EOIR_News_Service_Statement_of_Work_06032016_to_Administration.docx

EOIR News Service Statement of Work

The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) intends to outsource the daily creation of a morning briefing for the Office of Communications and Legislative affairs and other EOIR officials. In furtherance of EOIR’s mission, agency officials must start each day fully informed about important news printed and broadcast nationwide. EOIR has determined that this will best be accomplished via an expert-edited briefing rather than full-text articles or computer-generated summaries. This is a firm-fixed contract, with one base year and two additional one-year options.

The vendor will prepare a daily briefing memo that weaves together the important elements of news stories printed and broadcast nationwide. Stories to be considered will be those that mention EOIR or immigration policy. The items included will be culled from thousands of outlets daily and will be those EOIR officials themselves would have identified as important. Redundant and irrelevant news will be eliminated. Television news must include stories actually broadcast nationally and locally; it is not sufficient to provide links to stories appearing on the websites of local broadcasters, as many of those stories never aired.

The vendor must use human analysts to: find and review articles and broadcasts from all major (and most smaller) daily newspapers, national and local television, newsweeklies, magazines and journals, Internet sites, specialty press, etc.; apply a complex understanding of EOIR’s mission; determine which aspects of each story, if any, are important to the various constituencies within EOIR; edit out all information (not stories, but parts of stories) that is redundant or irrelevant; weave the remaining (important) information together such that it reads like a single story rather than what it really is, subsets of myriad stories on the same topic. In creating this new story from elements of various original stories, the vendor should also, as appropriate, characterize the coverage such that EOIR officials can quickly get a sense for how widely various story elements were run and also for the general tonality of the coverage.

For print articles referenced in the briefing, the vendor must provide a link to the original full-text versions when available on the original publishers’ websites. When links point to content on subscription-based sites, EOIR may at its discretion subscribe. For broadcast stories in which reviewing the actual audio/video would be particularly useful, the vendor will provide a link to available “video clips” that stream to the reader’s desktop.

The briefing must also: be delivered weekdays by 8 a.m. Eastern Time except on federal holidays (including no more than two days at each of Thanksgiving and Christmas); include news from weekends and federal holidays in the briefing immediately following those days; include a table of contents organized by subject matter; be available via an IP-protected website (including a searchable archive) or other secure delivery as dictated to vendor by the EOIR; include traditional email, mobile-friendly email, and Kindle; be available to any and all employees of EOIR, exclusively for EOIR’s internal use.

The news included in the briefing must be current, meaning the 8 a.m. briefing will include stories appearing that morning in the nation’s newspapers and broadcast in the preceding 24 hours by the nation’s national and local television news outlets. It is very important that there be an extremely low incidence of missed or day-old stories, typographical errors, and broken links.

The vendor must also be extremely flexible to accommodate changes to the briefing based on changing needs at EOIR. The vendor would be expected to accommodate changes of this nature within the terms of the existing contract provided those changes do not materially alter the vendors costs. The vendor might be required on short notice to change the topics to be covered; the deadlines; the format of the briefing; etc.

Given that the vendor will need to make expert judgments regarding which elements of various stories should appear in the briefing, and because this will be a primary source of information for EOIR officials, the agency requires that the vendor have at least three similar contracts to provide similar services to large, complex federal entities such as Cabinet Secretaries and their Departments.