In every journalist’s career, there are moments that stand out for reasons both good and strange.

For Jessica Yellin, who recently joined CNN’s Capitol Hill unit after covering the White House for ABC, there are two.

One was traveling on Air Force One with President Bush last year as a White House correspondent for ABC News and being whisked away with a small group of reporters for a meeting in the presidential quarters. At first, the scribes did not want to go. They were caught up watching a movie and were antsy to see the ending.

They didn’t know where they were being led. But soon, the carpet turned more plush, the furniture more exquisite.

They were being led to a meeting with Bush. Yellin looked around, semi-stunned. “I was sitting there saying, Now you literally have a seat at the table,” she recalls.

Another memorable moment involved, of all things, Astroturf. Living in Orlando, Fla., she had done a story on the lush factor of the quintessential fake grass. It was her first story that aired on CNN. “But it’s very realistic-looking,” she claims of Astroturf. “I think it’s called faux grass. They had plastic dirt inside, but it always looked dewy.”

Petite with dark blond hair, Yellin is a pistol of a woman who doesn’t act like anything or anyone would scare her.

She insists she is over 5 feet tall, but won’t elaborate except to say, “I project taller.”

She wakes early. “I now think of it as an indulgence to sleep until 7 a.m.,” she says, recalling the early days of working for “Good Morning America” in Los Angeles, when she had to wake up at 5 a.m. “I’ve worked bad hours,” she says. “You just get used to being tired and cranky.”

At this point, the baristas at Starbucks in Dupont Circle know her drink — a soy cappuccino — although these days she’s trying to watch the soy.

“I have too much,” she says. “Too much soy? Not so good for you.”

Her morning routine involves the coffee as well as what she calls “a manic combination” of reading the paper, scanning what’s online and “doing random yoga stretches.”

But Yellin hardly seems cranky. Instead, she marvels at all there is to cover on Capitol Hill, and looks up to broadcast journalists like ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, CNN veteran Wolf Blitzer and Campbell Brown, who recently joined the network.

“It’s the opposite of the White House,” she says. “There’s so much access and so much information. It’s challenging to stop and say, ‘This is where I have to break and start getting my story.’ ”

Earlier in life, Yellin thought she wanted to be a politician. Growing up in Los Angeles, she watched her father involve himself in city issues, renovating urban buildings in blighted areas and enlisting in the Marines in Vietnam.

Later, after studying modern American history at Harvard, she pursued some other career choices but discovered she was better suited to watching the politician instead of being the politician.

“It was disillusioning to me that I didn’t want to be in the position to make compromises,” she says. “[There] is a real civic contribution you can make as a reporter if you ask the questions that need to be asked.”

Yellin began her career in Orlando, working for News 13, a 24-hour cable station. She was a one-woman band, carrying her own camera, shooting her own tape. “It was great training and impossibly hard,” she says, recalling the outlandish news she covered, like sinkholes and people driving into lakes.

Years later, during her stint at the White House, she says, she frequently clashed with former White House spokesman Scott McClellan. “One time he said to me, ‘Don’t be so dramatic.’ ”

She was dismayed: “At first you think, ‘Maybe I’m overstepping?’ ”

But the more evasive she felt the White House was, “the more free you feel pushing next time.”

Yellin says people occasionally recognize her. She once remembers a woman in Florida nudging her husband and saying, “’Look, Harold, it’s the girl from TV. She’s nothing but a runt.’” She also copes with her mother, who regularly critiques her live shots. “The problem is, sometimes she’s right,” Yellin says, laughing.