Recipients and Distributors of White House Electronic Publications Points for a Briefing

Distribution

• 30,000 to 40,000 people get documents directly on a near daily basis. 90,000 to 100,000 more receive documents or reports on their content from the primary recipients through e-mail, face-to-face discussions, distributed hardcopy and telephone conversations.
• A primary recipient may obtain documents in several means, with reported means averaging 1.3 per person. 40%of primary recipients receive documents through mailing lists; 40%retrieve from FTP and Gopher servers; 23%browse newsgroups on Usenet; 19%download from bulletin boards; 13%retrieve from forums on commercial networks.

• Recipients are younger, more educated and more male than the national population. 85%are under 50, 75%completed college, 50%have post-graduate degrees and only 20%are women.
• The primary affiliations of recipients, in descending order of frequency, are universities and colleges, government and military, private-sector high-tech companies, advocacy groups and economic interest groups. Few recipients are affiliated with elementary or high schools.

• Every U.S. state has some recipients, with the greatest concentration found the Washington, DC area. 90%of recipients live in the U.S.; the remaining 10%are located in 25 foreign countries.

• Recipients are more politically active than the general population. One third work regularly or occasionally for issues or candidates; one-third write letters to elected officials, and the least active third vote.

• People use the documents more to keep informed, follow an issue or get a more direct view of political processes (65%of reported uses) than to acquire information for work or study (25%).

• 80%look at available documents at least several times a week and select documents to read by subject line; half spend 10 or more minutes per day reading them.

• Two-thirds of recipients brought information from the documents into political discussions, with more people doing so to support than oppose the administration.

• Recipients find the publication service satisfactory and valuable. 65%report satisfaction or extreme satisfaction, only 8%report dissatisfaction; electronic publication is rated important by 29%and highly important by 50%.

Source: 1600 survey respondents in February, 1994
Roger Hurwitz and John Mallery, MIT AI Laboratory

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