As the dedicated Bernie Sanders reporter for BuzzFeed News, Ruby Cramer spent months trailing the Vermont senator around the country, flying on his campaign plane, watching him kibitz with voters, and cultivating his political advisers over meals in more than a dozen states.

But last week, when Mr. Sanders dropped out of the presidential race, Ms. Cramer got the news while Zooming with her therapist from the Manhattan apartment where, since mid-March, she has been quarantining from the coronavirus.

She wasn’t the only Sanders beat reporter forced to cover the end of his campaign from a distance. TV networks and newspapers had long ago recalled their journalists from Burlington, Vt., where the senator conceded in a speech at his home. With reporters absent, the on-the-ground details of defeat — grimacing aides, tearful supporters — were lost.

“It was nothing like the end of a campaign I had ever experienced,” Ms. Cramer, who also covered the 2016 presidential race, said in an interview.

There is no more campaign trail. Instead of a traveling circus of raucous rallies, press bus gossip and drinks with sources at the hotel bar, there is Joseph R. Biden Jr. in his Delaware basement, videoconferencing into cable news. Journalists, barred from flying for safety reasons, still report by phone and text message, but voters go uninterviewed and swing states unexplored.

“It feels like it’s something that exists only in theory,” Ms. Cramer said. “There’s no tangible element. It doesn’t feel like the living, breathing, changing organism that it has always been.”

In interviews, nearly a dozen now-grounded campaign reporters described feeling unmoored without the usual rhythm of journeying from state to state, jousting with aides and badgering candidates — the raw ingredients that, through a subtle alchemy of social media, cable news hits and print deadlines, forge the day-to-day story line of a presidential race.

“That socializing that happens among the beat reporters that travel with the candidate all the time, and have that weird bond and relationship with the campaign and with each other — out of that petri dish, campaign narratives form,” Ryan Lizza, Politico’s chief Washington correspondent, said in an interview (conducted over FaceTime, naturally). “That dynamic isn’t there anymore. You don’t have that window into the campaign.”

“We have no one embedded in the basement,” Mr. Lizza quipped, referring to Mr. Biden’s subterranean roost.

News outlets are also grappling with how to cover voters in crucial states like Florida, Michigan, and Nevada, where journalists often gauge the direction of the country’s politics.

After 2016, when Donald J. Trump’s victory caught many prominent journalists by surprise (and led to remonstrations from readers and viewers), senior leaders in the news business pledged not to repeat the same mistakes. In 2020, went the refrain, political writers would focus on the heartland, leaving behind the conventional-wisdom factories of newsrooms in Washington and New York.

Man plans, and God laughs. Amid the pandemic, much of the country’s political press is now marooned in those coastal cities, covering a national race from couches in Georgetown and Brooklyn.

David Weigel, a nomadic campaign correspondent for The Washington Post, said in an email that he has been off the trail for a month, his longest stretch at home in Washington since 2017. He’s worried about what reporters are missing.

“Being able to check in with voters when some story was blowing up on cable is essential,” Mr. Weigel said. “It’s not just that it’s better to talk to voters at random. It’s that I’d worry, usually correctly, that online chatter was not reflecting what was happening.”

Mr. Weigel belongs to a band of road-warrior reporters that Peter Hamby, a former CNN campaign journalist, has deemed the “Avis Preferred” press corps: journalists who hoof it in the heartland, rather than offering analysis from afar.

“The value of traveling in political journalism is not to travel to Las Vegas to go to a rally,” Mr. Hamby, who hosts a political show on Snapchat, “Good Luck America,” said in an interview. “The value is to travel to talk to moms in a Whole Foods parking lot in Henderson, Nev. It’s not necessarily to cover a campaign event and just transcribe it.”

Now stuck at home in Los Angeles, Mr. Hamby and his Snapchat team are brainstorming how to maintain that you-are-there feel. “You can source stories through the internet, do it through your screens,” he said, though he acknowledged that tele-reporting was less than ideal: “You lose the texture.”

One remedy Mr. Hamby proposed: Cable networks should dump a few highly compensated pundits and hire correspondents who reside beyond the coastal bubbles. “The amount some of these networks are paying their contributors could fund dozens of correspondents around the country,” he said.

For news executives, there may be one advantage to the lockdown: an unexpected windfall.

In a typical campaign year, media outlets budget millions of dollars to cover the presidential race. Reporters who travel on a candidate’s jet can run up thousands of dollars in charter flight fees in a single day, not including Marriott stays and meals.

Neal Shapiro, NBC News’s president from 2001 to 2005, said in an interview that his network’s custom-built studios for Democratic and Republican conventions — where anchors peer down, hawklike, at delegates — could cost seven figures. If this year’s conventions are canceled or curtailed, he said, news outlets will see “a huge budget relief.”

But for workaday journalists, the cost of a muted campaign is significant. Every presidential cycle has its standout reporters, who parlay a plum assignment into book deals and other boons. Mr. Shapiro cited Katy Tur, whose coverage of Mr. Trump in 2016 led to a rise in her national profile and an MSNBC anchor slot.

“Nobody’s on the air, and nobody’s covering anything,” Mr. Shapiro said. “It’s going to be harder for those stars to emerge.”

For Rick Klein, the political director at ABC News, the coronavirus has meant abrupt changes for his team. “It felt in a lot of ways like we went from going 1,000 m.p.h. to zero very fast,” he said. Several “embeds,” the young reporters who travel with candidates for months, were reassigned to cover the virus, and Mr. Klein is leaning on local ABC affiliates to cover developments across the country.

There are still pressing matters for be covered: endorsements, fund-raising, advertising strategy and questions of election security when millions of voters are quarantining at home.

But for some reporters, abandoning the trail has posed an existential question: If campaign journalism isn’t traveling the country and closely observing candidates — well, what is it, exactly?

The author Timothy Crouse coined the term “Boys on the Bus” for his classic account of journalists covering the 1972 presidential race. But in an interview this week, he questioned if the entire enterprise was still necessary.

“I agree that a certain amount of information gathering depends on the serendipity and proximity that traveling with a campaign affords,” Mr. Crouse wrote in an email. “But a lot can still be done over the phone, can’t it? Is it possible that all the time spent on planes and buses is, in some ways, a waste?”

Ms. Cramer of BuzzFeed News — whose father, Richard Ben Cramer, wrote “What It Takes,” the definitive record of the 1988 race — saw it differently.

“This is a great opportunity to move away from horse-race coverage,” she said. “But we are missing a whole human element of campaign reporting right now. I don’t know what Joe Biden’s days are like — what that looks like, feels like, sounds like.”

For now, some stranded trail watchers are finding new ways to occupy their time. Mark McKinnon, a co-host of the Showtime political series “The Circus,” has moved from New York to Colorado, where he is focusing on a different presidential campaign: the fictional one in a screenplay he is writing with his daughter.

“That’s what we do when there’s no real race to cover,” Mr. McKinnon said. “We make one up.”

Sydney Ember contributed reporting.