President's Report, January 2009

Dear MRE members and friends:

With 2009 now well underway MRE is looking at some new initiatives over the next few months that the board of directors and officers believe will make our organization more relevant and useful to you.

One of the more drastic changes you will see in the coming weeks is a completely redesigned MRE web site. Under the leadership of board member Kelly Kennedy and executive assistant Salome Angrand, the Web Site Redesign Committee is preparing prototypes for the new web site that we believe will make it more useful and much more user-friendly to our members and those interested in military affairs reporting.

Without going into a great deal of detail, we want to be able to showcase the work of our members and potential members; provide updated information about embedding, military justice issues, veterans affairs issues, base access, and other topics of interest; provide a bulletin board where members can ask questions and get answers about issues of interest; and reach out to those who are not members but who are simply seeking information about some aspect of the military and military reporting.

We will have more on that next month.

In addition, the board at its monthly meeting on Jan. 24 unanimously approved the organization assisting in gathering information for National Sunshine Week (www.sunshineweek.org), an initiative of the American Socieity of Newspaper Editors.

This effort is designed to bring attention to the importance of transparency in government. As many of you know, one of President Obama’s first acts was to sign a memorandum to heads of executive offices and agencies in which he said he had ordered the attorney general to draw up new guidelines on release of information under FOIA that would provide more accountability and transparency in government.

The focus this year of National Sunshine Week is on the need for government agencies to provide records on-line in digital form, as opposed to making those seeking information file cumbersome FOI requests. Just as a side note, MRE has had an FOI request rattling around the Pentagon for more than 13 months now and even though the information we are seeking has been investigated and cleared by the IG, we have yet to see that information despite numerous requests.

I will be sending an e-mail to all MRE members with a form to fill out regarding defense-related records on-line. The form seeks specific information in a number of areas related to government but can be adapted to information being sought from defense agencies. During the course of your daily work, as you look for records on-line, write down what you find and, more importantly, what you cannot find on-line and provide a brief description that you can e-mail to those compiling the information.

The turnaround time on this is quite short. The information is needed by Feb. 13 so you have just less than three weeks.

It is a relatively simple process and hopefully will help convince the Obama administration not only to digitize more defense-related information, but to cut through the bureaucratic roadblocks and slowdowns that many of us have encountered when we file FOIs with the Pentagon and other government agencies.

This form also will be posted on the MRE web site. We will publish the results once they become available. The information is the important thing, but this endeavor also will help raise the status of MRE as an organization devoted to transparency in government.

One final note: Remember that as a member of MRE you also are a recruiter for our organization. If you work for a news agency that has reporters or producers who do any stories related to the military, no matter how tangentially, encourage them to join. Our membership form is on-line at http://www.militaryreporters.org/images/mre_app.pdf.

If you have any questions or concerns, or would like to contribute ideas to our web site redesign, please send them to me at ronmartzmre@gmail.com.

Stay safe out there, wherever you are reporting from.

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