Interview with Kate Davidson
Kate Davidson is currently an economics reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Since working as an economics reporter for a prestigious paper is my ultimate goal, and I’d been following Kate on Twitter and reading her stories, I emailed her, having no previous contact with her or anyone she knew. To my delight, she agreed to an interview.
Kate began at a Fordham University, which did not have a journalism department, and when she realized that being a reporter was really what she wanted to do, she transferred to Boston University where she got her degree in journalism and worked at the school’s paper.
“The experience was invaluable,” she said. “I feel like a lot of the people who worked at the student paper were the most successful in the long run. When I was in these classes when I was in school, and there were students I didn’t know, I didn’t see them at the paper, I knew they weren’t writing because I didn’t see their bylines. I just thought ‘What are you doing? How are you preparing yourself?’”
Right out of university, with just the undergraduate degree, she started work at the same place she’d interned during college, her hometown newspaper.
“I really am grateful that I had a chance to work at a small town doing small town reporting. I just feel that it so important and so helpful to have that foundation of being in the real world. I hate to say that ’cause I don’t want to denigrate what my colleagues have done here. Some have been really successful and are great political reporters and they know their stuff but I do think it’s good to have more — have that perspective of what it’s like being stuck covering a fire or getting called out late at night to go and have to get information from the local police chief who hates you and doesn’t want to deal with you. It’s really good exercise for some of the hard parts of reporting.”
She stayed for about a year before moving on to the Concord Monitor, which had a reputation as being a pipeline for the larger regional papers.
When, two years later, she moved to DC because her husband was going to graduate school there, she got a job at Congressional Quarterly. It was an entry level job, starting over at the bottom again, and covering the Financial Services Committee. But when the woman who had hired her left for American Banker, she recruited Kate to join her.
“Ugh, do I really want to write about banking? About community banking?” she asked herself. But a lot of important people read the American Banker, it was well known in Washington so she went for it. She didn’t think she could handle covering the Fed or the Treasury Department, but when the treasury reporter left for another job, she applied for it, nothing thinking she could really do it.
She got the job.
“It sounds in hindsight like I was doing all the right things but it was very much like taking advantage of opportunities as I saw them,” she said. “And I guess I should say that at every turn I thought, “I don’t know if I can really do this.”
After a time, a former colleague who was an editor at Politico asked her out for coffee; saying they needed reporters. She’d accidentally blown him off before, and felt she shouldn’t be rude again, so agreed to meet up with him, even if she had no intention of working for Politico. I could never work at Politico, it’s an insane place to work and too competitive,” she thought, but “by the end of the coffee meeting he convinced me I should really come over.”
So to Politico she went. She wasn’t under contract, so when someone, an old friend who worked at the Wall Street Journal, later approached her on behalf of an editor who was interested in seeing her clips, she agreed.
“And it was the same thing, he was like, let’s have coffee, let’s talk.”
She had sent in her more recent clips on business and banking. But the editor asked her specifically for feature stories, some of her earlier work. So she sent him the piece of Fred Thompson.
“He was so into it and wanted to know all about it,” she said.
So even for a position writing about economics business-minded paper like the Wall Street Journal, being able to write a good feature is still an important skill. Because they are indeed the ones that people get into and want to know all about.
The story behind the story
What is special about working in New Hampshire, she said, is of course the presidential primaries. New Hampshire being the first to do them, they get a lot of attention. For the 2008, she was assigned Fred Thompson. At the time, people expected him to make a big splash, though it turned out that he didn’t.
All the reporters at the Monitor were assigned a candidate to do a profile, something that no one had written about the candidate before, something about their past that would illuminate them for voters.
She was assigned Fred Thompson.
“It was challenging because it had happened so long ago… it was kind of hard figuring out who can I track down who knows about this. And actually, the campaign wasn’t really helpful. They didn’t have much infrastructure at the time,” she said.
Since Kate was not able to talk to Thompson, she had to get creative, finding people from that time who knew about him. She was fortunate to track down Marie, who was forthcoming. Not only did she also speak to Hal Hardin, the U.S. attorney in Nashville from ’77 to ’81, she also spoke to several reporters who were on the ground, covering the story as it was happening back then: Kirk Loggins, a reporter for The Tennessean, the largest newspaper in the state; Carol Marin, a Nashville television reporter who covered politics and the prison system at the time; and Larry Daughtrey, a reporter who covered the statehouse during the Blanton administration.
As for criticism, she didn’t have much on this particular piece, but when she first started working in banking and economics, there was a steep learning curve. I asked her, feeling very self-conscious about this myself, if she got much flak for covering things she was relatively new to, if she ever got things wrong. I admitted to my own fear of not having a complete enough understanding of something to report on it.
Kate is pretty thin-skinned; she joked that she’s in the wrong profession.
“You’re probably always going to get people who say ‘this story sucks!’… or, ‘you didn’t understand this, you didn’t flesh out all these nuances.’ But I somehow manage to put it out of my head…. You kind of just have to ignore. Unless it’s really legitimate, you can engage with readers. But most of the time, you kind of have to set aside the criticism you get. Just move ahead; get better next time.”
The only criticisms that have ever truly affected her, she said, has come from bosses. She recalled one boss who, though a friend now, made her flinch every time when approaching her about a story she’d turned in.
“Do I have everything right in this story? I mean, I triple and quadruple checked. But she was tough on me. She would challenge me. ‘What are you saying here. I don’t know what that means.’ It really forced me to make sure that I understood… I had to learn to just do it because in the end I knew that on the other end she was going to be would be asking me, ‘what does that mean?’ and I’d have to be able to explain. I couldn’t just slide it into the story and think ‘well that sounds good and I think it makes sense.’ I’d have to know for sure. So that was a bigger concern of mine and it sticks in my head more than criticism from readers.”
As to advice for journalism students, “You just have to get the clips; that’s the biggest most important thing. And then, network network network.”
She suggested connecting with people on LinkedIn. “I totally didn’t appreciate this in the earlier stages of my career but networking is just so important. Take advantage of any connection when you are job searching or looking for internships. Take advantage of any possible connection that you have.”
She acknowledging that I wasn’t in quite the best place for happy hours and networking, but suggested that if I were ever in New York or DC, to ask someone out for coffee and get their advice. She even told me to email her any time I had questions of if there was something she could help me with.
After the interview ended, she followed me back on Twitter. A small thing, perhaps, but it felt wonderful. (Networking: check!)
But ever greater than the follow-back was what she said to me at the very end of the interview, after telling her how I lucked into getting a job at the OU Daily.
“We didn’t even talk about all of the mix-ups in all of this, the various undercurrents of women in journalism, women in the workplace. I’ve said it four times, but when I heard you said it just now, ‘Oh I lucked out, I was just there.’ NO. You got it because you’re good. You do a great job — don’t undersell yourself. It wasn’t an accident. You didn’t fall into it. You are great.”
Thank you, Kate Davidson.
