Media Orchard did the full cereal-milk-out-the-nostrils thing this morning when we saw this picture posted by FishbowlNY.

No, it’s not a hostage situation. It’s of New York journalists sleeping on a grungy conference-room floor at 5 a.m. as they wait through all-night negotiations between the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the transit workers’ union.

I was reminded of my “night cops” days — the late police beat — with newspapers in Lynchburg, Va. and Dallas. The Dallas Police Department confined cop-beat reporters to a little room (smaller and grosser than this conference room), where they had nothing to do but listen to scanners and wait for stories to break. On slow nights, it was highly sleep-inducing.

In fact, reporters from both the Dallas Times Herald and The Dallas Morning News were known to curl up in a blanket or sleeping bag from time to time — with the scanner by one ear and the phone by the other.

(Via Gawker)

Technorati tags: Journalism, MTA, New York, Transit Strike