The joys of niche journalism
[Alyssa]
So, I think it’s probably fair for me to guess that almost all of you have no idea what my employer, Government Executive, does. I didn’t either, until I started freelancing for them, and discovered that this magazine catering to federal employees had almost 80,000 subscribers and web traffic growing in the direction of half a million unique visitors each month. I just had no idea the audience was out there, because I never really bothered to think about it. But since I started covering federal workforce issues full-time, I’ve learned two things, one about journalism, and one about government.
1) Niche publications may be an increasingly important part of journalism’s future, as long as the niche is of reasonable size. There are 1.8 million civilian federal employees, not including Postal Service workers. That’s a huge market, and those readers are incredibly hungry for information about the conditions that govern their jobs.
And by narrowing down our beats, we get to do much deeper reporting than we might if we were at a publication that had a broader mandate. For example, my colleagues Robert Brodsky and Elizabeth Newell took the New York Times’ story on AEY Inc., ran with it, and figured out the backstory behind how AEY got labeled a disadvantaged business, a status that proved crucial to the firm’s success. The Times had the story of what happened, but Elizabeth and Rob figured out why.
2) What’s going on in the federal workforce right now is drastically under covered. Huge numbers of career federal employees are about to retire, especially in senior leadership ranks, and hiring freezes in the 1990s mean there aren’t enough people to move smoothly up the ranks to fill those vacancies. These circumstances are prompting a reform boom: federal agencies are working to streamline the hiring process, adopting alternate work schedules and telework policies, and developing programs in coordination with nonprofits like the Partnership for Public Service to reach recruits of all who wouldn’t have considered federal service before.
But those efforts may be too late to prevent disruptions to federal services and federal agencies. Wonder why your plane is late? It’s partially airport capacity, but it may also partly be due to a mass exodus of air traffic controllers. Has it taken forever for you to get a passport? The State Department had to shift junior employees to process applications. Upset about the U.S. Attorneys scandal? The complexities of the relationships between political appointees and career federal employees provides key context. More stories than I ever realized come back to the people who work in government.
38 Responses to “The joys of niche journalism”
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May 30th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
I think that your niche journalism based knowledge is useful to many readers. However when communicating from your niche it is very important to uhm stress the fundamentals. I know we like to think that Yglesiasblog readers are extraordinarily well informed compared to say average US journalists or congress people, but that doesn’t mean we are all able to catch subtle points such as the fact that 1.8 million non postal federal civilian employees is an amazingly tiny number.
Since the mid 70s I have been reading about the bloated Federal Bureaucracy with denunciations of the huge number of federal civilian employees. The huge number which I remember from the 70s was 2.5 million (including postal workers). Over the same period total employment has roughly doubled.
Now I’m too young* to remember the whole period of nonsensical claims that the Federal bureaucracy is exploding in size while its size remains constant — the figure was about the same in 1960 when I was born.
The fact that service disruptions have been as mild as they have been is a testament to the impressive increase in productivity of the Federal civil service (what they hell were they all doing back in 1960 ?).
*and I do so like to write that here where I am very sensitive about my age.
May 30th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Back in 1960 they were doing what they do now, but without computers, faxes, scanners, and copy machines.
May 30th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Do they discuss how fucked up the Bureau of Prison employees are?
Thought not.
I really don’t give a damn about Federal bureaucrats. In my anarchist view, most of them should be executed as collaborators in oppression.
Which is why I don’t give a damn how many people got killed in the Oklahoma Federal building bombing. They were a legitimate target.
I’d love it if they’d hit the San Francisco Federal Building which is a few blocks from me – as long as I’m not in it when they do, of course.
May 30th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Robert,
Don’t forget that there has been a huge increase in the number of federal contractors since the 70s. A quick search didn’t turn up any hard numbers, but I did find this article where Hillary claimed that she would cut 500,000 of them if elected.
May 30th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Yes, the AEY – Diveroli contracting story was great. I fed your colleague the back story on this amazing family, which I had blogged all about the week before “Government Executive” got to it:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/amazing-adventures-of-men-with-gold.html
May 30th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
And here’s my March 28 blogpost on the amazing affirmative action angle in the AEY Awful Afghan Ammo story, which “Government Executive” used for their April 3 and 4 stories:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/hey-feds-theres-this-thing-called.html
May 30th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
If “Government Executive” wants to cover a really big story, there’s the ongoing mess made of federal hiring by the Carter Administration’s 1981 destruction of the once famous “civil service exam:”
You might think that liberals who want to expand the federal government and conservatives who want to shrink it could at least agree to improve how well it works. Yet, good government projects, such as boosting the quality of the federal workforce, have largely dropped out of media discussion despite ample evidence that the federal government no longer functions as well as it once did, relative to what’s now technologically feasible. In its mid-20th Century prime, the federal government matched up reasonably well in efficiency and effectiveness against, say, Sears-Roebuck. Today, however, it’s blown away by Wal-Mart’s relentless improvements.
A cheap but seemingly unthinkable in the current climate way to improve government efficiency and effectivenss, would be for the federal government to do a better job of choosing among its job applicants by employing a tool used by both colleges and the military in picking whom to take: standardized testing.
In fact, the feds themselves once had an excellent test for entry-level job applicants. One of the last relics of the Carter Administration is the enduring hash it made of civil servant hiring by abolishing the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) in January 1981.
The U.S. military, which subjected all draftees to the newly invented IQ test during WWI, preceded the civil service in mental testing. It’s not widely publicized, but the armed forces remains devoted to their IQ-like Armed Forces Qualification Test, having accumulated abundant data showing that IQ is one of the best predictors of both trainability and performance. With the downsizing of the military after the Cold War, the Pentagon immediately took the opportunity to raise the virtual minimum IQ for enlistment to 92 (the 30th percentile). Even today, despite the difficulties of recruiting during the Iraq War, the typical new boot private has a higher IQ than the national average.
Testing has been shown to work well for selecting federal white-collar employees as well. A 1986 study by Frank L. Schmidt of the federal Office of Personnel Management found that hiring “on valid measures of cognitive ability, rather than on non-test procedures (mostly evaluations of education and experience), produces … a 9.7% increase in output among new hires.”
Similarly, the federal civil service once invested in increasingly sophisticated brainpower tests to identify young people who could prove competent senior managers in future decades. The Junior Management Assistant test debuted in 1948, followed by the Federal Service Entrance Examination (FSEE) in 1955, a test roughly comparable to the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) now required by grad schools.
In 1972, a lawsuit claimed that that the FSEE was biased because blacks and Hispanics didn’t score as well as whites on average. So, the Nixon Administration deep-sixed it and introduced the sophisticated PACE, which was elaborately validated as predicting performance in 118 federal jobs. The PACE consisted of multiple subtests, which could be weighted differently for each post.
Frustratingly, despite PACE’s impressive predictive power, blacks and Latinos continued to tally lower on it. In another federal discrimination case, the outgoing Carter Administration signed a consent decree in January 1981 agreeing to abolish PACE. Workarounds were “temporarily” implemented until a non-discriminatory general test could be devised.
Twenty-six years later, the Luevano decree’s makeshifts still control federal hiring procedures. (No such new test has proven feasible.) Federal hiring has devolved into a decentralized hodge-podge. There is some job-related testing, but most agencies emphasize credentials, and assess them in a mindlessly mechanical fashion to boot.
A 2005 article in Government Executive by Shawn Zeller observed: “It doesn’t matter whether a candidate earned his economics degree at Harvard or the University of the District of Columbia. Both are considered equal.”
Nelson of the Merit Protection Systems Board notes:
“Our reports show that demonstrating training and experience is not the best indicator of a candidate’s future job performance. Neither is grade point average, yet we use these two methods alone too frequently.”
But, hey, nobody seems to mind. Evidently, it’s good enough for government work.
For more, see:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/11/steve-sailers-test-case_4916.html
May 30th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
But, hey, nobody seems to mind. Evidently, it’s good enough for government work.
This is wrong, it should read it’s good enough for Corp. work. It’s all about the bottom line in the new world of private vendors who’s only think the bottom line not the citizen.
jo6pac
May 30th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Or how about a sizzling expose’ on the culture of mediocrity in federal agencies? My husband, who has oodles of private industry experience in his field, just applied for a highly technical fed position for which he was massively qualified — they told him as much. They ended up offering the position to another (less ambitious and less qualified) candidate, who they thought would be a better fit for their bureaucratic clusterfuck, er, organizational culture. We don’t really care that much about the job, but as taxpayers, we are seriously bummed. DEPRESSING.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Did anyone else find this post made them much more sympathetic to extreme libertarianism?
May 31st, 2008 at 2:46 am
I really hope there are more posts from this very interesting and, I will argue, critically important angle.
Everyone loves to beat up on the federal (and state and local) government bureaucracy, but everyone is an idiot. The government bureaucrats are probably the single most important thing that makes the US different from a second or even third world country. Seriously. The brilliance of the US constitution is basically a bureaucratic flow chart (checks and balances ring any bells).
The professionals in government are also a huge issue for the next administration. BushCo has waged a veritable ‘war on professionalism’, politicizing and undermining with incompetents the bureaucracies which make up the the ‘wheels’ of the government (where the rubber hits the road). Undoing this damage, combined with all the other nice little time-bombs (under staffing, legacy agencies long past their useful life, under funding, stupid turf wars, ect) will be a major and critically important challenge.
May 31st, 2008 at 2:46 am
I really hope there are more posts from this very interesting and, I will argue, critically important angle.
Everyone loves to beat up on the federal (and state and local) government bureaucracy, but everyone is an idiot. The government bureaucrats are probably the single most important thing that makes the US different from a second or even third world country. Seriously. The brilliance of the US constitution is basically a bureaucratic flow chart (checks and balances ring any bells).
The professionals in government are also a huge issue for the next administration. BushCo has waged a veritable ‘war on professionalism’, politicizing and undermining with incompetents the bureaucracies which make up the the ‘wheels’ of the government (where the rubber hits the road). Undoing this damage, combined with all the other nice little time-bombs (under staffing, legacy agencies long past their useful life, under funding, stupid turf wars, ect) will be a major and critically important challenge.
May 31st, 2008 at 2:56 am
“Or how about a sizzling expose’ on the culture of mediocrity in federal agencies?”
One of the problems with niche journalism (ie trade publications) is that you are not going to get any “sizzling expose’” since the publications market, sources, and in most cases funding comes from the agencies or businesses they cover.
A trade publication might cover the effects of there not being enough young workers in the industry to provide a pool from which to hire senior people in the future, but it will not tell you why things got that way in the first place, or why the industry can’t make up the shortfall from hiring from the outside.
May 31st, 2008 at 3:00 am
Apologies for the double post…
I should add that I’ve been getting more and more interested in a potential job in the government. I don’t know how much demand there is for an evolutionary biologist outside the NIH, CDC, or *shudder* DOD… but as someone who is arrogant enough to actually think they understand science, the government is a place where I might actually have some positive impact on the world. (Or get stuck in a meaningless paper shuffling job, of course.)
May 31st, 2008 at 9:29 am
Nah…you didn’t need to add that.
May 31st, 2008 at 10:50 am
As a federal employee I will only speak of my experience, but the retirement of a huge percentage of staff in the last year, mixed with little or no rehiring has most definitely has a negative impact on our ability to provide a minimal level of service. This is only going to get worse because we still haven’t lost as many to retirement as we will in the nest year or two. Currently we have a lot of positions in the pipeline but because HR here sucks, those jobs have yet to be posted (and had time limits) and will like not be filled anytime soon thereby making a bad situation worse.
As for the contractor issue, blame Republicans for that. They were the biggest proponents for the belief (i.e. lie) that the private sector can do it better. Now that budgets are shrinking, contractors are needed because many jobs won’t ever be filled with permanent employees but the tasks the contractors do still need to be performed. Where I work, we haven’t had much luck with the contractors for one the areas they were hired to work. They worse than the mythical lazy federal employee when it comes to actually doing the job they were hired to do. And since the jobs are frequently boring even the contractor has a hard time keeping positions filled.
May 31st, 2008 at 11:04 am
It should probably be recalled that journalism in this country began as and was historically most commonly “niche journalism”, and this notion that what used to be the bosses’ media are some sort of reference-level “national” media is a new one.
Back when newspapers depended more on subscribers than advertising in the first part of the 20th century, it was dominated by ethnic, socialist, labor, and movement newspapers, in terms of subscribers, versus the newspapers of wealth and power.
Only with the domination of the role of advertising did the newspapers and other media of wealth and power displace the previously more popular ‘niche’ media.
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