Public Policy Matters is maintained by professional journalists whose primary mission is to help introduce their news media colleagues to the full and uninhibited array of public policy ideas and issues that is available on the Internet.

We believe our goal is being achieved on several different levels for several different reasons.

Approximately 75% of our subscribers are editors and reporters who are working in print and broadcast newsrooms throughout the country. We are confident that they represent a segment of the news media which is highly receptive to public policy ideas and issues—and are anxious to report on them to their readers and viewers, as evidenced by their decision to pay a fee to receive our daily report.

We review several thousand websites every night, something no journalist could possibly do alone. Often, we provide information about current public policy issues that can provide an extra dimension to news articles, such as statements from policymakers whose viewpoints might not otherwise have come to an editor’s or a reporter’s attention. Or we can help widen the public debate by exposing editors and reporters to organizations that are unfamiliar to them.

Because we conduct a wide search for information that is not limited by "keyword" restrictions or filters, our "no holds barred" approach ensures that we can introduce news editors and reporters to new issues. In so doing, we have created an Internet reporting tool that restores spontaneous discovery to the news-gathering process.

Edward Zuckerman, Editor

Ed has always been a journalist, beginning in 1963 as a general assignment reporter for the Chicago Heights (Ill.) Star. He moved on to reporting and editing assignments at the Kankakee (Ill.) Daily Journal and the Gary (Ind.) Post-Tribune. In 1970, he was transferred to the Post-Tribune bureau in Washington, D.C.

After working 10 years what eventually became the Knight-Ridder Newspapers Washington Bureau, Ed left in 1980 to publish a newsletter, The Political Finance & Lobby Reporter (also known as PACs & Lobbies). The newsletter was retired after an amazing 25-year run at the end of 2005. During that time, Ed also published nine biennial editions of the highly acclaimed Almanac of Federal PACs.

The idea for the web-based news- and information-gathering service that is now known as Public Policy Matters sprang from Ed's efforts to find a press release on the Internet. Ed realized that a story he found in a newspaper was a rewrite of a government press release, and he sought to find the press release on the Internet. It took a few minutes to find a "media" button on the agency's homepage, and another 10 to 12 minutes to drill through a hierarchy of directories, subdirectories, folders and subfolders before he landed on the press release. "If it took so long to find a press release I knew existed, how long would it take me to find press releases that I do not know about," he wondered. Soon thereafter, the idea for Public Policy Matters struck.