United States Department of Labor
Redesigned News Releases
Redesigned News Releases
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is exploring a substantial change to the format of our news releases. Our objective is to improve readability, accessibility, and relevance while maintaining the BLS gold standard of accuracy. We have developed two prototypes with these goals in mind. Since news releases are the principal means through which BLS data are disseminated to the public, we greatly value your feedback. (Note that these examples use July 2019 data. More recent data are available elsewhere on the BLS website.) | leave a comment ยป
Redesigned News Releases,
BLS does not produce data on discrimination and sexual harassment cases. Here are some web links from other agencies that may be able to provide what you are looking for.
U.S. Department of Labor Civil Rights Center: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oasam/centers-offices/civil-rights-center
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: https://www.eeoc.gov/
Unable to find the EEOC/DOL claims (e.g. discrimination, sexual harassment). Those were very helpful for my development as an HR professional and would like to see them again. They used to be under press releases.
Please include the currently used PDF format too, especially for the Employment Situation report.
Major improvement to the current site. The fonts are far easier to read and maintain reader engagement. The tools (social media/graphs) on the summaries page are in useful areas. For the employment site: I find that the current site often states percentages/numbers changes without incorporating what we are comparing those values to. The beta more clearly defines what their numbers are being compared to.
Definitely much harder for me to get what I need out of the reports. Too general and the graphs do not help my work. I need specific percentages.
I love the graphing and Top Takeaways additions. However…
Please make sure the new format contains all pieces of information that were included in old format. This will maximize usefulness while minimizing negative reactions.
To help BLS credibility in this change I have two recommendations:
1. For first few months of changeover, provide releases in both new and old format.
2. Make sure new format contains all pieces of information that were included in old format.
There are always those doubting Thomases who won’t trust what is being done!
I love the addition of the graphs for context and the ease of finding the data points I use each month.
There seems to be a disconnect between the text focusing on just the last month and the chart including 20 years of data. It is hard to connect the recent trend discussed with the overall trend displayed. Perhaps limit chart to most recent year or tow to make recent trend more prominent.
This is a great improvement and really makes the information more useful to your audience. My job is to provide outreach to federal agency customers, so I would like to be able to download charts and tables for use in PPTs and MSWord documents that I generate for distribution to stakeholders.
The font used for the text of the release is too small. I’d like to see it closer to the font size of this comment. There are buttons over the top of some bullet points and clicking on the buttons just takes you to the top of the release. That needs to be fixed.
I love the two new Beta sites.
My lone critique is the text font size is a little too small (but overall, the Betas are excellent.)
Are there objections to making the table data easily downloadable.
This is definitely an improvement and is more mobile-friendly.