(Ironically enough, I was originally planning to write about the non-news - even by sports standards - of the Blue Jays firing one of their beer vendors.)
Click here! It will take you to a test of your 'News IQ' - twelve questions about relatively current news items. It's an American test, so the focus is on American news (and international news that got big play in the States.)
I scored 10/12, which considering I only *knew* eight (the others were 50/50 guesses at best), is a great score.
Unfortunately, the site seems to think it's a *really* great score, as I did better than 83% of surveyed Americans. Considering I try to avoid all but the biggest American political stories, I think this backs up the 'worrying lack of news awareness' people far smarter than I have deduced.
When I was in my first year of journalism school, the profs decided to give all the students "news quizzes". There weren't any trick questions, and as long as you read the front page of a newspaper or watched the first five minutes of television news (etc.), you'd do fine. Most people complained that the first few quizzes were too hard, so bonus marks were handed out liberally. I'm not entirely sure what point I'm trying to illustrate here, but if you can't answer "What happened last week at Dawson College in Montreal?" (the week after two people were killed in a shooting there), maybe journalism isn't really the right career for you.
And maybe Americans should pay more attention to the news, and less to what Miley Cyrus is doing. (Although Steven Page getting arrested for cocaine posession is, of course, completely different.) Or maybe the quiz just asked some stupid questions.
--Ryan
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