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When the last presidential race was in its early stages, Katie Glueck was a senior at Northwestern University. Now covering the Ted Cruz campaign for Politico, Ms. Glueck, 26, belongs to a select group of millennial reporters who have a front-row seat to the greatest political show on earth.
While youth is a virtue for those covering the turbulent 2016 campaign, it has been known to get in the way now and then. Caitlin Huey-Burns, 28, who covers primaries and caucuses for the website RealClear Politics, said, "I often get asked by voters if I'm writing for the school paper."
Rosie Gray, 26, who covers the campaign for BuzzFeed, said that her age is only occasionally a factor. "Honestly, the times I feel the most young is when I'm talking to a voter on the trail and I sound like a pipsqueak sayin g, 'Excuse me, ma'am, can I ask you a question?'" she said. "A lot of that had to do with how you present yourself and how you act. You can either act like a young little thing or not."
And she disputed the notion that her age is much of an issue. "I'm not that young," she said. "I'm 26. Thirty is staring me down the barrel of a gun."
But Maralee Schwartz, a former longtime political editor at The Washington Post, said that the rise of these correspondents is new indeed.
"They've become much more prominent," Ms. Schwartz said, adding that 2012 "was the first year that you saw how many younger reporters were on the trai l. One veteran reporter called me from the bus, stunned, saying: 'I am the oldest person here. One of them brought brownies.' They may lack experience, but they can keep pace with the changes and demands and responsibilities of the web."
Photo Katie Glueck, 26, a reporter for Politico, in South Carolina on the evening of its Republican presidential primary. She covers Ted Cruz. Credit Travis Dove for The New York TimesAbby Phillip, 27, who covers the Democratic campaign for The Washington Post, said: "When I first started as a reporter, I had just turned 21. I was the youngest person on the job. Now everyone I work with is my age."
Ms. Phillip, who has more than 11,000 Twitter followers, went to work for Politico in 2010, soon after graduating from Harvard, where she was a government major. She joined The Post in 2014 and is now a leading player in this troupe.
Having come of age during a historically unruly decade, the 20-something reporters are perhaps uniquely prepared for an unpredictable narrative featuring protagonists like the upstart Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump, the reality television star turned front-runner.
After all, they belong to a generation jolted into political awareness in their childhood years by 9/11, and the news of their teenage years was heavy with the war on terror and a deep recession.
They learned to doubt conventional wisdom when their elders told them that an insurgent named Barack Hussein Obama could never win the White House. And they joined the ranks of professional journalists at a time when older reporters were being laid off in droves and venerable publications we re shutting down.
As a result, they're supple. And unlike some of their colleagues, who came of age in the days of bulldog editions and ink-stained fingers, they are at home in the social-media sphere and are accustomed to working at digital speed.
"I definitely think I have an advantage as a young person covering this, not only from an energy level but from a 'fresh eyes' perspective," said Ms. Huey-Burns, a 2009 graduate of John Carroll University.
They're also at an ideal age for enduring the campaign slog.
Photo Rosie Gray, 26, who covers the campaign for BuzzFeed. Credit Travis Dove for The New York Times"I don't have any kids," Ms. Huey-Burns said. "I don't own a home. I don't own a car. I definitely have more flexibility to do this sort of thing, and I think it gets harder and harder to go out on the road when you have other obligations."
Ms. Huey-Burns, who has 7,200 Twitter followers, was speaking in an empty bakery in Irmo, S.C., on the outskirts of Columbia. In a matter of hours, the well-funded Jeb Bush would quietly end his quiet campaign.
"I get so excited on voting days," she said. "I just cannot wait to see wha t happens, and I love that feeling. I know it sounds weird, like I have no life."
Such enthusiasm is a trait she shares with her fellow millennial reporters, who are not yet weary of the endless stump speeches and Hampton Inns. Story lines that may echo long-ago campaign tales for those reporters old enough to have endured the hustings in the company of Michael Dukakis or Jack Kemp are fresh to those who haven't seen it all before.
"It's amazing," said Ms. Glueck of Politico in the lobby of a Marriott in Columbia. "The other day we had the leading candidate for the Republican nomination tussling with the Pope. That's a rare moment, and it wasn't even necessarily the dominant story the following day."
Unlike some of their more experienced colleagues, the reporters under 30 also seem to accept the notion that they are always on the clock, that keeping up a running patter with news-hungry audiences via Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat is as much part of the job as filing a 550-word dispatch.
"There are points where I have to remind myself, 'You haven't tweeted all day,' because it is an important part of building our brands and sharing our work, and that doesn't come to me naturally," said MJ Lee, a 29-year-old politics reporter for CNN. "But there's no going back.
"You have no exc use," continued Ms. Lee, who is married to Alexander Burns, who covers politics for The New York Times. "You have to be up-to-date on everything, because you can be. You have your iPhone and you have Twitter. Why aren't you up-to-date on the latest thing that happened two minutes ago? When I get on a plane and it's a small plane and there's no Wi-Fi, I get uncomfortable."
Ms. Lee, a 2009 Georgetown University graduate who majored in government and Chinese, said: "Yesterday, we went to dinner, and for some reason I stopped getting email on my phone. And that made me really nervous. And it was maybe 17 minutes."
The energy required to maintain a constant online presence is just part of the challenge. To write or broadcast anything connected with politics in 2016 is to be exposed to instant backlash. Even a deeply reported and elegantly written campaign story is likely to draw malicious attack.
This is especially true of female reporters, who often find themselves the target of misogynist online abuse. But an advantage of growing up with social media is the ability to withstand the torrent. When Ms. Gray, the BuzzFeed reporter, wrote about the "alt right" movement of white supremacists, she knew exactly what she would face, and she said she took it in stride.
Ms. Gray, who has more than 51,000 Twitter followers, left New York University in 2012. Like the other young reporters on the beat, she is thankful for the circuslike atmosphere of the 2016 campaign.
"Its definitely fun," she said. "I don't like all the finger-wagging and people saying it's so dire and serious. It definitely is, because the stakes are really high and it's the presidential election and it actually really matters, but you have to appreciate the pure wackiness of the thing, and that's what makes it special. It's the most fun campaign ever."
Photo Zeke J. Miller, 26, covers politics for Time. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York TimesZeke J. Miller, a 26-year-old reporter for Time, talks and writes at a near frenetic pace when he is not tweeting bits of micronews in rat-tat-tat fashion to his more than 77,000 Twitter followers. Between Jan. 10 and the last days of February, he said he spent a total of three hours in his New York apartment.
"This is our Super Bowl," Mr. Miller said over a beer at a Greenville, S.C., restaurant. "At some point, I'll be Peyton Manning and can't throw anymore and go out on top. Until then, I have to suit up for the next day. I'm confident that at some point I'll grow tired of this. I don� �t know when it'll be. But I hope that never happens."
The odds are against Mr. Miller, a 2011 graduate of Yale, where he majored in political science before getting his professional start at Business Insider. As veteran reporters know, the physical stresses of covering the long campaign can take a toll on the person you were back in the early days of Iowa.
After more than a year on the trail, the reporters following the candidates from New York to Nevada have become all too familiar with the lack of exercise, the drive-through windows, the bottomless cups of lukewarm coffee, the nonstop adrenaline, the cramped middle seats in coach, the key cards that fail to open hotel-room doors and the nights of fitful, four-hour sleeps.
Continue reading the main story"I always try and bring running shoes in my suitcase and I use them maybe once a week on a trip," Ms. Phillip of The Washington Post said. "It's a trade-off between sleep and exercise, and sleep is hard to come by, so I usually choose sleep."
"It's hard to eat well," she said. "You end up eating chicken nuggets and French fries, driving to the next event and then calling it a day. There was a time in New Hampshire where it was a pretty busy day and I ate McDonald's twice. I think a little bit of my soul died."
But she's not the only one.
"We've given up our lives in order to do this, but you're not alone," Ms. Phillip said. "One of the best things is to know that when you're in that hotel room late at night, wondering whether you're able to do this, it's not just you. Other people are going through it, too."
