Focus Editorial Guidelines

As stated in the newsletter's tagline, the goal of Focus is "accelerating infrastructure innovations." The following guidelines further explain the newsletter's editorial strategy:

• To serve the providers of highway infrastructure with innovations and support to improve quality, safety, and service.
• To help promote and market programs and projects of the various offices of the Office of Infrastructure. By promoting these programs and projects, Focus should help to advance the strategic goals and the overall communications strategies of the Office of Infrastructure.

As part of this overall strategy of promoting the goals of the Office of Infrastructure, Focus will cover infrastructure-related developments in the larger highway community, including State highway agencies, industry, the Transportation Research Board (TRB), the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), local governments, regional Superpave Centers, international organizations, and academia. The infrastructure areas covered are bridge technology, pavement technology, asset management, program administration, winter maintenance, and work zone safety.

• To continue to cover technologies developed under the Strategic Highway Research Program, such as Superpave, anti-icing/road weather information system strategies and work zone safety products.
• To target articles to tie in with regularly scheduled events, such as AASHTO's annual, regional, and subcommittee meetings; TRB's annual meetings; and special events, such as training courses, workshops, and conferences.
• To provide a regular calendar listing of infrastructure-related and other workshops, conferences, classes, etc., deemed to be of interest to readers.

Focus targets its articles to an audience that wants to know primarily about technologies and products that they can use, rather than reading articles about policies or bureaucratic procedure. More than half of the respondents in a 1999 survey of Focus readers worked in State (27 percent), Federal (7 percent), and local (21 percent) agencies, with other readers hailing from consulting firms (16 percent), academia (7 percent), and material supply firms (10 percent), among others. Most of the readers described themselves as managers or technical experts. Focus is written with the needs of these readers in mind.
An Editorial Board has been established that has the responsibility of:

• Developing editorial policy
• Guiding the content
• Championing infrastructure technology communications within the office and across FHWA.

Reprints

The contents of the newsletter may be reprinted in whole or in part, however, please check with us if you plan to reprint any graphics or photos and we will check to ensure that the photos or graphics belong to the Federal Highway Administration. When you reprint the text from our newsletter, please provide an appropriate reprint citation, such as: "Article reprinted from the Federal Highway Administration's February 2001 issue of Focus, which is also available online at www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/focus/."