Young Scoop08 reporters hit the campaign trail

By Robert MacMillan

NEW YORK, Nov 12 (Reuters Life!) - Presidential candidates keep close tabs on the reporters and bloggers who cover them. Now, they will have to contend with a press outlet that includes staffers who aren't old enough to vote.

Scoop08, now in its second week, is a Web site staffed by high school, college and graduate students who are covering the 2008 presidential race.

The site's founders take a jab at mainstream press coverage in a letter on the Web site, saying Scoop08 will "transcend horse-race politics, focusing instead on the substance -- the characters behind the candidates, the big ideas behind the rhetoric, the trends behind the headlines."

The site boasts about 300 correspondents who will write, for free, from their high schools and colleges, and 22 named editors. It promises feature articles, editorial digests, podcasts, video reports and blogs, and will cover beats like campaign rhetoric, the Green Party and social networking Web sites.

"The first and foremost thing is to engage young people and report on and discuss issues pertaining to young people," said co-founder Alexander Heffner, a 17-year-old senior at the Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts.

"We're covering material that's often unreported and often overlooked."

One example is a scheduled story about the hip-hop world's views on Democratic candidate and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, said Features Editor Vivian Nereim, a 20-year-old junior at Yale University.

"Hip-hop for the past 30 years has sort of been this very traditional barometer of blackness," Nereim explained.