By Zhiming “Diego” Xin
China Daily
Beijing, China
Hosted by the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

We, the Alfred Friendly Press Fellows, arrived in the US at a special time - special in the sense that the newspaper industry, already pinched by the rise of the Internet, has to cope with the severe challenges of an economic recession.

As we are leaving the US, the good news for the US economy is that it may have gone through its worst period. For us, the best of our careers may have just begun after five months of a first-hand, skill-honing fellowship in a US newsroom.

What have I learned from this experience? How can I pass it on to the young journalists back home? Well, simple as they seem to be, I feel it is hard to give a definite answer, because it’s more a feeling than a concrete idea.

My first impression is about the “free press”. How free is it? Well, I don’t know. But I’ve shadowed my colleagues to the courthouse, the government, the legislature, the police station and commercial companies. The reporters dealt with those big-name government officials, legislators and businessmen as equals. All involved in the “game” understood properly their equality, with due respect to each other. I know that it’s, at least partly, a result of the Constitution and the Amendments, which guarantee freedom of speech and the press.

On September 17th there was a story on the Constitution Day in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It said that many people, including some journalists, carry a pocket book of the Constitution with them everyday. Free press and respect for the Constitution has become an unspoken right. It’s unimaginable in my country.

Free press could be having lofty ideas, but it means much more than that. It could also be embodied in everyday reporting and writing. For example, in my host newsroom, journalists have always tried to make their own stories — instead of re-writing government or court releases — by interviewing people and looking for interesting perspectives. As Akos Beothy, a former AFPF Fellow from Hungary, asked: “Why do we have to rely on our government and company sources, acting more like a PR-agency than journalists?”

In the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which is a not-so-famous, more localized newspaper compared with those international newspapers, you can hardly find “hard” news. It’s partly a result of the competition from the Internet, but I can unmistakably see the endeavor of my colleagues to find interesting angles to tell a “human interest” story. They always try to interview more people and tell their personal stories. It’s a good strategy to engage readers; it’s also a good way of doing journalism.

If there’s any skill I’ve learned, I would say I had some practice doing business stories and making them more like features. In the limited number of stories I’ve done for my host newspaper, the most impressive thing for me is my relentless effort to make my story different from news releases. The most challenging of it is to produce an enticing lead. I have not done that successfully (I’ve usually spent most of the time figuring out a good lead; it’s much easier to complete the other parts), but I’ve read numerous of my colleague’s headlines, such as in the September 17th St. Paul Pioneer Press, in which Richard Chin used the lead: “The Constitution is never far from Chuck Samuelson’s heart.” He used a pun to indicate the fact that many people not only keep a small book of Constitution in their breast pocket, but also keep the ideals of Constitution in their heart.

Using a pun requires much linguistic skill and wit, something not all writers could accomplish. But there are other easier ways to make our stories more readable, such as starting them by relating someone’s personal story. As always, it’s easy to find and memorize tips on how to write business stories as features, but it’s hard to carry them out in real writing practice. It takes time, energy and persistence to improve in that direction.

Another thing I’ve learned from my host newspaper is the combined use of multimedia and print and the cooperation between the print and the online sections to cater to the readership. For example, when something significant cropped up, the writers would first write a short piece for the website before digging deeper to write a story for the print edition. While my host newspaper doesn’t make many multimedia videos, sometimes it put Youtube clips on their website, such as the one on a September 14 emergency landing of a German plane with landing gear problems. Of course, the editors must be very careful to abide by the intellectual property rights and rules and make sure not to pick up the wrong video.

Reporters and editors do make mistakes, however which I learned during my fellowship in the US. On July 5, China’s Xinjiang saw a brutal mass killing tragedy, in which more than 100 ordinary Han people were killed by a local minority group. The US newspapers reacted enthusiastically and promptly to cover the event. Their reporters interviewed extensively the local minority group, related in detail how they were treated “unfairly” in the past, and how “peaceful” they were this time, without mentioning the fact that they brutally killed more than 100 people in their “peaceful demonstrations”! They did mention the number of deaths, but in a way as if those dead were all from the minority group crushed by the Chinese government.

Those newspapers also quoted the Chinese government, but it seems they did it simply to have it refuted later by giving more voices to that minority group. They went so far that in a picture shot by Reuters, in which the Reuters caption was “People who were injured during riots …”, a major US newspaper simply changed it to “Uighurs injured at a hospital …”, while the face of the man and his name card on the wall clearly indicate he is a Han Chinese, not a Uighur. The editor could explain it away by saying he/she can’t tell Han Chinese from Uighur Chinese. Then since he/she can’t tell them from each other, why did he/she make the change? I don’t know why the editor of that internationally renowned newspaper made the mistake, but it’s thought-provoking. What they did reminded me of last year’s incident in Tibet in which some western newspapers simply used fake pictures or changed pictures to show the “brutality” of Chinese troops.

I’m very upset, since they are newspapers from which I’m supposed to learn how to do good journalism -- fair, balanced and accurate. Apart from feeling upset, I should learn some lessons from them, too.

1. Never take something for granted. For a long time, thanks to ideological differences, the Chinese government has always been described as “communist” (every English speaker knows what “communism” means). So I guess many journalists simply take it for granted that whatever the Chinese government does, it’s wrong. It’s an easy way of doing journalism, but is it a good way?
2. Try to be balanced, fair and accurate, no matter how different a journalist’s opinion is from the party he/she is going to cover. It takes a lot of time, energy and effort to achieve this. It’s no simple task.

Back home, I’ll talk with the young reporters on what I’ve learned in the US. I’ll also talk to the senior editors about the practice of my host newspaper and how they try to embrace modern techniques, such as social networking and multimedia, to make their reporting more intriguing to the readers.