Nice profile of my friend Kay at chicagotribune.com:

Candidates and their campaigns take pretty seriously the ubiquitous reporter with the black flip hairstyle and the rectangular glasses.

“She’s the voice of Iowa,” says Tommy Vietor, the local spokesman for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama. “If you want to deliver a message and you’re not talking to Kay, you’re not doing it effectively.”

Kevin Madden, spokesman for Republican Mitt Romney, says he was “star-struck” when he met Henderson last summer at the Ames Straw Poll. Along with other national political junkies who cyclically train their focus on Iowa, he’d been reading her blog religiously for months.

As David Yepsen, the Register’s political veteran, puts it, “Kay’s a double-barreled reporter. She instinctively understands how something will play with average Iowans,” he says.