Dateline: Portsmouth RI, 13 April

Reference: "The Inside Word: The Early Bird Gets Rumsfeld's Attention: Daily Digest of Military News Gets Lots of Notice, Often for What It Omits," by Christopher Cooper, Wall Street Journal, 13 April, p. A1.

Great article on Early Bird, the news clipping service inside the Pentagonósort of their official (and original) blogger of all the news that's fit to reprint. As one senior official says in the piece, "It has an agenda-setting capacity, that's a fact."

The material is available online at http://ebird.afis.osd.mil/. The site takes roughly one million hits a week. To peruse it is to see the world of news through the Pentagon's eyes, which is why journalists rely on it so much. Bob Woodward will tell you it is his bible on the security books he's written over the yearsólike the one coming up this week.

My Washington Post Outlook article ("Forget Europe. How About These Allies") appears today in the Early Birdónot the lesser-read Supplement but the main pub. Today's take is found at http://ebird.afis.osd.mil/ebfiles/e20040413aaindex.html, and my piece (#45) is reprinted at http://ebird.afis.osd.mil/ebfiles/e20040413275165.html.