The Defense Department is facing more than its share of challenges these days, from implementing sequestration to transitioning out of Afghanistan to dealing with the shift to the Asia-Pacific region. It’s a time of transformation in national defense, and the hunger for information about how to address it is large and growing.
At Government Executive Media Group and Atlantic Media, we’ve decided it’s time for a publication that addresses the new era in national security head-on and aims to be a source of indispensable reporting and analysis about the future of defense. We’re calling that publication Defense One, and we launched it last month. It’s a leading-edge digital offering not just for desktop computers, but tablet and mobile devices, too. You can find it at Defenseone.com.
We’ve been covering defense for a long time in the pages of Government Executive, on GovExec.com and at our technology-focused online publication, Nextgov. That ranges from as far back as 1996, when James Kitfield won the Gerald R. Ford Prize for national defense reporting, to 2012, when our special issue on the future of defense was a finalist for a Jesse H. Neal Award from American Business Media.
We’ve assembled a staff of experienced writers and editors for Defense One. The team is led by executive editor Kevin Baron, who has been covering defense, foreign affairs, and national security for 15 years. A two-time George Polk Award winner, Baron most recently wrote the “E-Ring” blog for Foreign Policy. Before that, he was a staff writer at National Journal, a reporter in the Pentagon press corps with Stars and Stripes, and an investigative reporter in the Boston Globe’s Washington bureau. Baron is joined by associate editor and senior reporter Stephanie Gaskell, who was previously the Pentagon reporter at Politico. In her nearly two decades in journalism, Gaskell has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti and Guantanamo Bay. Baron and Gaskell are assisted by producer- reporter Kedar Pavgi, who interned at Foreign Policy before spending the past year with us at Government Executive.
Defense One also features the work of several key contributors, including Kitfield and Marc Ambinder, a highly regarded writer in the areas of intelligence and national security. Ambinder currently writes for several publications, including The Week, GQ and The Atlantic.
Defense One also leverages the high-quality journalism about national security already produced across Atlantic Media, which is leading the way in launching digital publications for influential audiences. In this case, the audience will be the national security leadership community—Defense leaders, members of Congress and their staffs, contractors and think tank analysts.
We’ll focus on five key areas of coverage: global threats, management, politics (domestic and international), technology and ideas. Defense One will home in on subjects such as budget uncertainty, emerging national security frontiers, new management paradigms and opportunities brought by emerging technology.
Defense One is centered on breaking analysis of developing events, with the goal of being relentlessly interesting. It will feature a constant stream of articles, infographics and interviews that inform military commanders, civilian defense professionals and other stakeholders about the future of national security.
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