New Face Online

The debut of the brand-new GovernmentExecutive.com.

Timothy B. Clark

A brand-new GovernmentExecutive.com.

Soon, you'll see a whole new look for Government Executive online, as we unveil our redesigned and upgraded Web site. Over the course of 11 years, the site has gained a very large audience. It now attracts more than 400,000 unique visitors each month. Its archives of original reporting from the print magazine as well as our staff of online reporters constitute the largest widely available journalistic resource about the operations of the executive branch.

But the site has been showing its age. In our redesign, we've eliminated clutter that the home page has accreted over the years. We have simplified the organization of information. And we have upgraded our technology to accommodate new features, moving toward "Web.2.0," shorthand for a much more interactive site, with content from many sources, including you, our readers.

The redesign effort, led by Executive Editor Tom Shoop and Art Director Kelly Anne Johnson, has produced a clean, elegant look-and a new name: GovernmentExecutive.com. (But fear not: All the old GovExec.com addresses you may have bookmarked still will work.) This change connects the Web site more directly to the magazine-whose content will be more tightly integrated throughout the site while also residing in a spruced-up online home of its own.

We have combined our current roster of 10 topic-based subsections into four: The Workforce, Defense+Homeland Security, Technology, and Management+Oversight. Our hope is that these will become destinations in their own right and key sources of news, information and online tools.

We will be stepping up the pace of news delivery, updating the site throughout the day, using stories not only from our own reporters but also from the Associated Press. More than ever, GovernmentExecutive.com will be the essential destination for news and information about what's happening in the federal arena.

We will strive for much more interactivity on the site. Every story will include a box at the bottom for readers to add their comments and to respond to those of others. In the coming months, we'll be rolling out a series of blogs, written by reporters specializing in key topics, that again will encourage users to add their wisdom on issues of the day. Our bloggers will hue to journalistic standards of accuracy and objectivity, but as Tom Shoop's Fedblog has shown, the good blogger also can offer interesting commentary on the news.

We have just started up a second blog, Tech Insider, edited by Allan Holmes, who came to us from CIO magazine, with contributions from David Perera and Daniel Pulliam. And we'll soon add a third from Bob Brewin, whom I am delighted to welcome to our team. Something of a legend in the defense and defense technology world, Bob was the author of the widely read "Intercepts" column at Federal Computer Week. He has a particular interest in defense communications, which began when he carried a radio on his back during two tours of duty in Vietnam.

Tim Signature

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