“I don’t think I’m breaking any company secrets when I say Fairfax has been a financially troubled company,” political reporter Matthew Knott told the New News conference in Melbourne.

“We don’t have as much money as we used to, and this was twice as long as a normal election campaign.”

The decision was reported at the time as being motivated by editorial judgment and not belt tightening.

“We got praise for it,” Knott said. “People were saying ‘good on Fairfax for getting people off the bus’ for what . . . was honestly a money-saving decision.”

News outlets must cover the expense of sending their journalists to follow party leaders around the country during election campaigns. Fellow panelist and Buzzfeed Australia political editor Mark Di Stefano said that sending staff on each leader’s bus was both expensive and “potentially useless”.

“It’s around $2000 per person per day,” he said. “It’s an eight-week election campaign . . . I did some rough calculation and it probably cost the ABC upwards of about $800,000.”

He said that each leader would only answer seven or eight questions from reporters “on a good day”, and questioned the value of the exercise.

Both journalists said that they had drawn flak from press gallery colleagues for things they had written during the campaign.

“I’ve had threats from other journalists: ‘your career’s going to go down the toilet’,” Di Stefano said.

Knott said that “certain people wouldn’t look at me in the corridors” after he published an opinion piece asking if the Parliamentary Press Gallery had “got it wrong” on the 2016 election.

“People try to intimidate you into changing your stories,” he said.

Di Stefano said politicians were very skilled at deflecting or ignoring journalists’ questions to push their message.

“There was nothing as infuriating as trying to call out Bill Shorten and his scare campaign about Medicare,” Di Stefano said.

“Calling out his lies . . . didn’t matter.

“I spoke to Bill Shorten’s press secretary and he said, ‘My job is to have two images on the evening news every day: Bill Shorten running and Bill Shorten with sick kids’.”

But politicians’ attempts to control the media message led to some creative teamwork among the press gallery.

“I don’t think I’m breaking any company secrets when I say Fairfax has been a financially troubled company. We don’t have as much money as we used to, and this was twice as long as a normal election campaign.” — political reporter Matthew Knott

Di Stefano said that during the election campaign he had asked Turnbull about the same sex marriage plebiscite, and that Turnbull “snapped” at him in response.

“The whole press pack noticed that he was prickly about it,” Di Stefano said.

Turnbull was then met with eight questions in a row about the plebiscite.

“This is how it should work,” Di Stefano said. “We all went off script.”

The panel agreed that social media was an important influence on the way the election was reported.

On Facebook the most shared stories of the election campaign were about the marriage equality plebiscite and the “Fake Tradie” story, according to analytics firm Share Wars.

Mark Di Stefano said that Buzzfeed spent a lot of time thinking about the ‘framing’ of headlines, and the thumbnail images that appear in links to articles on social media feeds.

The same issues concerned Fairfax’s journalists.

“It’s around $2000 per person per day [to ride the campaign bus]. It’s an eight-week election campaign . . . I did some rough calculation and it probably cost the ABC upwards of about $800,000.” — Buzzfeed Australia political editor Mark Di Stefano

“Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie recently wrote a story on corruption in the oil industry,” Knott added. “We spent a lot of effort asking “what’s the headline? How do we make this difficult story relatable, and get people to share it on Facebook?”

Andrew Hunter of Share Wars said certain issues in the campaign were naturally more shareable, and therefore popular. He noted that people shared stories as a way to express their stance on issues that they cared about.

“Same sex marriage is a moveable, colourful, divisive feast,” Knott said. “The question is: how do we take a same approach to tax policy? Childcare policy?”

Election Watch editor Cathy Harper said that there was “no doubt that personality reporting gets more hits”.

Knott said that Fairfax’s social media metrics showed that the audience quickly tired of election coverage.

“Once the decision has been made that something is boring it’s hard to get [the audience] back.”

One approach was to pull back the curtain on the campaign.

“The audience loves seeing how the sausage is made,” Di Stefano said.

But there are limits.

“I have a complete ban on selfies with politicians,” Di Stefano continued. “You couldn’t get a worse optic for a journalist.”