Washington Post Helps Us Keep Track of White House Visitors
The White House makes no secret of its visitor logs, but it doesn't serve them up in an easily searchable database with the information prettily graphed, but thanks to The Washington Post, anyone can easily keep track of the White House's many, many visitors.
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Monday's story by T.W. Farnum, pointing to some visitors of note, really just serves to introduce The Post's new tool for exploring the visitors' list, which primarily tracks lobbying activity at the White House, and other news outlets are already using it to write stories of their own. Politico's Josh Gerstein found a visit by Eldon Roth, CEO of Beef Products, Inc., which makes pink slime -- a detail Farnum did not mention. Gerstein also noticed an extended contingent from BPI:
Another lobbyist for the firm who was part of the group that visited the White House that day is former Rep. Stephanie Sandlin (D-S.D.), who lost her seat just six months earlier. A food safety advocate who lost a child to E. Coli contamination, Nancy Donley, was also part of the group. The BPI team met with Robin Schepper, a staffer working on First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" anti-obesity campaign.
It's a good catch, and shows that the real value in The Post's treatment of the logs isn't actually its reporting, but the tool it gives others to more easily report on their own.
