I got my idea for today’s column while reading about blogger Joshua Micah Marshall’s posting that found design similarities between the websites of Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority at CPA-Iraq.org and the Brookings Institution at Brookings.edu. After writing about the site of the Council on Foreign Relations in March 2004, I had planned on writing about Brookings, too, but didn’t get around to it. Now I have a “news” hook to do so.
This think tank has a site that journalists should know about and bookmark. It offers all kinds of material that can help those covering a variety of topics, including foreign affairs, economic policy, domestic issues, and more.
One of the most useful sections is the Iraq Index, a statistical compilation of economic and
security data about that country. It’s maintained by Brookings scholar (and high-profile pundit) Michael E. O’Hanlon and his research assistant Adriana Lins de Albuquerque.
But it isn’t just foreign stuff. On the front page today, there’s a fascinating piece by scholar William Frey about the reverse migration of black Americans to the U.S. South.
The site’s content goes back at least eight years and everything except the books it sells is accessible without charge. You can sign up for a weekly e-mail alerting you to changes to the site.
I asked Fred Dews, the site’s editor, what he’d want readers of this column to know about. Here’s what he sent me via e-mail:
We offer full transcripts of dozens of public events on a variety of subjects, documents that journalists can use to check their quotes or just refresh their memories of the event they attended. We aim for same-day posting of transcripts for morning events, and following
morning for afternoon events.
Another scholar — Peter W. Singer — had already been working on the issue of privatized military functions when the news story broke about the murder and mutilation of four American contractors in Fallujah. We’ve kept relevant articles by Singer on our home page for quite some time.
Our main home page content changes once or twice a day with the latest report, op-ed, article, or paper about some current public policy topic. Our challenge is to keep the mix right, as Brookings scholarship covers such a wide variety of research and policy areas. We also have to balance links to our content related to news stories of immediate interest with content that is cutting-edge but not as interesting to a broad audience.
That challenge of keeping things topical and broad is what most sites wrestle with every day. Brookings.edu just seems to do it better than most others.
Sree’s Links:
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