Susan Delacourt wonders if the rear cabins of campaign planes this fall might be empty.
Our industry, as some might have noticed, is in a bit of a “transition” period. Elections are expensive. And the most expensive item is the leader’s tour. It costs, conservatively, approximately $15,000 a week for one reporter’s seat on one leader’s campaign plane. Multiply that by five weeks and four reporters — that’s $300,000, minimum… In the past, the media managers would have sucked up the cost of the leaders’ tours as the price of doing the journalism business. But the business is changing (read: has no money), so it would be unwise of any politico, planning a leader’s tour, to count on all those journalists’ seats being filled on the plane. (We’ve been suspecting, by the way, that we’re subsidizing those tours.)