As a White House correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for CNN, Maggie Haberman estimates that she hasn’t slept through the night in four years.

A New York native, Haberman attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied fiction writing. Upon graduating, she couldn’t find a job at a women’s magazine, so she turned to the New York Post after hearing about a copy clerk job from a family friend.

“The first day I was like, ‘This is really awful,’ because it was just basically like you’re a gopher, you’re running around,” she said. “Within a day the energy and rhythms of the newsroom had completely captivated me. [In] the ‘90s, New York tabloids were a great place to learn.”

Even then, she said it would take a few years covering New York before she realized the paper was a good fit. Eventually, she was taken by the way the pace of city government intertwined with how agencies and public policy impacted people.

“My editor sent me down to cover City Hall in 1999 and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing,” Haberman recalled. “In retrospect it was a little scary, but Rudy Giuliani was in the second half of his second term at that point and he was just a fascinating, larger-than-life figure to cover. He was a bit of a precursor to the person I cover now, in certain ways anyways.”

By the person she covers now, she primarily means President Donald Trump and his administration. After five years as a political reporter with Politico, Haberman joined the New York Times in 2015 as a presidential campaign correspondent. Since then, she has established herself as one of the Times’ most prolific journalists, regularly breaking stories on every dimension of the Trump administration.

“The schedule doesn’t stop,” she said. “Donald Trump starts communicating over Twitter sometimes as early as six in the morning and it can go until nighttime,” she said.

While she says her schedule varies, she aims to speak with fifty sources a day.

“I think it’s good to talk to as many people as possible as frequently as possible,” Haberman said. “Just to check in, just, ‘What are you hearing? What’s going on?’ A lot of it is just conversational, a lot of it is not asking a specific question but just picking things up on the transit.”

While reporting on stories like the Mueller report and the President giving his son-in-law a security clearance certainly stand out in her mind, other stories also spring to mind when reflecting on a career covering the ebb and flow of national politics.

“I did a story in 2014 when I was at Politico about how that election cycle, almost every person who won for office, whether they were re-elected or whether they were the challenger, had upside-down poll numbers, so their negatives were higher than their positives,” she said. “That was a harbinger of where we were going, sort of socially and politically. That voters felt negatively about almost every politician. That was a big red flag for 2016 and why Donald Trump could run such a divisive campaign and such a relentlessly negative campaign and voters didn’t punish him for it. Voters no longer punish you for doing that.”

As the digital sphere overtakes print media, Haberman is uniquely positioned to have experienced being near the epicenter of both. At the start of her career, the internet was not yet a fixture of society the way it is now. As an industry, she says the internet has introduced more choices to consumers for where they can read their news.

“I think early, nascent internet existed. ’98 was the first year I really remember the Internet existing because of the Drudge Report in the Lewinsky year,” she said. “There has been a huge shift away from traditional institutional media and more towards smaller startups, be it Buzzfeed or almost anything else.”

With more choice comes more scrutiny over the profile of the source itself, a factor which is compounded by the President’s popularization of the phrase “fake news” as a way to dismiss coverage. Haberman said this can lead to a preoccupation with where news is coming from, which distracts from the news itself.

“I think readers are very focused on who is delivering the news to them as opposed to the news that is being delivered, and some of it is because some readers don’t like the news that’s being delivered, and so it becomes easier to focus on who’s delivering it because maybe then it’s not true,” Haberman said. “But it doesn’t make it untrue. I think in the Twitter era, readers’ ability to think critically has been a bit dulled.”

Despite the industry’s evolution, Haberman said that the basics of reporting instincts and knowing when to pursue a lead is still a learned art.

“I mean sometimes you just know. Sometimes people will come to you with something that just isn’t a story, it’s something that bothers them. And you hear them out and you assess what the news value is…and sometimes something can become a story later on, but you know it when you see it,” she said. “…Very few people are born knowing exactly how to do this; you learn from good editors, you learn from colleagues, you learn from watching other people.”