In the delicate journalistic ecosystem of the White House’s James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, the seating chart is the be-all, end-all of status. Where a reporter sits says it all, from the coveted first row of well-coiffed network correspondents to the back, a Siberia of smaller outlets like Cheddar and Gray TV.
So at a moment where Washington’s hierarchies are in flux, it was no surprise on Tuesday when the Trump administration declared that the seats could use a shake-up.
One prominent chair off to the side of the press secretary’s lectern, typically occupied by a White House official, will now be assigned to a reporter from “new media,” a catchall category that the administration said would include podcasters, social media influencers and other creators of “news-related content.”
“It’s essential to our team that we share President Trump’s message everywhere and adapt our White House to the new media landscape in 2025,” Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, said at her debut briefing, while projecting a chart that showed Americans’ declining trust in traditional media institutions.
The announcement was intended to be rich in symbolism, although it also appeared to be something of a compromise.
Seats in the briefing room are traditionally assigned by the White House Correspondents’ Association, which negotiates with the president’s aides over access and logistics. Rumors had flown that Mr. Trump may seek to evict news organizations that he professed to dislike.
Instead, the administration avoided a clash — for now, at least — by simply adding a seat. (The Correspondents’ Association has no jurisdiction over the row of chairs located to the side of the lectern.)
Ms. Leavitt, pointedly, took her first questions on Tuesday from a pair of reporters that she identified as members of the “new media.” Both of them, however, were relatively familiar to the Washington press corps.
The leadoff questioner, Mike Allen, is an embodiment of the establishment media: a former reporter at The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico, he is now one of the leaders of Axios, a popular Washington news site.
Axios did not previously have an assigned seat in the Brady briefing room, partly because the site’s editors frequently said they saw little value in attending. “We beg our reporters to never go to a White House press briefing,” Mr. Allen’s partner, Jim VandeHei, told Vanity Fair two weeks ago.
The second question went to Matt Boyle, the Washington bureau chief of Breitbart News, the right-wing outlet. Breitbart’s reporters have regularly attended White House briefings for many years, although it, too, has never had an assigned spot.
“We view today as a historic first step by the White House to rectify the wrongs committed by the failed establishment and legacy media and the bankrupted institutions that protect them,” Mr. Boyle wrote in an email on Tuesday.
For her third question, Ms. Leavitt turned to a more traditional news organization: The Associated Press. Its reporter, Zeke Miller, asked Ms. Leavitt if she viewed her role “as advocating on behalf of the president, or providing the unvarnished truth?”
“I commit to telling the truth from this podium every single day,” Ms. Leavitt replied. She added, “While I vow to provide the truth from this podium, we ask that all of you in this room hold yourself to that same standard.”