The New York Times today revealed it was one of several news outlets invited to an off-the-record lunch at the White House with President Obama today, but declined.

Jeremy W. Peters, on the paper's Media Decoder blog, revealed the invitation, then went on to recite claims that Obama has met less with the press than Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, and the same as George W. Bush to this point in their first terms.

“As part of what is apparently an effort to soothe some of those concerns, Mr. Obama invited a group of about a dozen White House reporters to have lunch with him on Thursday,” Peters writes. “There was one catch: they couldn't write about it because the lunch was supposed to be off the record. (The New York Times declined the White House invitation.)”

Michael Calderone at Yahoo is already noting that speculation has begun about who attended the lunch and what, if anything, may come of it:

White House reporters are keeping quiet about an off-the-record lunch today with President Obama--even those at news organizations who've advocated in the past for the White House to release the names of visitors.

But the identities of the lunch's attendees won't remain secret forever: Their names will eventually appear on the White House's periodically updated public database of visitor logs. The White House posts them with a three-month lag, so records of August visits won't be available until late November. (Although since many of those invited already work in the White House every day, their lunch visit may not register.)