If the Queens Courthouse Press room was a person, it'd be an old guy with a big nose reddened by lunchtime shots of whiskey from the bottle kept in the back of the top drawer of the grey metal desk. He'd have big hands that could type quickly with two fingers on an old manual typewriter, and you'd know that he kept a reporter's long notebook with beat up cardboard covers in his back pocket next to his handkerchief. Or so I see it after reading the New York Times' Corey Kilgannon's wonderful character sketch Where Scoops Go to Die.
"In the Queens courthouse press room, there are two large metal file
cabinets with three old typewriters on top, each supporting an old
telephone. The tools of the trade are stacked like headstones, as if to
memorialize a bygone era of newspapering."
[...]
"The scene is like a David Mamet rewrite of "The Front Page," with the reporters badgering, spying and tailing one another throughout the building in a battle for exclusives."
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