8:33; Kerry; Aww… [View All]

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by Joe Hagan, THE NEW YORK OBSERVER
http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage5.asp

"You definitely have this sense of ‘the group,’" said Kelly Wallace of CNN, who has been with Sen. Kerry since Jan. 11. "They’re the people who have been with him for five months or longer … the group who have been with him very step of the way."

And the Kerry pack has a sense of owning the story. Becky Diamond, a correspondent for MSNBC and NBC, said she felt she knew Mr. Kerry better than almost anyone after spending all last fall with him. "I feel liked I’ve logged the hours," she said. "You have a lot more freedom when you’re not covering the front-runner. You have time. And that’s wonderful. The downside is the network doesn’t have the appetite for your story. Not as much of your stuff gets on air. I don’t have the kind of access to Kerry that I used to have. Now, there are 50 journalists instead of five."

She said that she and Ed O’Keefe of ABC News "used to drive around in a van" with Sen. Kerry. "That doesn’t exist anymore." "It was so quick," said another Kerry-packer. "It was an explosion of people …. Everyone wants a piece of this guy. We used to hang out all the time." "It’s gotten three to four times bigger," said Pat Healy, the Globe reporter, with Sen. Kerry since September. "People on the Dean bus are joking about trying to get on the Kerry bus," said Ms. Wallace.

On Monday, Jan. 26, the Kerry caravan traveled from Portsmouth and back to Manchester. A pool of six reporters and photographers traveled with Mr. Kerry by helicopter to two photo ops, while a dozen reporters followed in the Real Deal bus, driving 15 hours through bleak, frozen landscapes that melted away before they could be remembered, stopping in hot, dry, mobbed high-school gymnasiums where they found makeshift desks, plugged-in laptops, assaulted deadlines.