FROM LEFT: Yunji de Nies, Jake Tapper, Savannah Guthrie, Chris Cillizza, Nia-Malika Henderson, Chuck Todd, Anne Kornblut, Katie Connolly, Julianna Goldman, Jonathan Martin, and Phil Elliott.

Covering the White House is known by the media to be a career-maker or a career-killer. For the new crop of young correspondents on journalism’s most prestigious beat, it’s likely to be the former.

The reporters featured here cut their teeth breaking news on the presidential campaign trail, and each is 40 years old or younger. “You have to have the endurance of a 30-year-old to survive this!” says Ann Compton, a 35-year veteran of the White House press corps and recent president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.

As one of the new correspondents, Phil Elliott of the Associated Press, puts it, “I don’t know that anything can prepare you for the pace.” And NBC’s booth in the White House has a dry-erase board marked with the mantra EVERY DAY FEELS LIKE A WEEK AND EVERY WEEK FEELS LIKE A DAY.

For most of the group, covering the historic 2008 presidential campaign was the launching pad to the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, as it provided them with the Rolodex of sources in and around President Obama’s administration that they need to be successful.

Elliott and Newsweek’s Katie Connolly, another newcomer, say they pinch themselves when thinking of the opportunity they’ve been given. NBC’s Savannah Guthrie says, “It’s really an honor just to go into that building.”

Compton’s counsel for the new crew is twofold: “In the short run, it’s to never let down your guard,” she says, advising that in covering a president, “anything can happen, day or night.” As for the long run, she says, “Every once in a while, take a step back and look at the big picture.” Compton adds that it’s important to “get time off for good behavior,” and that boils down to getting back on the presidential campaign trail a few short years from now.

	FROM TOP LEFT: Anne Kornblut during a live taping of Meet the Press; Jake Tapper giving the peace sign during the presidential inauguration; Julianna Goldman (BOTTOM LEFT) on a plane with then-Senator Barack Obama; Chuck Todd; Washingtonpost.com’s Chris Cillizza monitors questions from the online audience at the 2007 MySpace/ MTV Presidential Dialogue Series with then-Senator Barack Obama.

CHRIS CILLIZZA, 33, has a different mission with his blog, “The Fix,” for The Washington Post’s website than do most reporters covering the White House for day-to-day news. Every morning he offers a “Cheat Sheet,” guiding White House followers through the day with his reported analysis. He only goes to the president’s house once a week because what he does is “less dependent on tons of access.” So, for Cillizza, the pace is a tad less grueling than it was on the campaign. He explained that campaign coverage could go in “a thousand different directions each day,” whereas the White House is a bit more manageable.

Like NBC’s Chuck Todd, he’s balancing two roles in covering both the White House and the campaign politics still going on down the ballot. Cillizza, who’s every bit the campaign junkie Todd is, refers to his wife as “Mrs. Fix” and his newborn, Charlie, as “Baby Fix.” Nevertheless, what may surprise the loyal readers of the Georgetown grad’s blog is that he says he “kind of fell into reporting and never thought he’d be covering a presidential campaign.”

KATIE CONNOLLY, 31, wound her way to the White House for Newsweek after working on its most successful issue of 2008, also known as the “book project.” Every four years the publication sends reporters out with each of the presidential candidates and embargoes the in-depth reporting for after the election. Given her probing background, Connolly’s editors approached her right around Election Day to offer her the current job, where she takes a more reflective view of what’s going on in the White House each week. “There’s less need for us to stake out doorsteps,” she says, contrasting her coverage to that of most other White House correspondents. “We report analytical or thematic angles to stories.”

Connolly grew up in the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia, and calls covering the American president “such a pie-in-the-sky dream.” She received her master’s in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in 2007 and became a journalist only thereafter. As a foreigner she’s had more trouble with access to the White House than most, and earlier this year got stuck wearing a pink ID tag in a sea of green ones because Secret Service imposes stricter standards on foreign-born correspondents. Her Australian roots give her a special angle in covering the beat: “I don’t bring with me the history of growing up in this society.” In fact, despite the frustration with partisanship that often dominates the dialogue here, Connolly says because she grew up with Australia’s two-party parliamentary system, it amazes her to see politicians cross over for a vote at all.

PHIL ELLIOTT, 27, got the attention of AP Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier in 2006, the year he spent in New Hampshire covering the primaries for the news service. He was shuttled to Ohio—where he grew up and graduated from Ohio University’s journalism program—for swing-state coverage immediately after, but he describes his meteoric rise as “entirely luck—luck and more luck is the only way I can explain it.” Now he’s one of 11 AP reporters assigned to what Fournier describes as a “diverse White House staff” full of reporters with varying talents who are at different points in their careers. Fournier says Elliott “fits the mold of a young, hard-charging, aggressive, fair reporter—who’s usually first.” Elliott calls the White House far more challenging than the campaign trail. Covering nine different subject matters in an eight-hour period, he says, “is a lot more difficult than writing about a TV ad during the election that’s running in 12 states. Now, at the end of the day, I feel like I’ve accomplished something.” Elliott’s goal each day is to learn something new, and his approach to writing is to demonstrate that he cares.

JULIANNA GOLDMAN, 28, has the distinction, in President Obama’s eyes, of being “one of the originals”— at least, that’s how he referred to her when she was the first reporter he called on during one of the transition news conferences in early December. She started covering Obama in Iowa back in July 2007. Despite that familiarity, she showed that she’s ready to keep Obama in check: She also managed to sneak in the fifth question at Obama’s first prime-time presidential news conference in February, and part of her credit-crisis-related inquiry went like this: “During the campaign, you promised the American people that you won’t just tell them what they want to hear, but what they need to hear.”

Goldman’s boss, Bloomberg executive Washington editor Al Hunt, says, “It’s hard not to gush about Julianna.” She’s spent her entire professional career with Bloomberg, starting out in New York City on the TV side as a segment producer on a show about money and politics soon after graduating from Barnard College. She realized, however, that she could grow as a reporter if she moved to print journalism, and made the switch. Says Hunt, “It’s extremely rare to see successful, smart, attractive young women who want to move from TV to print.” She had been covering Washington for a while when Hunt called her before her summer 2007 wedding to MSNBC’s David Shuster and told her to enjoy the honeymoon, because she was going to have to work really hard when she got back. She was assigned to Iowa in the fall and moved to covering Obama full time from the night of the Iowa caucus onward.

SAVANNAH GUTHRIE, 37, was bounced onto Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s campaign plane when executives at the Peacock saw a major story—and a major star—in the making. Guthrie, who made her way to NBC in 2007 via Court TV, says she always knew she wanted to cover Washington and politics, and she hoped one day to cover the White House. It started to fall into place last year, when she did White House duty on the weekends before she hit the Palin plane. Then, three days before Election Day last year, her boss called to tell her she’d either be flying to Chicago on the morning of November 5 to cover Team Obama or staying put to cover a McCain transition. She said she was so busy with the final hours of the campaign that “it didn’t dawn on me till later: ‘Maybe they’re giving me the White House!’”

Guthrie started in TV news when she was 21, but she took some time to get a law degree from Georgetown and then placed first on the Arizona bar exam. With the background she’s had, she notes, “I use my law degree every day whether I realize it or not.” While her background helps her synthesize all the information thrown at reporters, she says the most challenging thing is the need to master so many issues—but that’s also the part she loves most.

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, 34, didn’t take the “circuitous path” to covering the White House, but she did graduate from Columbia Journalism School in 2005 after earlier studies at both Duke and Yale. She’s worked everywhere from The New York Times to The Washington Post, Newsday (on two occasions), and the Baltimore Sun before she landed at Politico last year.

Her second stint at Newsday afforded her time on the campaign trail, beginning with the bitter Pennsylvania primary, and that’s what brought her to her current publication, where she now covers first lady Michelle Obama full-time and fills in for general-assignment coverage on the president.

When she flew from the Democratic convention in Denver, Colorado, to the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, in June 2008 and was tasked with writing about Obama clinching the nomination, she first thought of her father, who marched down to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 during the civil rights movement. He taught Henderson about politics and history but died when she was 17, and the moment made her think of how he would feel about his daughter covering what seemed to him such a “far-off thing.”

ANNE KORNBLUT, 36, is the veteran White House reporter of the bunch, having covered the early Bush administration for the Boston Globe before covering politics for The New York Times. She’ll take some time off from her current paper, The Washington Post, to write a book about women in the presidential race, having covered Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political career at the Times and the Post. In the span of her 15 years on the job, she’s put three presidential campaigns behind her—so it’s no surprise, then, that when asked about a story she wrote during the Democratic primary in which she likened the battle between Obama and Clinton to a “shadowboxing match,” she didn’t even remember the article at first. Although the cable networks devoured the story for a couple of days, Kornblut says it best: “When you’re in the bubble, you’re always running around; I had no idea it got that much pick-up.”

Kornblut grew up in Washington but went to Columbia University and launched her career on the metro beat in New York City. Just like her return to the Beltway after her Big Apple stint, she loved coming back to the White House after two years on the trail. “Coming back is like coming home,” she says. “I’ve always felt pretty comfortable here.” In fact, she made her debut in the East Room back in elementary school when she played the violin with Amy Carter in the late 1970s. But as for recent history, she says her approach is fairly similar to covering the beginning of the Bush years because her overarching questions are the same: “Who are these people, and how are they doing things differently from the way before?” The only real difference between then and now, she adds, is that there are fewer Washington bureaus for regional papers than there were eight years ago, making the demand even greater for the coverage that’s coming from the capital. Luckily for her voracious readers, despite the belt-tightening going on in the industry, Kornblut says she feels pretty safe where she is even though she can’t see around the corner. “As long as there can be journalists, I want to be one.”

JONATHAN MARTIN, 32, was working as a staff writer for Chuck Todd at National Journal’s online blog, “The Hotline,” just three years ago, and he says it’s “cool” to now be working alongside his old boss. In 2007, eight years after graduating from Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, Martin was hired by Politico to cover the Republican presidential primary, and his blog on the topic rapidly became a must-read for any GOP political staffer or volunteer. Although he was assigned to John McCain’s campaign during the general election, he was in constant contact with the Obama team about the opposition, and his aggressive style made him a good match for the White House beat—though he says he “never really aspired to it.”

Covering Obama might be familiar territory for him, but, he adds, “It’s not as evident day in and day out what the motivation is for the president as it was for the candidate.” As such, Martin plans to aggressively cover the president and hold him accountable. “Politico places a premium on being fast and being smart. I just want to cover it in a way that political junkies can appreciate and understand.”

JAKE TAPPER and YUNJI DE NIES Tapper, 40, always wanted the White House beat and says he had tried and failed in the past. So this time, with ABC News, “I worked really, really hard so that the people who made the decisions had no choice and felt like they had to give it to me.” He’s made good on the opportunity he’s been given, as he was the first to break the story that former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who was Obama’s first pick to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, was forced to pay back taxes. Tapper says unearthing the story was a proud moment on the beat.

Unlike the rest of the new crew, Tapper thinks the access is better than on the trail and that the White House team just can’t avoid the press these days. So far he seems to be setting the tone in asking the tough questions, much like NBC’s David Gregory did in the early years of covering the Bush administration. Nevertheless, Tapper, a Dartmouth grad, says, “There’s not a press briefing that goes by that I don’t learn something from my colleagues’ questions.” His biggest surprise about covering 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? “I didn’t know I was going to have as much fun as I’m having now.” De Nies, 30, who works with Tapper, reports for Good Morning America, World News Weekend, and World News Now, and focuses more on the first lady.

CHUCK TODD, 37, says, referring to his background as an analyst, “I didn’t know until a couple years ago [that] I was a journalist.” These days, however, he has several journalistic titles, among them NBC News’ chief White House correspondent and political director for all of the networks’ platforms. After studying politics at George Washington University, Todd spent more than a decade at National Journal’s campaign digest, “The Hotline,” and left his role as editor in chief for the Peacock. “Right now, the center of the political universe is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” he says about how he’s balancing his current full plate. But he also mentions that the 2010 midterm elections are right around the corner. “Ask again in a year,” he adds.

Like Kornblut, Todd isn’t looking past the moment—he’s just enjoying covering a historically significant presidency. “So many people would give a limb to do this.” ★