What makes you arc up? What are you passionate about? What topic makes your friends roll their eyes at the pub as soon as you hook on and start opining? It's a question our editor likes to ask hopeful new reporters when interviewing for a new position. The answers are sometimes surprising, often predictable.
Thankfully my years of being a new recruit - a sparkly-eyed hopeful - are far, far behind me. It's also a shame, because I have a ready-made answer to this question. One of the things I am most passionate about is the ever-blurring line between high and low when it comes to news.
It's a line I have straddled for my entire adult life, often, in the past, to the disgust or bewilderment of those who believed (wrongly) that scrolling through the Oscars red carpet gallery, or knowing, somehow, the names of celebrity offspring.
Back in the day, it's true, you had to make a certain amount of effort to learn these facts. Leaf through Who magazine, say, or actually watch a four-hour-long televised awards ceremony (can you imagine?)
Engaging in such activities made me inferior in the eyes of some, I guess, not that I minded. Worse was when those who professed not to care about such things thought this made them superior. I've learnt, over the years, not to care too much about this either.
But I do remember once being profoundly irritated by a friend who, during a discussion about the then-recent break-up of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, announced that she "didn't even know they were married". Whaaaaaa? we all exclaimed. Oh, she said, faux-apologetically, I don't really follow those sorts of things.
What annoyed me most about that was how out of step it was with reality; Brad and Angelina's break-up was front-page news of every newspaper in the world (probably not much of an exaggeration). To claim this information passed you by was to admit that you just ... don't follow the news.
It got me so riled up, she may as well have said, with a shrug, that she refused to recycle, or wear a seat-belt, or vaccinate her children. What she was really saying was that she didn't really engage with the world at large.
We all have our blind spots, and when it comes to pop culture news and celebrity gossip, there are as many levels of knowledge as there are celebrities.
For example, I know, by osmosis, the various couplings of many of the A-listers, and some of their lower counterparts, in the same way that I know, say, the names and occupations of my parents' friends, or the make-up of the current front bench. I know because I know, and I don't know how I came to find out, because the knowledge just appeared. It's something I used to be ever-so-slightly ashamed of, even in the throes of moments of great triumph. I used to worry that retaining such knowledge in my head would be to the detriment of other, more important facts. But I've come to realise over the years that the one does not supplant the other. In fact, I strongly believe that the low enhances the high, and vice versa in immeasurable ways, and that's what makes the world exciting.
The same can be said for most things that make headlines these days. I don't follow cricket, but I note that Michael Clark and his wife Kyley are soon to divorce. They stand out in my mind mainly because she rode a horse during their wedding ceremony. I challenge any Australian to deny even the vaguest knowledge of this fact.
I'll never forget an evening, back in the early 2000s, when I was called upon by a senior editor to attend a charity trivia night for a high-profile law firm. Our table won, and it was only because I was able to answer a question nobody else could: name all five Spice Girls and their real names.
To this day, I can't comprehend how there could be anyone who doesn't just know the answer to this question. But I did, and do, and we won and I was crowned the evening's trivia queen - me, the ditzy journalist wannabe among all these intellectual lawyer types.
For the record, I think I could probably name all of the Spice Girls' offspring as well - naming celebrity offspring was, back in the day, a party trick of mine. But it's here that I can see the hairs of knowledge splitting quite definitively. I think you'd be hard pressed to find many people who couldn't identify, say, a Kardashian, but as for their respective partners and children? That's getting into the real nitty gritty - that's some specialist knowledge.
And then there's all the flotsam and jetsam of reality television, the bachelors and single girls and married-at-first-sights. Why any free citizen would sit through even five minutes of this stuff without howling from boredom is beyond me, but I don't think this makes me superior.
And look, these days, I've mellowed. I'm also, it must be said, old and out of touch. I may have ogled the Oscars red carpet with glee this week but I certainly didn't know who three quarters of the people wearing them were.
Just leave me to scroll through the dresses worn by those beautiful strangers who, for one night of the year, have access to literally any dress on the planet - let me look at said dresses and judge them harshly!
But don't pretend you didn't know they were on. Don't bother. It doesn't matter one way or the other, but at least phrase your disdain in real terms.
I saw they were on, and chose not to care, you could say. Or, I've been too busy to pay attention to the world around me. Anything but wholesale dismissal of the kinds of information tidbits that, nowadays, are integral to the way we all consume our news.
Come to think of it, maybe I'm not as passionate about this as I thought.
Maybe my chance to impress a prospective employer with my fervent beliefs has passed. Perhaps it's for the best.
Sally Pryor
As features editor at The Canberra Times, I love telling people things they didn't know - or even things they've always known - about the city we live in.
As features editor at The Canberra Times, I love telling people things they didn't know - or even things they've always known - about the city we live in.
