As a journalism student at Marquette University and intern for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, I know what it means to be constantly trying to get a new story.  Some days I have had to leave straight from class to an event that I needed to cover.  There is a huge pressure to keep up with my work and get stories out quickly.  However, compared to campaign journalists, I do very little work.  After all, I only work for a small online news outlet and only produce a maximum of two stories a week.

In 1972, this high-speed world of political campaign journalism was captured by the book “Boys on the Bus.”  This book told the tales of journalists traveling together to cover political campaigns and get out the news story.

Today, instead of having many well-paid journalists for a campaign, news outlets are looking towards young, up-and-coming journalists to do the dirty work. 

With the Internet and the changing face of the media, young journalists such as NBC embed reporters literally cover political campaigns seven days a week almost 24 hours a day. Each embed is selected from a highly competitive pool of journalists to follow one candidate everywhere he goes. 

To some journalists this would appear to be the opportunity of a lifetime, but to me it sounds completely crazy.  The embed reporters have to carry around all sorts of equipment everywhere they go, getting little sleep and no time to sit at a table and eat much less see their families.  To top it all off, they work “at a fraction of the salary” that campaign reporters during the 1970s would make.

It is an amazing opportunity and I take my hat off to all journalists that participate in the program but for me, there is no price you could pay me where I would exchange my life, my family, and my freedoms for months just for a good opportunity.



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    I am a journalism and writing intensive English major in the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University. 

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