Inside the Bubble: 9 Secrets from the 2012 Race (CNN)

[CPUd]

Based on interviews with reporters who traveled with both campaigns.

tl;dr:

- The reporters were mostly young folks, unknown in their field.
- The Mitt campaign was consistently hostile to the reporters, and billed them up to $10,000 per week for meals, travel and board.
- Twitter.

The article is rough on the Mitt campaign, but the photo gallery is almost exclusively stock photos of the Obama campaign on election night.

The best part of the article is that it confirms what most here already knew - the campaigns didn't distribute (or get) their info via the traditional sources, but from political sites:

7. "A link is a link, dude"

Ben LaBolt, Obama's national press secretary, said that during the 2008 campaign, his press shop could safely assume that the producers of the network television morning shows would read, or at least scan, the front page of The New York Times before going to air each day.

That was no longer the case in 2012.

The campaign correctly figured out that the political class -- reporters, producers, pundits, strategists -- was gathering information from an ever-expanding, complex patchwork of news and opinion sources beyond the dead-tree front pages of the legacy newspapers. Twitter became the clearinghouse for that news.

"That's one of the reasons why any time we got a story placed, either a proactive push on the president or a contrast on Romney, we'd create a digital package to push out with that story to make sure that people actually saw it, because we couldn't assume that getting it in the paper was enough to get it on TV nationally, and certainly not regionally," Labolt said.

In terms of reaching reporters and other people of influence, print newspapers and television news were mostly irrelevant. The content that mattered most to the press operatives working inside the campaigns was the digital product—the stories seen by political insiders who woke up in the morning and immediately starting scanning the headlines on e-mail and Twitter using their BlackBerrys or iPhones.

"A link is a link," said Matt Rhoades, Romney's campaign manager. "I've said this a million times. I used to say it going back to, like, 2004. A link is a link, dude."

It might be a link to The New York Times or Politico or RedState or ThinkProgress—an online story, no matter how biased or thinly reported, had a URL that could be peddled to other news outlets, linked to the Drudge Report and, most importantly, pumped directly into the Twitter feeding frenzy where the conventional wisdom was formed.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/03/politics/hamby-twitter-politics/index.html