All Blog Posts from Public Eye

The President of the United States, or POTUS as he's known to the members of the press, is followed on trips domestic and abroad by the ever-present shadow of the travel pool. The responsibility is split between the five networks – CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, FOX – and on every fifth day, CBS is charged with travel pool duty. "On that day I am no longer working for CBS unilaterally," said CBS News producer Jeff Goldman, who handles pool responsibilities for most presidential trips for the network, "I am working on behalf of all five networks." That means nothing is proprietary – he's providing information for everyone.

For Goldman, that means his Blackberry is a veritable umbilical cord. It is vital and he is attached. Even the beloved berry, however, has its limits. On the Saturday before the midterm elections, Goldman was in Englewood, Colo., where President Bush was going to record a live Saturday radio address in a local coffee shop. About 30 seconds before the address was set to go live, Goldman was thumbing away at his Blackberry. Suddenly, a secret service agent accidentally knocked into him, launching the Blackberry, very unfortunately, into a nearby trash bin. Desperate to communicate with the other networks, "I fished the Blackberry out, covered with mocha latte," said Goldman. "And it kept on ticking."

"Everybody – correspondents, producers, show producers, senior producers -- want to know what's going on. It’s a way to inform all the networks – and every working part of their news operations -- where the president is at any given moment," said Goldman.

He, or anyone else managing the travel pool at any time, is constantly reporting movements – who is on Air Force One, when is it leaving, when is it arriving, what happened during the onboard briefing. Then there are the events along the way – photo ops, bilateral meetings, shots of the president arriving at Downing Street.

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Now that you know all about the network pool, here’s another little explainer for you. It’s about a segment you’ll likely be seeing on cable news later this afternoon and on the evening newscasts tonight – the president being interviewed by correspondents from each network following his tour of a border patrol station in San Luis, Ariz. This happens every so often when the White House decides to offer up the president, the first lady or someone else from the administration to all five networks for sit-down interviews. So how does the whole thing work?

Earlier this week, White House correspondents were told that they would definitely want to be on the president’s upcoming trip – which suggested that he would be granting one-on-one interviews, said Carter Yang, a producer for the “Evening News,” who is covering the president’s trip. Yesterday, the White House confirmed that there would indeed be sit-down interviews with each network.

CBS News producer Tom Seem explained that the White House sets the interview length and determines the order of when each network’s interview will take place. In this case, the interview length is five minutes, and the order of networks is: Fox, followed by CNN (the cable networks get first dibs because their deadlines are more immediate) then CBS, NBC, and ABC.

With the president obviously wanting to discuss immigration, does that mean other topics are off limits? Are there any editorial ground rules? Yang said there aren’t any. “We would never agree to an interview in which the White House said there were certain topics that were off limits,” he said.

Seem said that there have been times when the White House staff has said before an interview that if subjects outside of the primary topic are broached, the president likely won’t answer them. “But this White House has toned that down quite a bit,” he added. “They did that a bit at the beginning but not anymore.”

Nonetheless, he expects that the White House intends for the interviews to be on the subject of immigration and most of the questions will likely be focused in that direction. “It’s definitely a newsworthy subject,” he said.

(The interview will be posted on CBSNews.com as soon as it's available, and we'll update with a link .)

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Aaron Lewis started at CBS News in 2002 as an intern for the weekend news and soon became a desk assistant during the beginning of the Iraq War. He spent a few years at CNN as a video assistant and returned to CBS last August as the network's pool coordinator. Along the way, he's had some interesting experiences -- including one anecdote about what it's like to crash a story at CNN. Literally.

What do you do at CBS News?

For certain news events, the five major networks (ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, and NBC) are either mandated or decide amongst ourselves to provide a single camera crew to shoot and feed back to all of us at the same time. These events are considered "pooled" events. My job is to represent CBS when it comes to coordinating logistics with other networks for these "pools."

What single issue should be covered more at CBS News?

When it comes down to it, nothing is more important to our viewers than their health. Everyone at least knows someone who's been affected by cancer, Alzheimer's, or heart disease. Progress is constantly being made on those and other diseases. I think viewers would welcome more stories about such progress.

Give us a great behind the scenes story.

After about a year working in CNN's video library - and a good amount of prodding - I'm given a chance one day to help produce live shots for CNN International and Headline News. Of course, I was excited to do something other than log and archive video all day, and I wanted to get more opportunities like that, so I didn't want to screw up. Anyway, the producer I'm working with asks me to track down video and get it cut for air in less than 10 minutes. So I take off through the newsroom and after about three steps, I trip over a random incline in the floor and crash to the ground with a tremendously loud THUD. The newsroom goes dead silent and everyone just stares at me for several seconds. Then laughter. Even the interns had their fill. I was OK, but needless to say, I didn't make the best impression. It took another couple months before I got a shot in the newsroom again.

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What’s it like to be the Washington network pool coordinator? What is this “pool” situation all about anyway? Aaron Lewis, pool coordinator at CBS News in Washington, will tell you all about it this week -- he’ll answer 10 of the standard questions everyone gets, and one tailored just for him. Or he might answer one from you. So send in your questions or post them in comments, Aaron will post his answers on Thursday.

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There are always a few pieces that seem to exist only on the fringes of the news cycle, so here's a few we came across today that might pique your interest:

As the news cycle moves faster than ever and stories must be produced at an almost superhuman speed, search engines like Google and Lexis-Nexis have become invaluable for reporters and anyone else interested in sifting through a lot of information in a short amount of time. As one who has traversed the road of Nexis more often than I’d like to remember, I was particularly interested when Edward Tenner asked in Sunday’s New York Times if today’s search engines are making us, well, dumber. Can an expert Googler distinguish a legitimate source from a lesser one? “Despite constant tweaking, [search engines’] formulas display irrelevant or mediocre sites on a par with truly expert ones,” writes Tenner. And librarians aren’t too thrilled either:

“As another university librarian, Pamela Martin, observed, ‘Google's simplicity and impressive search prowess trick students into thinking they are good all-around searchers, and when they fail in library searches, they are ashamed as well as confused.’”

We’ve given you a glimpse of White House pool report humor before, but in this weekend’s Lowell Sun (thanks, Romenesko) Evan Lehmann provides a little more background on the often amusing dispatches...

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If you’ve ever had a doubt about the detail-oriented nature of the White House press corps, here’s a tidbit from a pool report on the President’s cabinet meeting today:

“Chertoff sat next to POTUS on his right. Rumsfeld sat next to him on his left, and appears to have brought his own coffee, since there was a small, brown insulated paper cup sitting next to his china coffee setting.”

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