Pebble Beach

On Friday we stopped back by the White House for a second time. It could not have gone much more smoothly; we exchanged emails with the friendly folks in the lower press office on Thursday afternoon and then showed up. The Ukrainian foreign minister was visiting the West Wing, so we ended up at the Northwest Gate behind the assembled mass of the Ukrainian press corps–all five of them.

Once inside we ended up exploring some of the most photographed ground in journalism: the North Lawn from which network correspondents do their live stand-ups. The lawn, off to the right of the drive, is hard to miss. The cameras, lights, monitors, and sound equipment, shrouded against the weather in giant green pouches, are all visible from outside the gates.

Now anyone who has spent much time around the media knows that television crews are a very different beast from print and radio reporters. While print and magazine reporters can move blithely with only a laptop and a cell phone, a television correspondent requires a full crew–including a producer, cameraman, and a sound technician, along with all of their accoutrements.

Thus while the print reporters are content with their self-contained workspaces in the back at tiny wooden desks, the television crews sprawl all over the briefing room. As we noted last week, cameras, tripods, and ladders blanket the briefing room, and while the producers and correspondents work in their “spacious” couch-sized booths and the camera crews lounge in the briefing room, their real focus is the North Lawn.

The area outside is known as “Pebble Beach,” because even though it is now nicely covered in slate, when the TV crews first moved there (from their previous location on the muddy other side of the driveway), it was covered in loose stones. Drainage problems left correspondents and crews slogging through the unpleasant “beach.” Then the White House one day surprised everyone by covering it with well-laid slate. Even long-time correspondents are hard-pressed to come up with another time the White House–any White House–went out of its way to do something nice for the press corps.

The crews relax nearby at the ready all day. They explained that even when the President is traveling that post-9/11 most of the networks now staff the White House with a full crew from before the morning shows until after the evening news casts. They wait because if something “goes down” and they’re not already inside the complex, there’s no guarantee the Secret Service would allow anyone inside, and no one wants to the only network left shooting their stand-up in Lafayette Square across the street. Thus they all wait inside the gates–reading books, chatting about sports, and stepping outside every so often for a smoke, just waiting for that next story.

Much of the news of the world comes trickling through the White House, and certainly any major event anywhere in the world will require comment from the podium at the front of the briefing room.

In fact, it turns out, after their New York newsrooms (or Atlanta in the case of CNN), the North Lawn of the White House is the place most likely for a network or cable channel to go live. Much like the Cold War bombers of Strategic Air Command, the crews are supposed to be on a hair-trigger alert. If something happens they can be live from Pebble Beach in about two minutes.

But until then they have John Grisham novels.

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