Mr. Trump has forsaken formal news conferences, and his usual forum for sit-down interviews has been Fox News. (Last week, in Davos, the president acquiesced to interviews with CNBC and the British presenter Piers Morgan, who has usually been friendly toward Mr. Trump.) But he has embraced the so-called “pool sprays” — journalist jargon for a White House photo-op — to spar with reporters off-the-cuff, sometimes for nearly an hour at a time.

“Amid the insanity of the attacks on our industry, you have this journalistic nirvana,” said Jim VandeHei, a co-founder of Politico who now runs Axios, an outlet that went live a year ago with the aim of distilling Washington’s complexities into highly tweetable micro-scoops. “You get play-by-play visibility you could only dream of under previous presidents.”

Mr. VandeHei proselytized for his site’s “smart brevity” philosophy during an interview at Axios’s Virginia offices, inside a co-working space where pale ale is on tap and the coffee urns specify the altitude at which the beans are grown.

Axios covers the Trump administration with a bullet-pointed morning newsletter, by the well-connected Washington journalist Mike Allen, and quick-hit scoops from its sole White House reporter, Jonathan Swan. To hear Mr. VandeHei tell it, the era of the in-depth newspaper story is over.

“People aren’t reading that long and, to be honest, they shouldn’t have to,” he said.

An Axios buzzword is “illuminate” — tell readers exactly what they need to know, and nothing more. Mr. Swan, a newcomer to Washington who regularly breaks news, does not attend White House briefings, where fresh information can be scarce.

His avoidance of the ritual is likely to cheer liberal critics who say the Washington press has been too meek and rigid in adjusting to the Trump juggernaut. There were groans, in November, after a briefing during which the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked White House reporters to preface their questions with a list of what they were thankful for — a schoolyard exercise that some journalists played along with.

But Ms. Talev, a Bloomberg News correspondent and the president of the Correspondents’ Association, said that the briefing remains an opportunity to force the administration to speak on the record — a crucial forum in an era when truth is blurred. “We think briefings serve people; we think open dialogue serves people,” she said in an interview at Peet’s Coffee, a block from her West Wing desk.