Normally there is not much “news” coming from Dover, but it’s NASCAR week there, so the entire town is teeming with the national press corps.
Hmmmm. I wonder if the perp also rode along with the crowd.
The thing about something like a NASCAR race is hat it follows a schedule. All those reporters aren't on-call 24/7. At 1 am, I was probably wrong when I said they were home in bed -- they were out on the town racking up expense reoirts that they'd figure out how to justify later.
A planned, scheduled event is to the news business what a big convention is to any other business. You go to spend 6 or 7 hours on the clock, which leaves 17 or 18 of unscheduled time. You might want to sleep for a few of those. Otherwise, it's an extended meet-and-greet.
I knew folks who were in the press corps in Kuwait in 2003. You couldn't bring liquor into Kuwait legally. So every camera crew had a bottle of "Windex" -- needed to clean the lenses, so it could breeze through customs with nary a question -- that was, in fact, grain alcohol with blue food coloring. When news got slow, the newsies wold pool their resources in one hotel suite and bust out the blue shooters.