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 a lot of skills involved in being a good journalist, but here’s one that often gets left off the list: self-knowledge. What kind of journalist are you? What methods are your strengths? What are you not so good at? Is your idea of a journalism hero Bob Woodward or Seymour Hersh?—or maybe the late, great Molly Ivins?

These thoughts came to mind when I was reading a Washington Post piece about the death of conservative political columnist Robert Novak. In it, Howie Kurtz quoted a passage from Novak’s memoir, describing Novak’s relationship with political guru Karl Rove:

"Karl and I had grown close since he began plotting Bush's path to the presidency as early as 1995. I had never enjoyed such a good source inside the White House. Rove obviously thought I was useful for his purposes, too. Such symbiotic relationships, built on self-interest, are the rule in high-level Washington journalism."

Whether you liked or loathed Robert Novak, in that last sentence he was simply stating the obvious. It’s a reality I would advise any journalist to think hard about before you come here, if such an opportunity should ever come your way—because Washington is a whole different ballgame. I speak as someone who couldn’t play it very well.

I came to Washington in 1989 from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which had recently suffered a kind of managerial implosion that left a lot of us looking for a way out of town. My former editor, Bill Kovach (founder of CCJ), put in a word for me with Ben Bradlee, who looked at my clips and liked them, and bingo! I was on my way to The Washington Post’s Metro Desk—not precisely the Big Time, but an anteroom thereof, and a nice little career leap for me. I went on to spend the better part of a decade at the Post, which was a very decent employer. But there was hardly a week in that whole period when I was not painfully aware that I just did not belong.

In Atlanta, the kind of reporting I’d done involved covering courts. That was a skill that transferred very nicely to Washington, which is chock-full of federal, local, administrative and a variety of specialized legal proceedings. But the part of the work for the AJC that had most engaged me was a kind of on-the-road investigative reporting—roaming around in obscure places, looking and listening to people and picking up on patterns and things nobody else had noticed. Some journalists do this purely as feature writers; I did it in combination with my legal background, and it yielded the kinds of stories nobody else was doing. I found that really enjoyed digging into a pile of boring documents to find some nugget of journalistic gold, and that I liked to write about people who were not newsworthy in any conventional sense of the term, but whose lives illustrated some important social trend or problem. And, in large part because I liked it so much, I was really good at this kind of thing. It also suited my temperament, which is a bit loner-ish. For some journalists, racing in a pack of fellow reporters in pursuit of The Big Story provided a shot of adrenaline and the thrill of the chase, but my instinct was always to leave the gaggle to somebody else and go see what was going on out back.

Arriving in Washington was a complete culture shock. Instead of having the time to really get to know people, to find out the story that every human being has to tell, I was suddenly in a situation where information gathering meant quickly identifying the power players and maneuvering for access. It was a job that required sharp elbows and a lot of lunches where I pumped people for information, knowing at the same time that they were pumping me.

Talking to people and learning about their lives had always been something I enjoyed, and now I was talking to people all day long. But instead of feeling energized, I felt drained. There was no time to draw a person out or follow some train of thought to its conclusion; instead, it was a multi-track mental exercise. What is he/she telling me? Why are they telling me this? What should I tell them? What do they think I know? What should I bluff about knowing? Does he owe me any favors? Do I owe him any? What time is it? Can I get this in time for deadline? Is that Congressman X at that table in the corner, and who is that woman he is talking to?...And on and on. And I’m talking on a very practical level here; I’m not even getting into the ethical swamps which await all who do this kind of quid-pro-quo reporting for a living.

I was just no good at it, and I kept making mistakes—not the kind the paper would have to run a correction on, but reporting mistakes nonetheless. For one thing, I began by thinking of the sources I was trying to cultivate as personal connections, which they were not. The reporter-source relationship in Washington may look from the outside like a personal friendship, and on occasion it can be. But generally speaking, it’s a purely business transactions, with information as the currency. If you mistake it for a real human interaction, you will get hurt. Worse, you’ll get played. And that carries over into after-work hours, too. In D.C., a person’s social desirability is directly connected to the prestige of the media platform he or she represents and/or how much political access they have. When those things disappear, so will (most of) your friends. This sounds painfully obvious, and maybe I was slow on the uptake about it. But I’ve also seen some very smart people forget.

All of these things were skills I could have learned—and I would have, if I had been really interested in doing so. But I wasn’t. The kind of story which emerged from these interactions rarely struck me as the most interesting thing in the paper, even when it made the front page (as such stories very often did). I’d look at some big scoop produced by one of my colleagues, something every political insider in town was talking about over breakfast, and I’d think: Eh.

The result of this was that I spent the better part of a decade working for bosses who never really knew what to do with me, in a place where I never really figured out how to do my best work. It was like walking around in shoes that didn’t fit: you can do it indefinitely, but comfortable it ain’t. This is not to say that, for me, working for the Washington Post was a mistake. On the contrary: uncomfortable as I was, I still got to work with some of the best writers and editors in the business. When I left the Post, I was a much, much better journalist than I was when I arrived there. It was a crucial part of getting me to the point where I could do what I truly love doing, which is writing books.   

Still, if I had it to do over, I would have handled that whole job-interviewing process differently. I would have had a better idea of the environment I was getting into, and I would have said to my prospective employers, “Look: here’s what I do best. Here’s where you can get the best out of me. Yeah, I’ll cover courts for you if that’s what you need at the moment—but long term, I need to be aiming for the Style section, or maybe writing a local column, or doing some beat where I get some freedom to travel—because I’m never going to be first-rate at as a Washington-insider political reporter.” I think everybody would have been a lot happier.

In a time when the journalism industry is shrinking and jobs are hard to come by, this kind of perspective on things may sound frivolous. Give me a break, you think; if the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN ever offer me a job, I don’t care if it’s writing about pork belly futures—I’ll be on the next plane. And maybe that will work for you. But I still believe that it’s always a good idea to, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, to take a searching personal inventory about what really matters to you. The “best job” is not measured by some objective standard, like salary, or even in that subjective value we call “prestige.” It’s more personal. The career advice I give my 12-year-old daughter these days (on those rare occasions when she asks me for any) is: Figure out what you love to do; then figure out how to make money at it. Simple to say, hard to do.