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.

On my desk sits a 16-pocket file folder full of interviews, clippings, notes to myself, story outlines and jotted phone numbers. There are also five books, all of which I can say I have thoroughly scanned and one or two I have actually read carefully. I’ve got about 3,000 words on my hard disc, and next week I’ll be spending several days shadowing a World Court judge who is the subject of my profile. If you ask me today, I can confidently outline for you the place of human rights law within the general topic of international law and the three main sources of the body of human rights law that have come into being in the post-World War II era, as well as some recent major cases that have come before the International Court of Justice (which, by the way, should not be confused with the International Criminal Court or with the War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia).
Next month? Don’t ask.

The brain is a plastic organ, flexible in its contours, and journalism – I am convinced – is an air pump. As journalists, we are in the business of sinking ourselves in a subject, in understanding it in depth, and in writing with authority on a whole bunch of things we never studied in school: urban traffic trends, ecology, exercise physiology … even human rights law. Properly practiced, the craft of journalism will enlarge your brain and raise your I.Q. And then, after a while, about 75 to 80 percent of what you went to so much trouble to learn will go away, and you’ll get dumb again. Because besides being flexible, the brain is also leaky.

What brings all this to mind (albeit temporarily) is the fact that my family is about to move. In the process of offloading the tons of debris that seem to accumulate around here, I’ve been going through old story files. (There were a lot; I’ve always been a devout practitioner of the first rule of journalism: Never Throw Away a Phone Number.) What I’ve discovered is that once upon a time, I knew a hell of a lot about a whole ton of things, very little of which I can recall now.

For instance: I had an inch-thick file on Ritalin. Why? You tell me. I found notes from an interview I did with somebody in a town in upper Montgomery County that I don’t remember ever having been to. Nor do I recall why I was talking to these people, none of whom I can ever recall seeing, even though I wrote down detailed physical descriptions on my yellow legal pad. At one time, I was an expert on the demographics of Bowie, Md. At another point in my history, I was up to speed on welfare reform; at still another, I was a whiz on labor statistics involving the work history of women in their 40s. Heck, I had a guy at the Bureau of Labor Statistics on speed dial.

Where is it all now? Pffft – gone.

There are no doubt people out there who have better memories than I do (though middle age will get you all one day, children, or let’s hope so). Still, I doubt if there is a journalist alive who wouldn’t be able to find a story or video clip out there of some story he or she barely remembers doing … even though, on the day the story was done, it seemed pretty important.

Partly, that’s just the nature of the news business. Your editor doesn’t really care about what you reported on yesterday; the question is, “What have you got for me today?” Another is the sheer volume of information that we humans in the 21st century are expected to deal with, which makes it not very important to know the exact number for the current gross volume of exports from Sierra Leone, say, but really, really important to know how to find out. Because while you and I are thinking about it, that number is likely to change, and anyway it’s not what it was a year ago. Understandably, the details blur.

More than anybody, except maybe those guys running in front of the bulls in Pamplona, journalists operate on a what-do-I-need-to-know-right-this-second basis. It’s a deeply ingrained habit. I’ve been going to the same dentist on Wisconsin Avenue for 15 years, a fact that came up one day when my father-in-law was visiting and we discovered that for all this time he and I had been visiting doctors in the same building. “What floor is your dentist on?” he asked me, and I said I didn’t know. “You don’t know?” my husband asked in amazement, and I said, no, that’s what the lobby directory was for. Well, isn’t it?

Anyway, looking at the piles of evidence on my office floor – stuff I used to know and don’t know any longer – I console myself. It’s not that you’ve allowed all this knowledge to slip away, Tracy, I say to myself. It’s just that you never had to remember.

But there’s a larger point here, I think, and it’s this: What’s news has always been a concept that operates almost entirely independently of what’s actually important – and this is something journalists really need to keep in mind, if only because it gives us a little bit of humility. In this respect, journalism is a lot like surfing: It’s exciting, it takes some skill to do, it puts you where the action is, there’s almost always something breaking. But the horizon and the shoreline are where the big changes happen, and it’s hard to keep your eyes on that big picture while you’re balancing on that surfboard.

One corollary of this is that the importance of any given story really has nothing to do with the time and energy you invest in it. They may coincide, but often they don’t. I remember, for instance, working 11 years ago on a big investigative piece about financial mismanagement at the Humane Society of the United States. I remember a particularly difficult interview in which I had to stand up to a high-priced, attack-dog defense lawyer who was trying to bully me – and that stuck in my mind because big confrontations are not my style. I sweated over every word of that story because there were already lawsuits in the air, and in the end that piece took two months to do. Today, I couldn’t tell you the name of the guy I was writing about, and I’m sure nobody at the Humane Society remembers me.

But then there was a story I covered in 1981, my first year of working for the Atlanta Constitution. It was an inquest in Walton County, Ga., into the death of a young black man found hanging from a tree deep in a remote part of the county. Walton County happens to be the site of the last public lynching in the United States, a memory that is encoded into the DNA of every black resident of that county. On that winter morning two and a half decades ago, that 1946 event was fresh in the minds of every black person who crowded into the courtroom, whether they had been alive in 1946 or not. I still remember the involuntary gasp of dismay and disbelief from the crowd when the foreman of the jury (all white? certainly mostly white) read the verdict: “Suicide.”

That was a daily story; the next day, I was on to something else. But what happened in that courtroom that day spoke volumes about the different cultural memories black and white people have in this country. It taught me about a piece of that black history not every white person knows, which in turn helps me understand a story in the Metro section of the Washington Post last week, involving a black construction worker’s outrage at a noose a white co-worker made one day at work “as a joke.” That one-day story in Walton County 26 years ago was part of the 20 percent that stuck with me. It permanently enlarged my brain.

The case troubled me, and I kept a file on it for a couple of decades. Recently I overheard University of Maryland Law School professor Sherrilyn Ifill on the Kojo Nnamdi show on WAMU, talking about a book she has written on the history of lynching on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. I e-mailed her and got a friendly response. She’d never heard of the 1981 hanging incident and asked me if I could forward on to her whatever information I had about it. So I went looking for my file.

It wasn’t there. After keeping it for all those years, somewhere along the line I’d decided … it wasn’t important.