The Washington City Paper broke big news yesterday: The Washington Post is getting a game room. Situated in a converted smoking lounge next to the paper’s cafeteria, the room will feature a Wii—donated by newly-minted WaPo publisher (and Graham family scion) Katharine Weymouth—as well as air hockey, foosball, and other Watergate-era Rec Room Favorites.
In an email exchange yesterday afternoon with WCP editor Eric Wemple, Weymouth revealed that 1) it was the publisher herself who commissioned the room (“I thought – why not – we can have some fun too”), and 2) she uses emoticons in her e-mail exchanges. The winky ones. (Which makes another Weymouth e-mail comment—“soon enuf my honeymoon period will end and I will become known as the battle axe or something”—seem implausible. No battle axe I know of, after all, ends her sentences with emoti-winks.)
The exchange, however, leaves one burning question: who will emerge as the Post’s Guitar Hero rockstar? My money’s on Milbank. We welcome your thoughts…
;)
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.