In the news business you need to be flexible.
No, I’m not talking yoga or circus training here, I’m talking mental flexibility.
Reporters are required to know a least a little bit about a lot of things at any one time. Right now, for example, we all tend to know at least a bit about the Trans Mountain pipeline and the upcoming election on electoral reform in B.C.
Aside from keeping abreast of these broader issues, we’re often expected to know about a lot of local goings-on as well. Amalgamation of Duncan and North Cowichan, for instance, is a hot topic right now, along with the search for missing 41-year-old Ben Kilmer, and the upcoming Duncan Has Talent competition.
But it’s also not uncommon for me to get a phone call about an old story that ran in the Citizen. It could be from last week, last month, last year, or at some nebulous time in the decade prior to that. I’ve got pretty good recall, especially if it was a big to-do or issue (think contaminated soil or the North American Indigenous Games).
Sometimes I’ll remember quite a bit of detail — kind of like how I remember lyrics to songs from 10 years ago that I didn’t even like, but unfortunately heard enough times for them to take up permanent space in my brain (no matter how much I wish they wouldn’t when they inevitably come back to haunt me when they get stuck on a loop in my head for reasons unknown).
Other times just a name or circumstance of the story will twig a memory, and I’ll have to look it up for full facts. This is where computer search engines are so useful. They have made the finding process infinitely easier in many ways, as key words are often all you need to turn a fuzzy memory into a concrete history.
Or, as happened this week, I’ll get a call from somebody looking for some kind of community information. On Wednesday morning a gentleman called me asking if I knew of an organization in the Cowichan Valley to whom he could pose a question about a bird. That is by far not the strangest request I’ve had over the years. I may or may not be able to answer your question, but I’ll always give it a shot. (Though if you could have just looked in the phone book, perhaps try that first.) And with the diverse lot we have here in the newsroom that I can ask if my font of knowledge fails me, we manage to provide a surprising amount of information on a range of topics.
So reporters (and editors) are required to jump from topic to topic during the course of a day, or even an hour, with some kind of fluency.
I’m counting on the workout to keep my brain young.