The people who bring Government employees the online newspaper PS News have called the national launch of its sister magazine PS News Professional a “resounding success”.

A spin-off from the 10-year-old weekly PS News, the new PS News Professional started life with over 80,000 public sector subscribers across the nation, replacing five separate news editions that had done the rounds to reach Government employees in the States and cities outside Canberra since 2006.

According to PS News founder and group editor, Frank Cassidy, the new professionally-focused e-zine has been designed to cater to the public sector’s ongoing focus on training, personal development and career advancement.

“PS News Professional also continues the tradition of independence and pin-point relevance to its readers that PS News has made its hallmark since Day One,” Cassidy said.

He said Australia’s public sector made up the biggest common-interest community in the nation as well as in each State, but was treated as giant ‘black box’ by most media outside the sector.

“Despite a total workforce of 1.9 million Australians and annual Government expenditure of more than $500 billion – that’s half a trillion – the public sector as a market is among the most neglected in the country,” Cassidy added.

“Few Australians outside the public service know that it is a bigger and more powerful market than any of the nation’s capital cities yet it continues to go unserviced.”

According to Cassidy, the size of the PS market becomes eye-openingly obvious when compared to Australia’s biggest marketplace, the City of Sydney, which claims to be home to 437,000 workers during the day.

“Sydney’s workforce at its busiest is less than a quarter of the public sector’s day-to-day roll-up,” he said.

“Now, after 10 years of steady growth and with separate editions for the seven biggest public service workforces in the nation – either as the long-established online newspaper PS News or the brand new e-zine PS News Professional – the national subscription list has stretched out to more than 140,000 and is growing strongly.”