The Huffington Post says Romney's campaign tried to exclude the website Buzzfeed from the groups included in the pool. News organizations that form the pool pushed back, saying the campaign does not get to decide which reporters are included.
Last week, the Romney campaign asked reporters who travel regularly to assemble a pool, according to reporters. There are five national print organizations that regularly travel with the campaign -- The New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal -- so they'd clearly be in the pool. Reporters then also decided to extend an invitation to a few other news organizations who also travel with the campaign, albeit less frequently. That group includes BuzzFeed, Yahoo! News, the Boston Globe, and The Huffington Post.
"We have opened up our finance events for one wire and one print pool reporter to cover with the reports accessible to other media," Andrea Saul, a Romney spokeswoman, told The Huffington Post. "We do not have a separate blogger pool report."
Saul's comment suggests the campaign may consider BuzzFeed a blog and, for that reason, not eligible to be in the print pool. While BuzzFeed reporters write exclusively online, so do others in the "print" pool, such as The Huffington Post and Yahoo! News. Also, newspaper reporters routinely file dispatches from the trail that only appear online.
"We are part of the pool, and are looking forward to receiving tonight's pool report and taking our turn in the rotation," Smith said in an email to The Huffington Post. "In this case, as traditionally, campaigns do not get to determine which reporters cover them and how press pools are constituted."

