The Persons On the Bus : The reporters, equipment and their journalistic standards have all changed since the 1972 campaign bus.

When Rolling Stone magazine assigned the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson to cover the 1972 presidential campaign, the editors prudently hired a young Harvard graduate named Timothy Crouse to keep Thompson on track. Crouse did more than make sure that the magazine’s bar bills were paid and that its correspondent--the model for the macho “Duke” character in the comic strip, “Doonesbury”--stayed out of jail. Crouse eventually wrote “The Boys on the Bus,” an insightful study of the national press corps assigned to cover the George McGovern-Richard Nixon race.

On the eve of the 1996 campaign, “The Boys on the Bus” serves as a useful baseline to measure both the performance of the campaign press and the shifting nature of political journalism.

The 1972 press corps was almost wholly white, male, and dumb (technologically speaking). Reporters carried manual typewriters and dictated their stories from telephone banks to home offices in 200- to 500-word takes. Once aboard the candidate’s bus or plane, they were out of communication with their editors. When they composed their articles or television segments, they visualized their audience--voters very much like themselves.

By the time of the presidential campaigns of the 1990s, the press corps had become, indisputably, the boys and girls on the bus. Royal manuals gave way to laptop computers; complete stories were sent via modem directly to editors’ computer screens. With everyone routinely equipped with cellular phones, reporters at any given time were never more than a beep away from the home officials’ beck and call. They were also much more attuned to the interests of readers and viewers, or more accurately, to an audience perceived to be largely apolitical and apathetic.

These changes in the composition of the press corps and in the sophistication of their equipment could not help but affect the content of the news being transmitted. The frat-house campaign bus was a metaphor for the old, insulated, get-along-to-go-along world of political journalism. The modern bus, inclusive, wimpy, instantly and interactively online, travels to new terrain.

Eight women reporters were mentioned in Crouse’s book, usually in a favorable context. “It was no coincidence,” Crouse wrote, “that some of the toughest pieces on the 1972 Nixon campaign came from Sarah McClendon, Helen Thomas of UPI, Cassie Mackin of NBC, Marilyn Berger of the Washington Post and Mary McGrory (of the now-departed Washington Star). They had always been outsiders. Having never been allowed to join in the cozy, clubby world of men, they had developed an uncompromising detachment and a bold independence of thought which often put the men to shame.”

In the 1990s, our interviews and our preliminary bus head-counts suggest that women will make up at least one-fourth of the 100-plus working press corps members who will regularly accompany Bill Clinton and his Republican challenger. Today, too, Crouse’s old gang has become a collection of sensitive, ‘90s kind of guys. In 1992, for example, there was little gonzo-style bar hopping and less cozy dealings with campaign staff. An air of purpose filled the busses, trains, planes and computer-filing centers. It was as if all the reporters had taken a pledge of no-sex-please-we’re-too-serious.

“Everyone is more sober and better educated,” says Helen Thomas, who has covered eight presidential campaigns since 1964. In the 1990s, “Duke” Thompson would find himself a hard-drinking minority of one. In place of the sodden, bleary-eyed night prowlers, the pack had changed: Boyz 2 Men. New York Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson observed not merely nerds in love with their lap tops, but thoughtful “new men” who used their cellular phones to call home and say good night to their wives and children.

Even as women began boarding the bus in large numbers, the old boys’ press corps was breaking up into smaller cliqueish groups. The traveling contingent assigned to a challenger differs from the White House press corps, which is, typically, buttoned-down, self-important, full of itself.

Radio people tend to hang together, both men and women. Print reporters go out to dinner together, regardless of gender. Television correspondents, because of the demands for visuals, stick close to their camera crews. Fortysomething male reporters, married and with children, may have more in common with married female reporters who are their contemporaries than with younger, single men.

If 1992 is any guide, the integrated, computer-geek class of 1996 will produce qualitatively different coverage. Now that just about everyone’s computer is equipped with modems linked to vast data bases, we news consumers expect more rounded, fact-filled pieces. A downside of downloading, of course, is that the correspondents of the 1990s will turn into chipheads, spending more time at their keyboards and seeing less of the campaign outside. They will be virtual reporters instead of real reporters, describing electronic transmissions rather than actually witnessing flesh-and-blood events.

Other changes in coverage may be more subtle. One woman reporter told us that if women had been assigned to the Kennedy White House, “there never would have been a Judith Exner.” This reporter’s attitude was, girls won’t let “boys be boys.”

She may be on to something. During the 1992 campaign, the New York Post teased out a large headline over a slim item alleging an affair between George Bush and a former member of his staff. About the time the story appeared, Bush coincidentally held a news conference for the White House press pool in Kennebunkport, Maine, to triumph some now-forgotten Middle East initiative. The Post story offended several male reporters, who muttered that they would not ask any questions about it. But Mary Tillotson of CNN did ask, and Bush denied it, while traditionalists among the press corps rolled their eyeballs skyward. Tillotson defended the propriety of her question, “I’m a reporter assigned to cover the President and I did what I thought was my job,” she said.

If Tillotson had not asked the question, it turns out, two other reporters would have. Both of them were women.