The reporting of elections has been transformed not only by shifts in media, technology and journalism, but because the way elections are conducted - the substance of what journalists have to report on – has also changed. Greater media focus and faster news cycles presented both demands and opportunities for politicians in the 2000s. Describing his experiences in the UK, Tony Blair (2007) related:

A similar process occurred in Australia.

This chapter looks at how politicians campaigned and provided the raw material of election news. Politicians and their advisers went to great lengths to influence election news through campaign organisation and political PR techniques in the 2000s. These techniques might have been aimed at short-term objectives (setting the day's news agenda or winning a six-week campaign), but they also had much broader effects on political reporting and the nature of Australian democracy. To consider these effects, we need to look beyond the last decade to see how campaigning evolved in Australia from the early days of Federation to an era of electronic and then digital media.

Election campaigns: from Federation to the 1990s

Travel and public meetings

Face-to-face interaction with voters was crucial to early campaigning and this was obviously much easier when electorates were small.