The indulgences were endless. Yoga instruction was given all day, Jonathan Adler candles were set up throughout the room to set the mood; drinks included Tulsi Tea and several offerings of organic smoothies. There were endless amounts of chocolate, including coconut curry milk chocolate bars from Organic Free Trade, and plenty of free samples of Pangea Organics Egyptian Geranium with Adzuki Bean & Cranberry Facial Scrub. Once you’re done with your Pangea box, if you plant it into the ground, it actually turns into a tree.
“I really wanted to create a serene, meditative and relaxing environment that was really in contrast to everything outside,” said Shawn Henderson, the interior designer that the Huffington Post hired to design the space.
He said the mood was set with three key things: yoga, refreshments and Ayurvedic consultations.
Meanwhile, over in Media Pavilion 5, David Broder, the veteran Washington Post columnist who has covered every convention since 1960, was sitting with his legs crossed reading The Post. Alongside him, scores of Post reporters were hunched over laptops. Mr. Broder said he hadn’t looked at his since the previous evening; it was 2:30 in the afternoon.
What Web sites will he be reading?
“I will get stuff from our researcher, and then I’ll just write my story,” he said.
“I do not read a lot of blogs. There’s a temptation to sit there and read off the computer all day, but that’s not reporting. You’ve got to get off your ass and talk to people.”
But aren’t they talking to the readers directly already?
“What I’m thinking—and it’s not remotely about disillusionment; I love this job—that maybe I should do something different,” Mr. Nagourney said. “There are a lot of opportunities at The New York Times. I think I’ve done it well, or as well as I could do it, but I just want to do something different.”
Though he stressed his love for the job, he also emphasized the accelerated stress of his job.
“I’d like my stuff to be read, obviously, I’m a journalist—ego and all that,” he said. “But, like, during a period like this, our stuff isn’t going to be well read unless you really break a story or do something really exceptional. And now more than ever—it used to be like in the morning you used to pick up 50 newspapers, and now it’s just coming out all day.”
On this particular day he spent the morning writing a Web-only column, and an item for the Caucus blog on a Jon Stewart breakfast, which he rolled his eyes at. This was all before he had to write the lead-off column for the paper the next day on Ted Kennedy’s speech. Didn’t the Web stuff interfere with writing that outstanding analytical piece for the newspaper, the only one that will be in Nexis and stand as the paper’s historical record of the first day of the Democratic convention in Denver?
“Yeah, it does interfere with it,” he said. “But you know what? It is what it is. What can I do? Complain about it? The world has changed.”
jkoblin@observer.com
