By Xu Binglan
Senior Writer, China Daily
Beijing, China

Most of the Friendly Fellows would probably agree that we learned a lot during the fellowship, about American journalism system, the society and the people. Professionally, my experiences during the fellowship reinforced some journalism principles in my mind. This achievement does not sound exciting. But it is very natural that we, as experienced journalists, are not easily amazed by newsroom activities in our host papers, even though we are working in the most developed journalism system in the world. I take the reinforcement of the principles as being very important for me because I believe I am now much clearer about how important accuracy is for journalism and what kind of writing style a newspaper reporter should use to win readership. The significance of accuracy in journalism was a highlighted point of both Jonathan Friendly and Christopher Callahan during the orientation seminars in Washington. And we got an excellent example—the media's coverage of the election night—at the end of the fellowship.

This example made me realize how big the pressure could be to maintain accuracy as the top priority in the face of fierce competition and what a serious news organization should do under situations like this. I also learned from the election night and the following day that giving in to the pressure of competition at the possible expense of inaccurate reports could lead to great shame.

We all know CNN had bad performance on the election night. Austin American Statesman, a competing newspaper to my host, San Antonio Express-News, also sold out hundreds of papers declaring Bush won the presidency. But news organizations like Associated Press and the Express-News restrained themselves from doing so although they were under great pressure.

I was in Austin watching reactions of Bush supporters and realized how bad a taint CNN had put on itself. I discussed the issue later with Express-News editors and realized how much they cherished their decision to choose a safe approach. It seems that you can never be wrong to start an article with a story of a specific person that is closely associated with a news event. Stories about families or individuals under some special situation always have a big chance of getting applause. Neither can you be wrong if you talk about a news event's impact to somebody's beloved ones—mom, kids and/or spouse.

I always knew that human-interest stories or the human-interest part of stories could be selling points for newspapers. After being a business writer for a national newspaper more than five years, I seem to have lost my attention for such stories. A story of mine about a local couple with a 75-year-old marriage and their big family won praises from numerous people—both readers and colleagues. I just took it as a very common story when I wrote it. I never expected it to warm the hearts of so many people.

The final point I would mention is about hard news writing style—how to distinguish newspaper writing from television reporting and Internet news. I have always been trying to put the five Ws in the lead when I wrote hard news back in China. But the reality I find in San Antonio Express-News and in other American newspapers is that you can find some classic leads in hard news but usually they are not classic. The lead could be a vivid description of a person or the setting or something else. These unorthodox leads could be more sensational than the traditional ones but I have been holding the belief that leads for hard news stories should usually be more direct.

This belief of mine, however, was changed after witnessing my host paper's handling of the Blackthorne case, which is about the rich guy's plotting of murder for hire. The Simpson-style case was a focus for people in town for almost the whole year. It was a big deal when this guy was declared to be guilty. But the guilty verdict did not appear in the story until the tenth paragraph. My colleagues explained to me that in the era of television and Internet–where people could get the news as soon as the event happened—newspaper reports have to do something different, something deeper to distinguish themselves.

That is a simple fact. But this was really the first time that I confirmed that you can come up with an unorthodox lead style like this, even for hard news. Maybe this kind of lead should be the orthodox one for all the stories where newspapers find that they are not the first information outlet.