亲历邓小平死讯报道

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       Let experience be the teacher of good journalism
        It was almost 10 pm when the phone rang in my home.
      “Were you very busy in your newsroom tonight?” a young lady asked me over the phone.
      “Who are you?” I asked.
      “I am Kathy Chen with the Wall Street Journal,” she said.
      “No, I was not particularly busy tonight,” I said.
      “I mean whether you were busy with some big story tonight?”
      “I did not come across any big news events tonight,” I said.”Actually I came back home earlier than usual.”
      After putting down the phone, my gut told me that something happened. I was then the director of the political desk with Xinhua News Agency. It was the first time a western correspondent made a phone call to my home in my 10 years of working with the official news agency.
      I picked up the phone again and called the night-shift editor in Xinhua newsroom..
      ”Are you busy now?” I asked.
      “No breaking news tonight,” he said. “We are ready to go back home.”
      I came back to bed.  But the phone started ringing again when I was sound sleep. I turned on the light. It was almost 1 A.M.
      “Li Xiguang, come downstairs immediately,” a man said in a deep voice.”The car is waiting for you.”
      “Who are you?” I yelled at him to bring it on. Actually I was scared by the mid-night call. I suspected the secret police was coming to take me away because I spoke to a western reporter a few hours earlier.
      “I am a driver from Xinhua,” the man said .
      A black Mercedes Benz car drove me away from my home in the westerns suburb of Beijing all the way to the headquarters of Xinhua in the downtown.
      When the car passed by the General Hospital of PLA, I saw the main building was full of light. Cars with the white military license plates beginning with A01 went in and out in a continual stream. “Was he really dead?” I asked myself. A week ago, I was told in an internal meeting not to leave Beijing in case to prepare obituary for Deng Xiaoping.
      When I walked into the newsroom, Wang Zongyin, director of Xinhua World Service Department, took me and my colleagues to his office on the 14th floor and locked door. He handed us a lengthy document which was marked with “Top secret” and asked us to edit it into English.
      “We shall dispatch it at all possible speed,” he told us. The international media had been waiting weeks for the news. But they would not report it until Xinhua confirmed it.
      At 2:07 A.M February 20, 1997, our brief bulletin was sent out: ”Chinese veteran leader Deng Xiaoping died of illness at the age of 92 in Beijing at 9:08 P.M. February 19, 1997.”
      In just one second after we reported the death, AFP became the first international news agency to pick up the story. Before the sun rose in Beijing and before most Chinese woke up from their bed, people around the world had learned the news from radio and television which interrupted their regular programs with our bulletin.
      My on-the-ground experience of reporting the death of Deng Xiaoping is in the hundreds of cases and examples I cites in my newly-published textbook News Reporting and Writing. I want students find the book not only instructive in their school studies, but also a living reference to serve them through the years, specially at a time when we are witnessing the explosion of journalism outlets in China, the power of media is much greater than just a few years ago.
      China today has over 2,000 newspapers, 9,000 magazines, 400 million Internet users, 300 million weibo users and 700 million mobile phone users. This is a huge market for journalism education, but also a big challenge to journalistic ethics such as verification of facts.
      In a forward to the 800-page textbook, UNESCO representative Abhimanyu Singh writes, ”Current issues and trends including the emergence of multimedia platforms and new forms of journalism are redefining journalism practice. The quality of journalistic work is increasingly under threat as it moves from a journalism of verification to a journalism of assertion. In this context, journalism education should not only teach students how to write, but teach them to verify.”
      I am glad many international media educators share my and UNESCO viewpoints. In an introduction to my book, Professor Seymour Topping from Columbia University writes,  ” The textbook is not only a hands-on manual for developing the technical skills required for effective news reporting and editing, it also lay down important ethical guidelines. It urges the aspiring journalists to stick with the facts in news coverage.”
      In my 26 years of being a working journalist and journalism educator, I believe that journalism education is more a hand-on work. Since I founded the new journalism program at Tsinghua University 12 years ago, I have encouraged Chinese journalism professors to use their first-hand experiences to teach. I want to change the role of journalism students from passive and painful memorization to a pleasant and interesting life experience. I hope my new textbook will give students more fun than tedious work.

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