I thought this was an interesting bit of trivia: Sean Quinn, the in-the-field correspondent for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com, spills some inside info about how the news organizations arrange their seating chart for the White House press briefing room where they meet with the President’s press secretary (presently a fellow named Robert Gibbs). It’s the White House Correspondents Association itself that makes up the seating chart, not the White House, so whatever jockeying and politicizing of the seating occurs is strictly between the news organizations, but apparently it’s very fierce.
The picture above shows the seating chart for February; if you go to the link it also shows the seating for March. There are many more reporters than there are seats, so reporters from the foreign press, smaller papers that still send their own correspondent to Washington, and, more recently, bloggers like Quinn who represent the grudging formal acceptance of bloggers by the traditional media, have to stand in the back of the room.
