There has always been a star culture in the media. In the past, the BBC had Alistair Cook, the Daily Mirror Cassandra. Today, tubthumping, harrumphing columnists such as Richard Littlejohn, and celebrity pundits like Piers Morgan, are household names, and filthy rich with it.
The modest Salut! empire has its own stars. Pete Sixsmith writes as well at Salut! Sunderland as do many Fleet Street sports journalists in their papers. Salut! Live's verbatim interviews reveal the brighter lights of folk music - Rachel Unthank, for example, and Karine Polwart - to be handy with words, too. And even Salut! North has the Girl at the Redworth Bus Stop.
Now step forward a new star of Salut!, who happens to be another C Randall (pictured above, on the right).
Christelle Randall is the daughter described by my friend and former colleague Neil Darbyshire has having a "more glamorous media job than her dad".
Now she is putting that job - film publicist handling the likes of Julie Christie, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Neil Young - on hold to follow her African dream.
If Christelle takes her good looks from her father, she inherits her passion for animals, the wilder the better, from her late French grandfather. For the best part of the next three months, she will be participating in a wildlife expedition reserve in South Africa.
She will also be contributing postings on her experiences to Salut!
How often they will appear will depend on her access to the internet. We've already witnessed a couple of Ab Fab in the Jungle moments; she was overheard at a family wedding recently musing on whether she'd have trouble finding a beautician.
But if that suggests the least flippancy or frivolousness in her approach, think again. Christelle makes it her business to know a great deal about the creatures that so fascinate her. This is, for her, a deadly serious project.
And as an expert in making her poor parents fret, she struck a familiar tone with a group e-mail to friends, relatives, colleagues and contacts:
"After the expedition ends, I plan to travel to Rwanda, Botswana, Mozambique and the rest of South Africa. I'll be writing a blog whilst I'm away on my dad's own blog www.salut.com so you can hear about my experiences there. I won't have a phone and I'll be avoiding Facebook for my time away.........If there hasn't been a blog posting for some time it might be safe to assume that I've been eaten."
There's a lot of it about, by which I mean a lot of adventurous spirit.
A good friend, Fiona Barton, declares herself "thrilled and terrified" in equal measure, not at the prospect of attending the editor's morning conference at the Daily Mail, where she has been working for the last few years, but on leaving the paper to do some Voluntary Service Overseas work in Sri Lanka.
Fiona's role will be to train journalists and run workshops "for groups who, traditionally, have no voice", while her husband, Gary, will doubtless find his building skills pretty useful.
I am sure Fiona (pictured with her son Tom), will excel in her chosen route back into journalism, if she'll permit my traditional jest. But it will not make her Littlejohn rich:
"We are based in Colombo, will be paid about £140 a month and get a bicycle. Can't wait."
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