I wrote a column for CJR yesterday on the limits of traditional approaches to campaign reporting. Here’s the lede:

CNN’s Peter Hamby has written a must-read retrospective on coverage of the 2012 Romney campaign. His report, “Did Twitter Kill the Boys on the Bus? Searching for a better way to cover a campaign”, which weighs in at a hefty 95 pages, documents recent changes in the business models and journalistic practices of media outlets and how those have affected campaign coverage. Hamby, who interviewed with more than 70 journalists and campaign staff, places a particular emphasis on the youth and inexperience of many reporters who followed Romney, the lack of access to the candidate or senior staff that they were provided by the Romney campaign, and the effects of Twitter on how reporters covered the race and the relationship between the Romney campaign and its traveling press corps…

These sorts of trends are often cited in wistful laments for the good old days of journalism when candidates and journalists traveled the road together, but we should avoid nostalgia for the era when a few insiders from elite publications dominated how campaigns were covered.

Read the whole thing for more.