How does a presidential press conference work? On TV you see a roomful of people. But out of two hundred or more present, fifty will be White House staffers who have come to observe and another twenty-five will be technicians. Of those left, ninety-odd will be reporters with White House press passes who have no intention of asking a question. (They come because it is important that they be seen by an editor at home.) That leaves some thirty-five regulars, those who travel with the President and who ask the questions. The seating at a press conference is not by accident. The regulars have marked seats in the first three or four rows, and beyond that the seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. In a way that no one talks about, this allows a press secretary to let you know about his or the President's displeasure. If a reporter who has been in the front row walks in one day and finds he is sitting five rows back, he knows what has happened. This fixed seating allows the President to know who is sitting where. Johnson studied the charts, and Nixson always knew where the reporters who mattered, in his view, were seated. He knew where he could go if he needed to change the subject. The lack of follow-up to an answer has always been one of the flaws of the press conference format. The press corps has never done a good job on it. I tried to go into a press conference with five questions I would like to ask, and a backup list of five more. But I had to be ready to follow up someone else's question. There are other weaknesses in press conferences, of course, among them the fact that ninety-nine percent of the questions are political. Such issues as genetic-engineering, overpopulation, the global economy do not often get raised. We have not figured out yet what our responsibility should be reporting these issues before they get to be such immense problems. Ideally, a presidential news conference should be held every ten days to two weeks, live, in an unstructured seating. Television works best when it puts you there, in a situation where the camera has the least influence on the person. With our improvement in technology, we are coming to that point soon. The new minicams spit our broadcast-ready videotape on the spot. According to the passage, at a presidential press conference of about 200 people, will be reporters.