MS NOW is adding Abby Livingston as a political reporter, putting one of Washington’s steadier campaign reporters onto its growing political team. She will cover campaigns and elections and work primarily from New York City.
The hire gives MS NOW a reporter with more than a decade spent covering Capitol Hill and campaigns for The Texas Tribune and Roll Call, along with earlier stops at NBC News, National Journal and. In a memo to staffers, Shawna Thomas said Livingston will work alongside the network’s growing political team and bring audiences the latest developments from the campaign trail across all platforms.
That is the value of the move for MS NOW now: a political desk built around live campaign coverage needs reporters who can move quickly between breaking developments and the longer arc of a race. Livingston fits that assignment by definition. Her career has centered on Washington reporting, and her record has already been recognized with the 2017 National Press Club Award for Washington regional reporting and the 2018 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Washington correspondence.
What the memo does not say is why Livingston is leaving Puck, where she most recently worked. That missing piece matters because this is not a routine shuffle of names on a staff list; it is a senior hire crossing from a long Washington run into a role that now places her in New York City while still asking her to track campaigns and elections at speed. The move suggests MS NOW wants a reporter with deep political instincts in a broader, platform-wide assignment, even as the reason for Livingston’s exit from her previous post remains unstated.
For readers, the practical takeaway is simple: Livingston is not arriving as a generic newsroom addition. She is being slotted into the center of MS NOW’s political coverage, with a brief that ties together campaigns, elections and cross-platform reporting. The unanswered question is not what she will do next. It is what prompted her to make the jump now.
