At this stage of Obama's presidency, his White House spokesmen had devoted 20 hours and 22 minutes to exchanges with journalists in 32 total gatherings. Trump's representatives have been available 26 times, for 16 hours and 20 minutes.

The media availability totals — calculated in a Fix review of White House records, C-SPAN video archives and a database maintained by the American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara — include formal briefings and informal gaggles, which tend to be shorter and are not always filmed.

The total for Trump's White House includes a 40-minute gaggle Feb. 24, from which certain outlets, such as the New York Times, CNN and Politico, were excluded. It does not include a five-minute appearance by Spicer on the day after Inauguration Day, when he made false claims about crowd size and did not take questions.

Among the four most recent administrations, Trump's has held the fewest formal White House briefings, although 10 gaggles have helped produce a higher number of total appearances by spokesmen than under President George W. Bush.

The off-camera gaggle has been the Trump White House's preferred mode of communication lately. Spicer and deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have held five since Feb. 27, the last time Spicer stood at a lectern with cameras rolling. (He is scheduled to do so Tuesday at 1:30 p.m.)

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News outlets have certainly noticed. Politico on Monday dubbed the White House press secretary “the disappearing Sean Spicer.”

Going off camera is neither surprising nor inherently problematic. Spicer foreshadowed this approach in an interview on Fox News about a month before Trump's inauguration, when he said, “I believe that we'll have daily briefings” but added that “maybe not everything is on camera.” And White House Correspondents' Association President Jeff Mason said on CNN last month that “we don't object to there being briefings like that that aren't always on camera.”

Although the correspondents association has urged Spicer to allow filming more often, it appears open to the Trump White House's desire to do things differently. Remember, too, that in his final briefing in January, Obama press secretary Josh Earnest encouraged journalists “to not just raise objections because proposed changes depart from the way we've been doing things for a long time.”

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“The fact that we've been doing something the same way for a long time is not, in and of itself, a good reason to keep doing things the same way,” Earnest added.

Fair enough. The most important thing is that White House spokesmen consistently make themselves available to answer questions. That is the standard the Trump administration has set for itself.

“Our job is to make sure that we're responsive to folks in the media,” Spicer said last month. “We want to make sure we answer your questions, but we don't need to do everything on camera every day.”