Today is a new day! I woke up with the classroom conversation still vaguely on my mind but I knew I had to shake that lost feeling and get a grip on reality because today we are to visit Xiamen Daily.
Xiamen Daily has a a well earned reputation of being the oldet, best, and most respected newspaper in Xiamen. My professor was able to secure a few internship postion for the group slip between Xiamen Daily and a local paper, The Straight Harold.
Today I am among the group interning for the journalism marketing and new media branch. We traveled by bus for 45 minutes to the office located in Downtown Xiamen. When we arrived there was the editor and cheif of the paper. She was exteremly pleased to see us but could hardly express this emotion. Dr. Zhou knew she did not speak enough english to communicate efficiently with the group, so he brought one of our classmates, Emma, to assist in translating for her.
She took us to a meeting room where she offered us some tea and lychee. Oh how I fallen in the love with that duo. The meeting lasted for about an hour as we discussed everything Xiamen Daily was doing to keep their viewers interested. Across the globe the written paper is on life support similar to the printed paper in America. We discussed the tactics they used to save the paper and compared the tactics used around the globe.
Later we went to an area filled with surprising young staff. They were over new media, which included apps, twitter and facebook-like pages, as well as an app named wechat that is used by majority of people in Xiamen. This was the coolest part to me becuase though the government does not allow their citizen to use facebook or twitter Chinese people have created their own version of social media. I was fascinated by how well they could communicate with their audience using the app.
We finished our tour of the establishment then proceeded to the exit. Our professor told us that we would soon return to being our internship which lit our eyes ablaze and our minds focused on the work ahead.