Gone are the days of Hunter S. Thompson tagging along on Nixon's press plane just for a goof while covering the election for Rolling Stone. Now, only the most affluent publications can afford to send their most reputable reporters into the sordid muck of the campaign trail, where expenses can run in the range of $10,000 per week per person. And even then, what you're paying for is the chance to rub elbows with top campaign aides that remain inaccessible from the regular press folks who don't have enough time to thumb-reply a BlackBerry response to other muckrakers. Well, there's also the flow of high-end booze.

But in the age of Twitters and newspaper profit decline, as Howard Kurtz points out, the only type of campaign coverage that might still be worth the cost is the outsider, Gonzo journalism of old:

Obama advisers have concluded that newspaper and magazine stories no longer have the same resonance but that a brief item by, say, Politico bloggers can spread like wildfire.

"Having a blog is a terrific bonus for me because I get to put out everything I know in a constant way," says Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times. But, she says, "being on the plane is very, very expensive and does not necessarily provide stuff you could not get elsewhere. When you have limited resources, it's a corner to cut."

So are partisan bloggers like Politico, Huffpost, and Newsbusters the new Gonzos? One can't help but think that Dr. Thompson would have rallied the effects of these information disseminators, if not their cause. It's almost Marxian in a way: the blogs, which have way less money that traditional publications, are being catered to by Obama's people in hopes of spreading exclusive information, while the old standbyes are still shelling out thousands upon thousands in hopes of finally catching up with Rick Davis on the Straight Talk Express plane when all they really want is a link from Matt Drudge.