October 2012

We’ve upgraded the White House homepage. What makes it better? Most visitors aren't just stopping by; they're looking for specific information about the President and his policies. With these changes, we're applying the lessons we’ve learned from our earlier updates and making sure that the homepage is a gateway to our most timely and important content. It puts tools to search the site front and center and makes the page easier to navigate. We've also made it easier to catch live events broadcast on WhiteHouse.gov/live and highlighted the many White House social media accounts.

In 2011, we announced a number of new programs that will help companies better understand mobile consumers in a more detailed and efficient way. One of these programs provides insights into audiences on the move by connecting aggregated demographic, mobile usage, and location data into useful business and marketing reports.

To be clear about this, we are aggregating customer data that has already been de-identified, which means none of it is personally identifiable information. By packaging together information about demographics (age ranges, gender, etc.) and interests (such as “pet lovers” or “tennis enthusiasts”) with information about the types of people at a venue or who might pass a specific place, we improve advertisers’ ability to determine what ads to place on billboards or sporting events. This type of information can also be used by web publishers to help provide content that is more appealing to consumers.

The use of social media is becoming a feature of political and civic engagement for many Americans. Some 60% of American adults use either social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter and a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds that 66% of those social media users—or 39% of all American adults—have done at least one of eight civic or political activities with social media.

Overall, there are mixed partisan and ideological patterns among social media users when it comes to using social media like social networking sites and Twitter. The social media users who talk about politics on a regular basis are the most likely to use social media for civic or political purposes. And the social media users who have firmer party and ideological ties—liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans—are, at times, more likely than moderates in both parties to use social media for these purposes. Some of these activities are more likely to be pursued by younger social media users compared with the social media users who are ages 50 or older. Younger users are more likely to post their own thoughts about issues, post links to political material, encourage others to take political action, belong to a political group on a social networking site, follow elected officials on social media, and like or promote political material others have posted.

San Diego Union-Tribune LLC newspaper owner and real estate developer Doug Manchester told a local TV news station that he would consider buying the Tribune Company. "We certainly are going to look at it," Manchester told KPBS in an interview. "We are looking at it, yes. I would like to, yes." Manchester, who gained prominence in Southern California for his hotel and resort developments, bought the Union-Tribune last November reportedly for about $100 million. He has since also launched a television channel and bought another local newspaper, the North County Times. In the past, he also ran and sold a chain of radio stations.