In deadline-ravaged Vatican press room, crowding tests Conclave reporters’ endurance

  VATICAN CITY – With 5000 journalists from around the world covering the Conclave in the Eternal City to elect a new pope and his subsequent inauguration, desk space in the Vatican Press room adjacent to St Peter’s Square is at a premium while even the individual ‘box’ cubby hole offices rented by international and Italian news agencies are packed with shirt-sleeved veteran reporters, some of them old warhorses drafted back from retirement to edit dispatches on the smoke reports on the complex voting by cardinals ensconsed in the Sistine Chapel.

 Early birds who make it to the press room on the Via della Conciliazione can set up their laptops on a large central table and another one in an adjoining room and follow the smoke signals from the Sistine Chapel on large television screens while waiting for periodic briefings by the efficient, cheerful chief Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni, who is effectively bilingual in English and Italian. The slots at the table soon fill up with journalists forming alliances with neighbours from their countries, jabbering in a babble of languages as they consider whether the smoke will emerge in time for them to break for dinner washed down with wine at a nearby trattoria where the fare will surely be better than the simple food served the cardinals at the Santa Marta guest house.

 By lunchtime the leather seats in the adjoining press conference hall also are filled with scribes ravaged by deadlines working on pull down tables. Many of them have been occupied by TV journalists who leave tripods and other equipment on the chairs to stake a claim to the precious space.

 As part of the recently refurbished press complex, the Holy See press office accreditation department is manned by a team of staff who patiently and politely process hundreds of applications for temporary access to the facilities, Many newcomers are syphoned off to a secondary press room down the street at the Via dell Ospedale but still it can be a struggle to find space to work in the main press office, occasionally stressing tempers of the hacks.

 “I’ve never spent so much time in the same bathroom,” mused a reporter in the low-ceilinged press office rest room where the antiquated plumbing of the Vatican palazzo is put to the test. A coffee machine nearby is in constant use as reporters buy espressos for as little as 35 euro cents, the cheapest fix of high-quality caffeine in Rome.

 Inside one news agency cubby hole, veteran Vatican reporter Philip Pullella, with whom I worked years ago at United Press International under the legendary UPI bureau chief Jack Payton, has broken off from recent retirement to deploy his expertise and vast array of Vatican contacts.

 With the identity of the next pope initally impossible to call and the conclave conducted in absolute secrecy, journalists resorted increasingly to interviewing respected older colleagues such as Gerry O’Connell, the correspondent of America magazine who knows many cardinals personally and wrote a dazzling close-up book about the election of Bergoglio as Pope Francis in 2013.

 The strain has taken its toll. An Italian television journalist was rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack last month though fortunately it turned out to be a false alarm. Sources close to CNN said that the British Vatican correspondent Christopher Lamb's heart and lungs had held up suprisingly well considering that he only recently made the transition from print scribe to multiple live reports beamed to millions around the world.

 Such resilience was ascribed by media observers to Lamb adopting 'Fleet Street techniques,' or resorting to the occasional 'snifter' of strong liquor to help inspire his dispatches.

 After covering the last days of Pope Francis, his death on Easter Sunday, his funeral and the diplomatic meetings on its sidelines, and then the conclave with its surprise election of an American pope, the war-torn Vatican press corps may be somewhat frayed at the edges but its pack of dedicated reporters are very much in the news business.