Facebook surpasses 200 million users – Still ignoring Facebook? Every journalist who wants to be a part of the future of journalism should at least play around with Facebook and understand why it is so popular. With its new design and rapid growth, Facebook should be a very appealing network for news organizations.

If its growth rate keeps up, Facebook should easily surpass 300 million users this year. Check out the original article over at AllFacebook to see that growth curve. Facebook is becoming massively popular, and it’s growing beyond it’s original demographic of high school and college students. (hat tip to Journerdism)

Number of US Facebook Users Over 35 Nearly Doubles in Last 60 Days — A large part of Facebook’s recent growth has been in older generations than its original target audience. This is good news for news organizations. High School and college students may never be a major demographic for news organizations, but people 35 and older have always been at the core of what news organizations target. Just look at where the growth has been on Facebook this year (Twitter has been similar too):

Looking at Facebook US audience growth over the last 180 days, it’s clear that Facebook is seeing massive increases in adoption amongst users 35-65. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is still women over 55 – there are now nearly 1.5 million of them active on Facebook each month.

The biggest growth in terms of absolute new users over the last six month came amongst users 35-44. Over 4 million more US women 35-44 and nearly 3 million more US men 35-44 used Facebook in March 2009 compared to September 2008.

With Generation Xers and Baby Boomers joining social media at a rapid pace, it behooves news organizations to get a serious presence on Facebook ASAP. In addition, it’s time to start beatblogging. Our users are using social media. We must too.

Those who believe that social media is just for young, tech savvy people are wrong. Social media appeals to all kinds of people, regardless of age, sex and income.

43f Podcast: John Gruber & Merlin Mann’s Blogging Panel at SxSW — If you’re interested in starting a blog, this is a must listen. Gruber and Mann are two of the best bloggers around, and they discuss how to build an audience and what it takes to be good at blogging:

We talked about building a blog you can be proud of, trying to improve the quality of your work, reaching the people you admire, and maybe even making a buck (in a way that doesn’t blow your deal).

This podcast should be required listening for all news organizations thinking of getting into blogging. I’d make all of my beatbloggers listen to it. I’ve been blogging for years, and I found this podcast to be extremely useful.