President Barack Obama delivers a speech at MIT on Oct. 23.  (Photos by Lisa Aciukewicz)

President Obama shakes hands with people in the front row.

Photographers storm the stage as the president meets and greets.

According to Washington legend, the first presidential press conference was held when journalist Anne Royal found President John Quincy Adams bathing in the Potomac. Royal sat on Adams’ clothes until he agreed to answer her questions. Press coverage of the President has changed, as Harvard Press photography editor Lisa Aciukewicz and I learned when we had an opportunity to hear President Obama’s speech on energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Oct. 23.

The speech, in which the president repeated his call to arms for a clean energy revolution, saying “The nation that wins this competition [developing clean energy] will be the nation that leads the global economy,” was well-covered in the national press. Here’s a view from the press box.

Like Royal, we were out early, but didn’t catch the president on the Charles. He was still in D.C. We did catch the distinction between national and local media when we went to check in. CNN, ABC, the Associated Press, and other national news organizations were directed to a large gymnasium. We were sent to a table in the gym’s lobby, then directed to MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, where press instructions had indicated Lisa should leave her camera for a security check by 8 a.m. for the noon event.

Kresge Auditorium was well-chosen for the event, both because of its attractive design and its security benefits. Access to the auditorium was controlled through limited entry points in buildings and paths around the expanse, and security personnel could easily see anyone who approached the auditorium.

Clearly, security was the watchword of the day. MIT police, Cambridge police, White House Secret Service personnel, and others were on hand, limiting access to Kresge and its surrounding buildings.

At 7:30 a.m. we went to Kresge, where Lisa was told to leave her camera on the ground in a section reserved for local press. They had removed the chairs in several rows where photographers and videographers would work and this area would be “swept” before the president arrived. I learned that asking a photographer to leave her camera behind was almost like asking a runner to leave a leg. With Lisa psychically limping, we left Kresge to begin the most frequent task of the day: waiting.

This didn’t seem too bad as we warmed up with coffee and tea in the expansive lobby of an academic building and speculated about who else was there for the event, alternately pinching ourselves that we were among them. At 9 a.m. we returned to the lobby for press passes—another location, another wait. By 10 a.m., we had our orange tags pinned to our jackets and headed across the lawn back to Kresge. By now the security had dramatically tightened. Although instructions said auditorium access would be available at 10 a.m., they hadn’t specified to whom. Along with a large group of other photographers and writers, we were corralled to the side, where we watched well-dressed guests line up down a far path to another entrance in the distance, staffers bustle about, and student guests take snapshots. Conversation on the sidelines told us that most of us were representing low circulation or non-daily media. I sensed that most media members were happy to shiver in the cool air for the chance to be there.

When we finally were allowed to enter, a Boston Globe photographer set his equipment aside as requested “for security to sweep.” The sweep took only seconds. The sweeper, it turned out, was a leashed German shepherd that sniffed with efficiency for explosives.

Inside, as outside, the Secret Service and the White House event staff were easy to spot. The Secret Service men were distinctly nondescript. They had short hair, good but undistinguished suits, and a general lack of anything that called attention to themselves, although not always successfully. They also sported identical, small lapel buttons (which, we learned, changed daily), almost transparent earpiece cords that ran from ear to collar, and an obvious level of alertness. While guests and media turned their attention to happenings near the stage, Secret Service men watched the watchers.

The young White House staffers, who wore variations of black and white with their own small identification buttons, had clearly defined posts and tasks that they executed with a friendly but firm efficiency. The staff member who was in charge and seemed to be everywhere was a small young woman with a clipboard and earpiece. She appeared to be on top of every detail, yet had time to be polite to guests and staff members alike.

The room was abuzz before the event began. When Lisa struck up a conversation with a young woman standing nearby, she learned that the woman was a junior at Harvard University shooting photos for the Harvard Crimson. Her other neighbor was a New Bedford native, who was shooting for the Cape Verdean News. This seasoned photographer and father of five adult children had the same reaction as Lisa did: “How did we ever luck out and get to cover this national news event?” Suddenly the fact that we had been standing for more than two hours crammed in with gear and trying to shoot over the heads in the next row of photographers didn’t matter. We had made it in, and the show was about to begin.

Then came the game of “Guess who?” Do you know that anchor from NECN? How about that one for Fox? She’s definitely from WBZ TV. And hey, look, isn’t that Martha Coakley being interviewed by NECN? One after another the pols arrived: Coakley, Mike Capuano, Deval Patrick, and John Kerry, to name a few.

When President Obama arrived, Lisa was torn between clapping and taking photos. The sound of the shutters slapping around us brought her back to the task at hand. But several times during the speech she did put the camera down and just tried to absorb the moment.

In a very short 20 minutes it was over, and the president was whisked away by his Secret Service men to get to his next engagement, but not before he made a clean sweep across the entire front row of the auditorium, shaking hands and posing for photos.