Locked Up [Recovering Journalist Remembers]

On the economic indicators beat from 2005 to 2009, I spent early mornings with a pack of under-caffeinated reporters in the dingy press rooms of the U.S. Treasury, Commerce and Labor Departments.

We trooped in between 7:30 and 8:00AM, rumpled and probably hungry after metro-bus-car-foot peregrinations. We dropped our cellphones in drawers and inked names on a clipboard. We sat in front of desktop computers (remember those beasts?) under little placards proclaiming our agencies’ names. We groggily skimmed newspapers until 7:55-7:57AM, when a small bureaucratic gaggle arrived bearing a stack of press releases and supporting charts.

Someone would close the room’s door. There was always a warden of sorts, tasked with guarding the cell phones and flipping a switch that blocked telephone and internet lines to the outside world at 8:00AM on the dot. Some departments’ wardens took themselves more seriously than others. One department trusted the reporters to police themselves and didn’t cut the internet and phone lines.

At 7:59AM room tension would spike as we queued for the day’s offering. The journalist first in line often leafed through and called out the headline number to the rest of us. Fifteen seconds later the room would be silent, but buzzing, grumbling, quietly, with much shuffling of paper, then the mad typing of keys.

At 8:29AM the warden would open the phone lines and we would sit, poised, catching last-minute typos and dialing our newsrooms, which knew to expect silence on the end of the line.

At 8:29:50 a 10-second countdown began, and at 8:30AM another switch was flipped, connecting modems and computers to transmit the flood of our numbers-words-sentences-paragraphs-trends-developments-analysis. All of it, broadcast into the ether like that. The markets would move. Our editors would fire questions back over the lines, or some of us read prepared broadcasts to subscribers. Then I’d call my editor. Then I’d pack up and walk or metro to my office, spending the rest of the morning writing followups and running down other stories.

The procedures are more tightly guarded now, from what I have heard, because algorithmic trading and technological arms-racing have made tiny increments of time ever more valuable. Lower latency in the transmission process enables traders to execute casino bets on unemployment, home sales or GDP a few nanoseconds before their competitors. And as we know, money talks.