The Washington Press Corps is proud of Savannah Guthrie who is moving to New York, but sad that she will be leaving Washington.  Our hearts were lifted this morning with the news that Chuck Todd will continue to host “The Daily Rundown.”

Here is how our friends at TVNEWSER reported all the changes at NBC.

While I enjoy Michael’s like the next media maven, what’s so wrong with covering the leader of the free world 30 feet from his office and home? Grove’s complaint about Robert Gibbs tweeting reminds of when we began putting Ross Perot and President Bush and a former governor by the name of Bill Clinton on Larry King Live in 1992.  Our newsroom colleagues lamented the end of journalism, but social media didn’t just start on the Internet; interactivity has always been an important part of journalism.

Ask Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s communications director, how much his press shop likes responding to the five reporters who call with follows on each White House reporters’ tweet.  Take a quick look at the stories and interviews done by NBC’s Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie as well as ABC’s Jake Tapper; you want them to pull back and tweet from Café Milano?

Tell WHC Insider what you think after reading Lloyd Grove’s column.

Not according to Robert Gibbs’ morning gaggle with reporters today. Politico reports “Gibbs said there’s no ‘firm’ date … and dodged a question on the public option.”

Maddow to Bartend at MSNBC After-Party

Fox News set the bar for RTCA after-parties with its disco extravaganza in 2004, and this year, MSNBC will try to top it with Rachel Maddow, who will be mixing cocktails behind the bar. If that’s not enough, there will also be a chocolate fountain.

More than 400 guests are expected to cross the street from the Convention Center when the dinner ends to an MSNBC logo-swathed Washington Historical Society, at 801 K Street.

Maddow won’t be at the dinner; she’ll head to the party after doing her show; her “special cocktail” is being kept a tightly guarded secret. But an insider reveals the rest of the menu will include mini-milkshakes, ice cream bar, the chocolate fountain and breakfast, for those who stay to the bitter end. And a Starbucks Coffee Bar, in honor of the new “Morning Joe” sponsor. There won’t be a band, just a DJ.

MSNBC muscled in on the party after Fox News backed out. MSNBC was initially told Fox had locked up the Historical Society, the only party venue around in that part of town, and ”It was this space or nothing,” said an insider. No official word on why Fox may have changed its mind but someone in the know said it was due to the ever-changing dinner date, from April 2 to June 4 to June 19, a Friday-and Father’s Day weekend, no less. (Many on-air talent types at all the networks are begging off this year because of the timing.)

NBC is going all-out with dinner tables, too, purchasing 13, which will seat administration guests including Attorney General Eric Holder; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, senior advisers to President Obama; White House economic adviser Larry Summers; Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Congressional guests include Sen. Susan Collins, R.-Maine, and Rep. David Obey, D.-Wisc.

NBC’s lengthy list of on-air talent attending includes: Chris Matthews, Pete Williams, Andrea Mitchell, Chuck Todd, Tom Costello, Savannah Guthrie, Jim Miklaszewski, Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, John Harwood, David Schuster, Carlos Watson, Tamron Hall, Contessa Brewer, Monica Novotny, Alex Witt, Ed Schultz, Norah O’Donnell, Dylan Ratigan, Willie Geist, Kelly O’Donnell and Luke Russert, as well as a number of commentators and analysts (Lawrence O’Donnell, Ana Marie Cox, Michelle Bernard, Eugene Robinson and Richard Wolffe.)

Execs include NBC News President Steve Capus, MSNBC President Phil Griffin, SVP and Washington bureau chief Mark Whitaker, and Betsy Fischer, the longtime exec producer of “Meet the Press.”

“This is our year, this is our time. We’re the place for politics and we really wanted to make a big splash in D.C. at this dinner,” said spokesman Jeremy Gaines.

Jennifer Loven with President George Bush at the 2008 WHCD.

The White House Correspondents Association “represents the White House press corps in its dealings with the administration on coverage-related issues,” the WHCA Web site says. Spearheading that duty is the WHCA president — currently Jennifer Loven, who covers 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. for the Associated Press.

What does the duty involve? “As president of the association, you’re the go-to person between the White House and the reporters,” past-president Steve Scully of C-Span tells WHCInsider. (Loven declined to talk.)

“You mediate on issues like travel, or seating, on just about everything,” Scully continues. “And you really have to ride herd on the White House to get answers on anything that might come up.”

If anyone can get answers, it’s likely Loven. As NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd recently told WHCInsider, “Jennifer Loven decides when the briefings begin and end. [White House press secretary] Robert Gibbs knows. When it appears the pertinent questions of the day have been asked and everybody has gotten a shot, she closes it down.”

In Hollywood parlance, Loven has juice.

“She is not just president of the association,” Todd said, “she is also chief AP reporter. She and her AP colleagues are probably the most influential reporters out there. She can probably change the mind of a New York Times editor faster than their own reporter.”

Still, there are pressures to handle, such as the first time a POTUS attends a White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“This is a critical year, because there’s a brand new president, you assume that he will come in the spirit of the evening and give great uplifting remarks,” former WHCA president Ann Compton tells WHCInsider. “The hardest thing that Jennifer had to do was hire entertainment for the evening, and despite the recession, the tables are absolutely sold out. In fact, somebody asked me if I could get tickets and I said ‘Maybe in Rockville.’”

As it is in most news organizations, the White House beat is “a very high-prestige post within the AP,” a former longtime AP staffer tells WHCInsider. “Very often the White House correspondent stays administration after administration while the new kids who rode the victor’s campaign bus get added to the White House staff as a reward and to take advantage of their contacts.”

NBC WH Correspondent Chuck Todd

Elections usher in more than a new White House resident. It’s a time when the networks tap their new White House correspondent. For NBC, the highly regarded political analyst and editor Chuck Todd now occupies the NBC seat in the White House Briefing Room. While less than a mile away from his old perch at the Watergate as editor in chief of the Hotline, a back room backbencher of much political importance.   WHCInsider talked with Todd about his much more public role.  (He received an expensive old-fashioned shaving kit from a viewer when he won the NBC White House chair).   Todd won’t comment on rumors he will be getting his own interview show on MSNBC, but he proudly shares anecdotes of 5-year-old Margaret and 2-year-old Harrison.

Chuck Todd

Q. What surprised you most about being a White House Correspondent?

A. The lack of physical access inside the White House.  The high irony is we connect the two buildings, the White House to the West Wing.  The folks in the white house get to decide where you sit, where you go. It is not new to this White House, it’s a every modern White House that’s controlling.

Q. Compare Obama campaign access vs. The White House?
A. The White House is more open and transparent than the campaign but only because you cannot run the White House in a tight circle of just five people.

Q. How about your transition into this reporter role?
A.  I had a lot of real frustration.  I don’t think Ana Maria Cox got it right about getting rid of the White House Correspondents.  We still have a real value, but you have a lot of the good reporting outside the White House.  It is easier to report from outside the White House.

Q. How do the daily press briefings work?
A. Jennifer Loven, President of the White House Correspondents Association, decides when the briefings begin and end.  Robert Gibbs knows.  When it appears the pertinent questions of the day have been asked and everybody has gotten a shot she closes it down.

Q. Tell us about Jennifer Loven,  who is now such a public figure especially to cable and internet viewers of the daily briefings.
A. She is not just president of the association; she is also chief AP reporter.   She and her AP colleagues are probably the most influential reporters out there.  She can probably change the mind of a New York Times editor faster than their own reporter.

Q. What did you think about radio host (now MSNBC show anchor) Ed Schultz sitting in the front room at both press conferences?
A. They can invite whoever they want he has been in the front row twice [now three times], but he has not been asked to ask a question.

Q. What about Sam Stein and other bloggers?
A. The reporters that are over here all the time and devote all the resources. We have earned the right; we have invested the time and resources. For the big 6-7 of us if we miss something it is our jobs! We have to get the story.

Q. Why is Helen Thomas in the center front seat?
A. It has her name on the plaque on the chair.  The WHCA decided it.

Q. How much pressure is there on you when you get a scoop or news nugget?  How do you decide where to take it? Do you run to get on cable or the web?
A. I still write up a note to alert everyone so it’s writing first.

Q. Robert Gibbs clothing  –what is your take?
A. Clearly someone has told him he looks good in pastels. He looks like he is wearing all the Easter M and M colors.

April 21 — Press secretary Robert Gibbs faced persistent questioning from the White House press corps, which focused primarily on whether President Obama is now open to possibly holding former Bush administration officials — including the former president — accountable for CIA interrogation methods of suspected terrorists.

In response to reporters after his meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah earlier in the day, Obama said, “If and when there needs to be a further accounting of what took place during this period, I think for Congress to examine ways that it can be done in a bipartisan fashion, outside of the typical hearing process that can sometimes break down and break it entirely along party lines, to the extent that there are independent participants who are above reproach and have credibility, that would probably be a more sensible approach to take.”

Later, at the daily briefing, White House correspondents — mainly Chip Reid of CBS, Chuck Todd of NBC and Jake Tapper of ABC — pressed Gibbs on whether this signaled “a change of policy” by Obama, who had previously said CIA officers should not be held accountable for what they did.

Gibbs said, no, it was not a change of policy — Obama still believes CIA personnel should not be held accountable. Rather, the president was allowing for the possibility that laws may have been broken in deeming the interrogation methods legal. In other words, Bush administration lawyers who wrote the opinions that became the legal basis for the methods might be on the hook.

Todd and others asked if Obama might be making “an exception” for CIA officers. Gibbs again said no, that people acting “in good faith” of what they were told was legal and people potentially declaring illegal acts legal are different matters.

The second most-popular subject was the substance of Obama’s meeting with Abdullah and to what extent the administration is committed to a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

While the pace of the briefing held steady and the questions kept coming, both Gibbs and many reporters shared momentary laughs at times. But when Gibbs left the podium, the question was still hanging: Exactly what did the president mean about who should be held accountable and who should investigate?

That’s what the New York Observer is reporting on its Web site, citing “multiple network sources.” Todd, once a contender to succeed the late Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” will start hosting a new show the cable channel will debut later this spring. The idea is to give Todd “more experience as a political moderator,” according to the story.