right out of mid-’90s manual on HTML, The Drudge Report provides 7 percent of the inbound referrals to the top news sites in the country. “It’s a real achievement,” said John F. Harris, the co-founder of Politico. “I covered the Clinton White House in 1997 and 1998 and I would never have conceived that he would be an important player in the landscape 12 years later. He does one thing and he does it particularly well. The power of it comes from the community of people that read it: operatives, bookers, reporters, producers and politicians.”

So in a news age when the next big thing changes as often as the weather, how can a guy who broke through on the Web before there was broadband still set the agenda? How can that be?

His durability is, first and foremost, a personal achievement, a testament to the fact that he is, as Gabriel Snyder, who has done Web news for Gawker, Newsweek and now The Atlantic, told me, “the best wire editor on the planet. He can look into a huge stream of news, find the hot story and put an irresistible headline on it.”

On Thursday, a fairly straightforward Reuters article about a NATO attack on Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s compound occupied the skyline of the site with a particularly odious picture of the strongman girded by a headline that blared, “NEXT UP: NATO GOING FOR THE KILL.” Underneath, there were tons of links, news and pictures (Mr. Drudge has a real knack for photo editing) with all kinds of irresistible marginalia: “Desperate Americans Buy Kidneys from Peru Poor” was just above an article about what a prolific e-mailer Osama bin Laden was in spite of his lack of access to the Internet.

Yes, Mr. Drudge is a conservative ideologue whose site also serves as a crib sheet for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. But if you believe that his huge traffic numbers are a byproduct of an ideologically motivated readership, consider that 15 percent of the traffic at WashingtonPost.com, which is not exactly a hotbed of Tea Party foment, comes from The Drudge Report.

It is, in its own way, a kind of utility, with stable traffic of about 12 million to 14 million unique visitors every month no matter what kind of news is breaking. Everyone goes there because, well, everyone else goes there.

And in the last 14 years, there have been no big redesigns, no big rollout of new features and no staffing up to provide original content. The initial site, designed to load quickly in the age of dial-up modems, remains relatively untouched. (As does Mr. Drudge’s penchant to stay under the radar. He did not respond to e-mails requesting an interview.)

“The genius of Drudge is the simplicity of the layout,” said Matt Labash, a writer for The Weekly Standard. “Everyone else who tries to knock him off complicates that. There’s no tabs. There’s no jumps. There’s hardly any clutter, even if he now runs more headlines than he used to. He’s secure enough in the formula that he’s never changed it.”

Mr. Drudge understood the whole high-low bifurcation that news consumers are drawn to long before there was such a thing as Gawker. Andrew Breitbart, the founder of several conservative Web sites including Breitbart.com and the author of “Righteous Indignation,” met him in 1995 when Mr. Drudge was still working at the CBS gift shop in Los Angeles and running the Web site on the side. Mr. Breitbart immediately began helping him.

“Matt Drudge is an American original,” Mr. Breitbart said. “He does not rig search optimization, he does not care about the next big Web innovation, he just has the best nose for news there is. He gives people everything, every single thing, they want to know in a single stop.”

A big part of the reason he is such an effective aggregator for both audiences and news sites is that he actually acts like one. Behemoth aggregators like Yahoo News and The Huffington Post have become more like fun houses that are easy to get into and tough to get out of. Most of the time, the summary of an article is all people want, and surfers don’t bother to click on the link. But on The Drudge Report, there is just a delicious but bare-bones headline, there for the clicking. It’s the opposite of sticky, which means his links actually kick up significant traffic for other sites.

I’ve lived the Drudge effect. Over a decade ago, I was working at Inside.com, a media news site, and wrote about a poll that had taken place on one of the presidential candidates’ planes that seemed to suggest a liberal bias among the campaign press. Mr. Drudge liked it, for obvious reasons. Our servers melted as we stood back in wonder, staring at what the linked economy meant and how one guy in a fedora seemed to know something we didn’t. He still does.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter.com/carr2n

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=cbcd06e0961e9e211df6b2615cce92b4