Pentagon's Must-Read News Compilation Fades Away WASHINGTON - The Defense Department's Early Bird news service - which drove debates at the Pentagon, and its senior leaders to frustration, with its compilation of articles on military operations, budget politics and weapons programs - was declared dead on Friday. The three dozen or so news and opinion articles that made the Early Bird's daily cut became must-reads at first light for Pentagon civilian employees and military personnel, as well as for members of the executive branch, Congress, the defense industry, research groups, academia and the news media. It had enormous clout, with defense secretaries known to thunder at subordinates after reading an unexpected morning dispatch. Policy makers on the rise and commanders in the field read it with all the interest of old-school Kremlinologists poring over Pravda for clues to who was up and who was down and what prized weapons programs might face budget cuts or be saved. But it also served as a hometown paper of sorts for the government's biggest bureaucracy and largest employer, with readers deployed around the world. In all, the Early Bird reached an estimated 1.5 million readers who saw it online or had it delivered by email. There were many causes of death, said Col. Steven H. Warren, the director of Defense Press Operations, who made the decision to end the Early Bird. Because the Internet has personalized news aggregation services, a centralized Pentagon-financed effort was seen as an anachronism - especially one that was delivered only once a day in an era of 24-hour news, he said. News media outlets also raised legitimate concerns about copyright issues, because the Early Bird republished articles without providing web links to the originals, robbing news organizations of hundreds of thousands of potential online hits at a time of intense competition for readers. And it was undeniable that the Early Bird had "become the tail that wagged the dog," Colonel Warren said. "A small story that lands in the Bird can have a big impact, since we provided a vastly enlarged readership for some small, niche news outlets," he said. And placement of stories by mainstream media seemed to drive the daily agenda in ways that never were intended. Colonel Warren said he had spent months developing plans to redesign and reorganize the Early Bird. Then the government shutdown resulted in furloughs for the two civilian Pentagon employees who showed up each night at 10:30 to read news articles and copy-and-paste them into the Early Bird for delivery before dawn. During the shutdown, Colonel Warren's staff prepared a scaled-down daily news summary delivered to a small circle of Pentagon leaders. When the government reopened, Colonel Warren did not immediately give the order to restart publishing of the Early Bird. He waited and he watched. And he heard, receiving phone calls from Capitol Hill and even from former defense secretaries asking when the Early Bird would be back in service. On Friday morning, after a month without the Early Bird, Colonel Warren decided to officially shut it down. He is now pruning the Bird's distribution list, which had grown into a tangled jungle that reached far beyond the intended audience. He plans to return the news compilation service to its roots of providing articles to a group of Pentagon and military leaders who can legitimately claim privilege to a taxpayer-financed news aggregation effort. The new compilation, the Morning News of Note, will have about 300 readers, he said. Even so, Colonel Warren acknowledged a bureaucratic reality: that staff members may ask their bosses for copies that they will then pass along - meaning that, as with the Early Bird, distribution of the Morning News of Note will grow beyond its small base of readers. The Early Bird could trace its beginnings to 1948, when postwar news-clipping services became common across the military. They were consolidated in the 1960s in what became known as the Yellow Bird: the top page was canary yellow, designed to stand out on desks piled with papers. It became an official effort of the Defense Department's public affairs office in 1989. In the days of hard-copy publication, junior staff members would be sent to grab editions for their bosses. The arrival of fax machines provided a global reach, which grew longer with the Internet. Colonel Warren is acutely aware that his decision will be criticized among the Early Bird's vast readership, even though he will also get credit for killing off a Pentagon media product that has often troubled senior officials. Aides to Donald H. Rumsfeld, when he was defense secretary, used the Early Bird to poke back at reporters who were poking the department. Temporarily, at least, an order went out to top the first page with all of the published corrections and editor's notes from news organizations acknowledging errors in articles that had appeared in the Early Bird. "I suppose my biggest frustration with the Bird was that it lacked breadth," said Lawrence Di Rita, who served as spokesman and chief of staff for Mr. Rumsfeld. "Instead of providing a representative range of coverage on a broad set of issues, it tended to amplify the impact of a small number of topics," he said. We'd get three or four pieces from the major dailies or wires on one or two news-of-the-day topics, but often little or nothing on service-specific issues that probably had as much or more impact on day-to-day activity across the force as the four or five articles about some subcommittee hearing in Washington. In recent years, a number of news media outlets have started their own news compilation and analysis services on national security issues. And Navy officials report that, in the absence of the Early Bird, they have received a substantial number of requests for their news-clipping service.