Your editor wants a story on the changes in recent years to the number of births to unmarried women in your state. This will be one in a series of stories, "How We Live Now."

The tables below—figures for 1996—can be used as a starting point.

Jeff South of Virginia Commonwealth University, an expert on computer-assisted reporting, will get you started.

(District of Columbia: 66.0)

Here's South's thinking on receiving the assignment to obtain the latest available figures on births to unmarried women.

An excellent starting point to find official data on the Internet is a Web site called FedStats (http://www.fedstats.gov), which provides one-stop shopping for government statistics.

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Click on "Topic links—A to Z." Then scroll down to "B" and you'll find a listing for "Births/Natality":

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If you click on this link, you will jump to the Web site for the National Center for Health Statistics (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs). We arrive at a page that displays summary data about births with an index to more detailed information:

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Click on the "B" in the "A to Z" index, so we can zero in on detailed birth data. Here, you'll find links to "Births—Unmarried Childbearing" and "Births —Teen Births":

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That link takes you to this report, which is in the Adobe Acrobat format:

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If you skim the report or search the PDF for the word "unmarried," you'll find a table with the state-by-state data that you want:

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This report, and the data it contains, is more current that the previous report we found. We should use these numbers for our story.

This is a good example of how parts of a Web site can be out of date. To get the most recent information, you must rummage around and look in several places.