Farewell, Michael

THE DAILY FED

Farewell, Michael

Michael Reeder came to us from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and Vice President Gore's National Performance Review in 1995, full of ideas about how government executives could work better and how Government Executive magazine could help them.

Michael constantly urged us to serve our customers in new and better ways -- and to rate federal agencies on how they were doing so as well.

He took charge of the development of www.govexec.com, finding a superb group of developers to build the back end of the site and then tirelessly debugging their efforts. It was quite literally a round-the-clock job -- I have the e-mails from Michael logged at 2:00 a.m. to prove it.

Once the site was up and running, Michael became a self-taught one-man Web marketing team. He ran PR campaigns, wrote press releases, and, when all else failed, called or e-mailed individual managers and agency webmasters to urge them to check out the site. He was a dedicated evangelist for govexec.com, both within our own company and in the federal community.

Now Michael is taking his skills to computer reseller GTSI, Inc., where he will be an "Internet architect," further serving federal customers as they look to make the most of what the Web has to offer.

But Michael has left his mark here. If you've found govexec.com to be useful, informative, up-to-date and, most importantly, functional and accessible, you have Michael to thank. And so do we.

Michael's departure is only mitigated by the fact that it enables us to welcome Brian Friel, who has been helping us as an intern and part-time employee for nearly a year now, to govexec.com full time. Regular users of the site have no doubt already grown accustomed to seeing Brian's byline on many of our Daily Fed items, but few know the full extent of the work he has put in behind the scenes as well. We're lucky to have him.

Tom Shoop
Editor
www.govexec.com