IT’S WEIRD TO WATCH the ones who are watching. It’s an invisible feeling. With 3,000 journalists in town to cover the WTO conference, there isn’t much space to stand inside the Convention Center’s packed international press room, with its rows of tables covered with laptops, phones, fax machines, and piles of paper. Pairs of narrow shoes are piled on the floor beneath the work tables like discarded oyster shells.

Newshounds type madly, filing reports to their respective news services and organizations, most of which are owned by the same large, tentacular global corporations the newshounds are reporting on. Televisions throughout the room are tuned to local coverage of each day’s events, and at any given time, a gang of journalists can be seen standing wearily before the screens, giving occasional nods or smug smirks toward local anchors.

By Tuesday, November 30, the fleet of journalists already begin to look grubby with exhaustion; halo-hair and bedhead are common except among the Brits, who put others to shame with their inane, overcompensating professionalism. An Indian journalist wearing a beautiful salmon-colored sari smiles as she walks through the smoking lounge, another of the unruffled. In the press room, Japanese journalists work over laptops so small they look like toys. A gang from The New York Times stands around, griping.

“Do you want to go do the protesters?”

“No. Send Perlstein. He’s from California — he’s used to that shit!”

On Wednesday, December 1, a large French-speaking crowd has gathered in the center of the press room; cameras record an animated discussion between the spokesperson for the European Union, Willy Helin, and a Monsieur Lami, who represents French farmers against globalization. Lami, wearing a pea coat and knit cap, and Helin, in a pressed suit, debate about farmer’s rights versus the world market, while the French journalists listen, deeply absorbed, for almost 45 minutes. If this had been a discussion between Americans from opposing sides, I think to myself, it wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

The same question keeps popping up during interviews with delegates: “What do you think of the protests outside?” A Canadian reporter asks this of Helin. “We had fun coming up against those human chains,” he says, looking sincere and cold at once. Somewhat dismissively, he adds, “When I was a kid, I did that for my beliefs. We’ve all been kids.”

By Thursday, December 2, the journalists are looking slovenly, and moving slowly. Slumped into a chair in the press room, a Belgian journalist, Candace Ketterer, is being interviewed by a fellow Belgian with a mini-digital camera. “I’m really mad at the local media,” she says into the lens, smiling awkwardly. “They focus only on the vandals and gas — it’s absurd. There’s so much more going on. And it’s not impossible that this organization could give developing nations legitimacy and leverage. The media should be talking about altering policies, not focusing on getting rid of the WTO completely. Before the WTO, there was GATT. Do people want to regress to that?”

As the working day winds down on Thursday, a group of French people and Belgians wander from the Convention Center into the Sheraton’s dim, low-ceiling lounge. The tuxedoed piano player launches into an overly fluttery version of “Imagine.” At the bar, a sullen delegate sits alone, shaking his head to himself, as if in response to some terrible shame. Helin sits alone, too, a cigar burning between his third and fourth fingers as he stares off, probably not thinking of the farmer.

Two tired Belgians head into the Sheraton’s gift shop. A little paper weight on a shelf contains a miniature version of Seattle’s skyline wrought in clay. Shaking the object stirs up the water so a sprinkling of glitter swims like stars around the tiny clay city — a city in a dream, or about to wake from one. Now that the reporters and their judgments have gone, will we think of home as the same place it was before they came?