First an odd note: Some people out there define Trash as anything outside of what they could learn in their schools curriculum. What does this mean? Recently we were told that including fine arts made the packets too trashy. That amuses me. I'll just file this as more proof that how we debate these issues makes no sense, primarily because these issues mean different things to everyone.

Why current events were abandoned, and how we get them back.
Back in the day (current events was around 20% of all packets) I can sum up how we lost current events in two steps. First, we fell victim to the worst impulse in packet writing, packet deadlines. If you're writing for a packet deadline, what is the most obvious method of creating a current events question? Simple: open up Newsweek, or CNN.com, or whatever. Guess what, EVERYONE DOES THAT with the deadline approaching. So what happens: You end up with a bunch of questions submitted, which are identical to each other, reflecting not current events, but only what's in the newspaper on the day of the deadline. Unsatisfactory, especially when you go killing repeats. The moment I saw this begin to affect things on a grand scale was QOTC 1996. The big joke was that of 19 submitted packets, 9 of them referenced Mad Cow Disease (10 if you count that my team name was Cornell Mad Cow.) All of those were cut out. So suddenly the real interesting story, which provided intriguing current events questions, was out of the tournament. Result: harder, more obscure, and less interesting current events.
The second element of current events falling out of favor, was simply that when campaigns were led for other categories, no one would defend current events. Current events tossups are difficult to write, where the answer is not a person, or some sort of biography-type question (by that I mean a question basically retelling the origin of a person/group/movement/company/artwork.) Since we've been on a fairly absolutist purge of biography of any kind, current events was a natural casualty. Add to that, there is no natural constituency within quizbowl for it. By that, I mean that no major that is well-represented in quizbowl benefits from the inclusion of current events. Like the other fields that have been attacked as "not academic" or "not part of real quiz bowl" (current events, geography, general knowledge, pop culture, and sports), the draw for these categories is not based in a set of collegiate majors, but in a broad-based "things that people pick up in real life". The majors which could defend current events (business/finance, journalism, communication, international relations, etc.) aren't typical majors quiz bowlers gravitate towards. That we don't draw heavily from these is a different problem, and a rather shameful one, but one I can't offer solution to today.

The saving grace, and what makes them worth writing, is that primarily current events questions are about the interaction of elements. Those individual elements are what makes a set of answers that you can use, and the interaction of those elements is what makes them interesting. It makes them ideal for bonus questions.

So how do we make them work? Well, the two best ideas I can offer are to write them more, and write them more often. The two best writers of current events I'd ever seen (Pat Matthews and Eric Tentarelli, both unfortunately no longer writing) both wrote them ahead of deadlines. Additionally, they wrote them constantly. So if a tournament deadline was 3 weeks out, they'd have questions to put in from a variety of times, and a variety of subjects. Use that as a model. The second thing I can suggest is that if we want 2/2 current events out of 20 (to my mind not an unreasonable level), we shouldn't expect 3/3 for 30 to give enough questions to avoid repeats. Repeats are the hardest part of this for the editor, so we should give them the opportunity to avoid them, by putting more questions into the set for current events. So 2/2 in the edited packet should correspond to 4/4 in the submitted packet.

In a similar vein, things lost which should be found, consider this report on geography.