Sating The News Habit

nformation is the currency of Washington. Data, words, images, a torrent of information is both generated and consumed here, and it's what makes the city hum.

A lot of the information emanates from government: trade, agriculture, labor and other economic data; classified and unclassified profiles of worldwide trends; the huge Federal Register that paints a daily picture of agency regulatory activity; the voluminous

Congressional Record; and a deluge of congressional comment on every public policy issue under the sun.

That's not the half of it. Another mountain of paper (and e-mail) is produced by the influence industry that has grown so large in Washington over the years. The number of registered lobbyists has grown from 7,200 to 9,200 between 1997 and 2001, thus approaching a 10-to-1 margin over the cadre of 545 elected members of Congress. There are 1,175 major national associations with offices here, and 82 think tanks. On average, a U.S. senator's office receives 11,000 e-mails a day, up from 6,500 in 1999.

These data are from "Washington in the Information Age," a fascinating new study by Atlantic Research, a division of the Atlantic Media Co., which owns Government Executive, National Journal, The Atlantic Monthly and other media entities.

The study profiles the information consumption habits of Washington insiders-Congress members and their staffs, White House and senior agency appointees in the executive branch, veteran lobbyists and corporate reps, and people in think tanks and the media.

Their diet includes healthy helpings from the independent media, which act as essential filters and synthesizers for all the data emanating from other sources. The study reports that 3,515 media organizations have Washington bureaus.

Throughout the day, insiders gather and digest information from television news, the daily newspapers, e-mail, electronic newsletters (such as our own GovExec.com Today, CongressDaily and The Hotline, a digest of political news), faxes, the Internet and more. They make time for longer, analytical reports of the kind found in Government Executive and National Journal.

Most are self-defined news junkies. (Are you? The answer is yes if you spend more than an hour a day sifting the news. More than three-quarters of the 212 insiders surveyed spent that much time or more.) They view keeping up with the news in competitive terms. They certainly don't want to be the last to know, and much prefer being first.

Major daily newspapers - The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal - often shape the agenda for policy debate each morning. More specialized media, including Government Executive, frame the debate in their particular fields. In our niche, we offer two of the kinds of services insiders view as essential.

In our monthly magazine (and special issues on subjects including procurement, outsourcing and homeland security) we provide in-depth, forward-looking analysis of important trends affecting federal agencies and programs and the people who run them. Our print circulation includes 66,000 direct subscribers and an estimated 200,000 monthly readers.

In our daily e-newsletter, GovExec.com Today, we supply 80,000 readers with a digest of the latest developments affecting the agencies and people of government.

The topics Government Executive treats are of special interest, of course, to a specialized group of news junkies-those who are concerned with the federal executive branch and its overseers in Congress. We do our best to quench your thirst.