Staying Power

In Internet time, five years is an eon. Lord knows how many dot-coms have come and gone since we started up on Aug. 1, 1996. We're still around, and that is one source of satisfaction. But what really excites us is offering a service that's useful to people in the government community.

There is evidence of its utility every week, as we tally up the number of visits to the Web site and the number of subscribers to the daily e-mail newsletter its staff produces. This summer, GovExec.com was receiving nearly 2 million page views per month. At last count, subscribers to the e-mail edition, GovExec.com Today, numbered 55,000. The newsletter-available free to those who choose to subscribe-has become a vital source of timely information for those who follow government management and reform.

The GovExec.com staff now includes three full-time reporters and editors, whose work is supplemented by the reporting and writing of the magazine staff. Our "Websters," as we sometimes call them, provide firsthand accounts of breaking stories, and scan the news output of other parts of our company, National Journal Group, for items of interest to our audience. So the Web site and the e-newsletter include reporting from the staffs of National Journal, Congress Daily, Technology Daily and others among our 130 colleagues in the news operation of our company-one of the largest in the Washington area.

From the beginning, we have tried to embrace the Web in all of its potential. Unlike many magazines, we have not hesitated to upload the entire contents of our monthly edition, believing that our readers would remain loyal to the print version (which provides most of our revenue), but would also find the online archive of stories useful. Now GovExec.com's searchable archive includes tens of thousands of stories from the print and online editions-an invaluable tool both for federal managers and outside researchers.

Of course, we link articles to related reports, earlier stories and the like. And we develop services that make government easier to navigate, as we did when dozens of agencies began filing reports about jobs that might be considered commercial under the 1998 Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act. "It is ironic," observed Sen. Craig Thomas during an October 1999 hearing, "that for access to information about the government's commercial activities, the public must rely on a private sector magazine, Government Executive, which has posted all of the inventories on its Web site."

Now, GovExec.com's Results Report posts updates on agencies' strategic plans, performance reports and evaluations of them on the Hill; its Bill Tracker enables users to get the latest information about any bill in Congress; and its Calendar lists dozens of conferences, seminars and other events.

Five years ago, Brian Friel, a summer intern with a knack for technology and journalism, played a major role in launching the site, then served as its managing editor before turning the operation over to Katy Saldarini, who has run it for the past year and a half. They and their young colleagues have infused our operation with new energy, kept us close to the news and produced, under the brilliant direction of Tom Shoop, a first-class resource for people interested in the federal government.