Word: pressroom
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...tend to regard columnists with the same chummy contempt that linemen show quarterbacks. Reporters do the real work, sleep in cars, get kicked by Mafia bosses on the courthouse steps. Even editors do some sweating (yelling is taxing). But columnists ride the gravy train, that's what the pressroom says. In a way, it's true. They manage to arrive home before midnight; they dine with the brass. Their physical exercise consists of pacing all the way to the far end of the study, and often back again. Sometimes they sit up straight...
Standing in his familiar position on the podium of the State Department pressroom, Bernard Kalb announced to stunned reporters that he chose to "dissent from the reported disinformation program." Said Kalb, a former correspondent for NBC and CBS: "You face a choice, as an American, as a spokesman, as a journalist, whether to allow oneself to be absorbed in the ranks of silence, whether to vanish into unopposed acquiescence or to enter a modest dissent." He added, "Faith in the word of America is the pulse beat of our democracy...
...munches on the snacks for a late-night sugar rush. Howard Dean is almost Clintonian in his appetites. In Iowa he wolfed down pork sandwiches and strawberry milk shakes, and sometimes made detours to the dessert table; once, after an aide told him there was pie in the pressroom, he braved the reporters' gauntlet for a slice...
Flashy gadgets humble us all sooner or later. My eureka moment came last fall while I was attending an emerging-technologies conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I walked into the pressroom, ready to plug my laptop into the Internet, only to find the room completely devoid of electronic equipment...
Back in that pressroom in Cambridge, I realized I was free from technology, visible and invisible. No Ethernet connection, no wireless service--and fortunately no deadline. I had a couple of beers with another technophile before getting on an airplane to fly home to my wonderful fiance, whom--I had nearly forgotten--I met on the Internet. By the thumbnail definition, maybe the Internet already isn't technology anymore...