CCJ Traveling Curriculum trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter and the author of two books: The Beast: A Journey Through Depression and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression. She blogs regularly here.

There are times when I wonder at my own presumption, writing a column intended mostly for journalists out there in the trenches. It’s been 13 years since I worked in a newsroom, and those have been some of the most eventful years this industry has ever known. As the years have passed, my daily newspaper, the Washington Post—one of the papers I once wrote for—has gotten noticeably smaller, and I recognize fewer and fewer names. One day recently I called up an old friend at my previous paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and asked, “How are you?” His answer: “Still employed.” Today, reporters at both papers routinely blog, carry their own cameras, file updates for the digital edition and work under around-the-clock deadline pressure, none of which I had to do. What do I know about daily journalism anymore?
Not much, truthfully, if you’re looking for innovative thinking about some new business model to save a beleaguered industry. I keep up with the press critics hoping some of their ideas will make sense, because I sure don’t have any. I’m just a freelance writer working out of a modest home office, in between schlepping the kids to summer camp and putting in another load of laundry. Cutting edge I ain’t.
I am, however, still a journalist. On my desk at the moment is a to-do list with the words “trip planning” at the top; I’m getting ready to hit the road to do some research for a book I am writing about Southern identity in the 21st century. Though I’ve narrowed my itinerary to a few possibilities, I don’t know exactly where I’m going yet. This phase of reporting is always nerve-wracking, especially for a freelancer. Expense-account travel is a distant memory, and these days the time demands of in-depth research are in constant tension with my desire to get the next installment of my advance. I know, too, that the kids hate it when I leave town, that my overworked spouse will have to take up the slack when I’m not there, and that I will begrudge every minute of those irreplaceable summer days I’m not with my family.
And yet I can’t wait. Getting on the road is like opening the door of a stuffy room and stepping outside. On any given day, you don’t know exactly who you’ll meet, or what they’ll say, what new thoughts will occur to you about some subject you thought you knew everything about. You meet people who are interesting, or thoughtful, or tragic, or funny; you go to places you’ve never been before, eat food you’ve never tasted. It’s travel, in the old-fashioned sense of the word—not just changing planes in Cincinnati to get to a hotel conference room in Boulder, but in the original sense: an adventure, an activity which broadens the mind. It’s scary, not knowing exactly who I need to talk to in order to find the answers to questions I’m still formulating. It’s also so much fun I never quit being amazed that people will pay me to do it.
This has been my life for well over a decade now—long intervals of reading and talking to people on the phone and trying to wrap my mind around some subject and make sense of it, interspersed with brief bursts of travel. At the moment my office is a small library of books on the South—books on every shelf, books underfoot, books in stacks in the corner—and I’ve dragged in a coffee table to serve as a makeshift countertop where I can spread out my papers and notes. If it weren’t for computers, the mess would be far worse; I’ve got a couple thousand pages of documents on my hard drive. Besides my trusty desktop, I’ve got my digital voice recorder, my digital camera, a fax (which isn’t working at the moment) and two telephone lines. When I do interviews in person, I still take notes by hand, a habit I’ve never managed to break. This is not a high-tech operation. But then, written journalism has never required a lot of fancy tools. If you had to, you could do it with a quill pen and a piece of parchment paper.
That much, at least, hasn’t changed, and other things have stayed more or less the same too. When I left daily newspapers, I thought I was leaving the tribal world of journalism behind. I was wrong. The tribe has dispersed, but it’s still out there—an invisible network of people who are, like me, exploring some small corner of the world and trying to make sense of it. In recent years, we’ve been joined by an army of amateur bloggers, some of whom are good enough to put the pros to shame. This virtual newsroom has its own rivalries and gossip streams, like newsrooms everywhere, and it also has the same generous sharing of information and expertise—the only difference being it floats through cyberspace now, instead of over the tops of cubicles. This guy at Vanderbilt is the person you should talk to. You might want to take a look at this piece in Mother Jones, it’s on your subject. Ask Peter—he grew up there and I bet he still knows some people. And I still struggle with the same challenges: verification, weighing someone’s reliability and motives, figuring out where my own biases lay, determining when real objectivity requires being true to the facts instead of merely being loyal to my sources. Really, it’s remarkable how little the basic job has changed.
“Do you miss the newsroom?” a friend asked me recently. “I miss the party,” I said, “but the party’s over.” The journalism world I knew is gone, which is a tough admission for someone who so enjoyed knowing about stuff before everybody else. I’m no longer in the trenches. On the other hand, the view from up here on the hill isn’t bad at all, and it’s a good reminder of what the war in the trenches is supposed to be about. 
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