For Chuck Todd, getting calls from Rahm Emanuel is a staple of covering the White House. But they dwell as much on what the NBC correspondent knows as what he can get the president's top aide to divulge. For New York Times columnist David Brooks, it's an Emanuel invitation for a White House chat at which President Obama happens to drop by. For Washington Post reporter Michael Shear, it's three calls to his car in a matter of minutes as he shushes his kids on the way to a Virginia restaurant. 'A conversation with Rahm can be as little as 30 seconds,' says CNN commentator Paul Begala, who worked with Emanuel in the Clinton White House. 'He calls, drops a few F-bombs, makes his point and hangs up.' Perhaps no White House chief of staff in modern history has worked the media as aggressively and relentlessly as Emanuel. Drawing on his long-standing relationships with journalists, Emanuel serves up on-the-record quotes, background spin and the sort of capital gossip that lubricates relationships. The former Chicago congressman also seeks their take on events and floats possible administration tactics. And Emanuel is brusquely efficient. 'It's a no-nonsense relationship,' Todd says. 'He's always trying to extract as much information as he's trying to give.' 'He thinks like a journalist,' says Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, who marvels at his colleague making multiple calls and wolfing down lunch at the same time. As chief of staff to the elder President Bush, James Baker was also masterful at working his media contacts, but usually from behind a curtain of anonymity. Many other predecessors, such as Andy Card, Mack McLarty and John Sununu, were less accessible to journalists. Emanuel is regularly quoted in major newspapers, even in routine stories in which he is simply another administration voice. On Friday, The Post used Emanuel's remarks on the slow progress of health care reform in the 11th and 12th paragraphs of a news report; on June 7, he was quoted on the same subject in the eighth and ninth paragraphs of a Times story. The allure is obvious: He is a colorful character who lends spice to most stories. Emanuel's wife and three children are in the process of moving from Chicago, which might curtail his round-the-clock offensive, at least slightly. Along with Axelrod, a onetime Chicago Tribune reporter, Emanuel has become a more prominent voice in print stories than press secretary Robert Gibbs, who focuses much of his energy on the daily briefing and whose on-the-record comments tend to be cautious. White House officials see Emanuel as an independent media center but are careful to coordinate strategy with him. None of this would be remarkable, except that Emanuel serves as the fulcrum of a frenetic West Wing, controlling access to the president, helping to shape the daily message and constantly lobbying his former colleagues on the Hill. Yet he somehow finds time to stay in constant touch with a sizable group of journalists, both on the phone and through a series of off-the-record restaurant dinners. Emanuel has also hosted off-the-record gatherings of columnists and Sunday show hosts in his White House office, or on his outdoor portico. Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman says Emanuel 'enjoys jousting with the press and the idea that he understands our tribal rituals. There's no more political being in Washington than Rahm, so you can get a quicker read on a situation just by checking his barometric pressure. Are you going to get the inside story of what's going on behind closed doors? Absolutely not. But you don't go to Rahm for that.' Emanuel would comment only with an e-mail, and a rather dull one at that: 'I've always believed it is important to be in close communication with journalists.' He called Washington reporters 'professionals who take very seriously their responsibility to act as a go-between for the American people and their government.' He honed his media-management skills as a top adviser in the last Democratic White House. Emanuel would play off the competitive instincts of reporters, once leaking a story about AIDS policy to The Post to penalize the Times for dragging its feet on the story, another time calling network officials to knock down a critical Boston Globe report. No speech or initiative was too small for him to give it to a news outlet in advance in exchange for better play. Emanuel came to view journalists as a constituency group, like members of Congress, that had to be stroked. He called Tim Russert every week, either to complain about NBC's coverage of Bill Clinton or suggest topics for 'Meet the Press.' Conservative critics also got the Rahm treatment. After Michael Kelly, then the New Republic's editor, called Clinton a 'shocking liar,' Emanuel took him to lunch. Emanuel called Times columnist William Safire 'Uncle Bill' and had him over for dinner, despite his having called Hillary Clinton a 'congenital liar.' Against this backdrop, Emanuel's courtship of Brooks, a conservative who has at times been sympathetic to Obama, is hardly surprising. In March, after Brooks wrote that Obama had turned out to be another big-spending liberal, he found himself talking to Emanuel, two other top officials and the president, which produced a follow-up column crediting the White House with making a 'sophisticated and fact-based' case. Brooks says he had a half-dozen dinners with Emanuel during his congressional days and now considers him a policy maven as well as political tactician. 'He's comfortable with journalists,' Brooks says. 'He provides real information without giving too much away. With some people you just get the spin; he does go beyond that.' In 2006, as Emanuel was helping Democrats win back the House, he gave the Chicago Tribune exclusive access to his expletive-filled strategy sessions and private fundraisers. Of his hardball tactics, Emanuel said: 'I wake up some mornings hating me, too.' These days he talks most frequently to former Clinton colleagues, such as George Stephanopoulos, now ABC's chief Washington correspondent, and the reporters who covered him in Congress. 'Maybe he's trying to push me one way or another,' Begala says. 'It's not really in his job description to work the press, but he's never going to stop.' 