After watching The Post, I came to understand the newsroom far better. The first thing that struck me about how they did business was the timetable. In the newspaper business, you have to be able to pump out a story fast. When one of his reporters tells editor Ben Bradlee he can write a story in a few days, Bradlee snaps back, "What if we pretended you were a reporter and not a novelist?" The reporter then hurriedly replies that he can get it done sooner. In another scene, Bradlee receives crucial information, and he and his reporters need to sift through thousands of pages of documents to find and write a story. They work non-stop for the next ten hours, scrambling to put this story together.
Another thing that I found interesting was the fierce competition between newspapers. When The New York Times published an interesting story before The Washington Post, Bradlee was furious. He always strived to get out stories before his competitors, or at the very least, at the same time as his competitors. The final thing that interested me was source confidentiality. When asked about his source for the classified study, one of the post reporters replied simply with, "We do not reveal our sources." Source confidentiality appears to be pretty standard in the news business; many sources would not be willing to talk at all if they knew they would not be anonymous.
My final article will talk about the essential conflict in The Post: The Press versus the Government.
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