The camera was on, but the farm owner in front of the camera had his mouth closed. Wu Zheng, who was in charge of the record, stared at the notebook and thought to himself, the interview is probably going to be cold.
This is the second day of the Suzhou group of Fudan University's "Record China" project this summer, and students are interviewed in Mingyuewan Village, Xishan Island, located in the middle of Taihu Lake, and Wu Zheng, a 2020 undergraduate student of the School of Journalism, is one of the five team members.
According to the introduction of the secretary of the village party branch before, this farm owner was once a local "thorn head", and after opening a farm, his life improved and he was quite open among the villagers. The students pondered that perhaps he could use his story to show the development of ancient villages in a small way.
But the questions were thrown over one by one, and the farm owner simply spat out a few words and never said a word. The interview ended hastily in an awkward atmosphere.
Talking about this experience, the students were very depressed, but Weng Zhihao, a teacher at the School of Journalism of Fudan University who accompanied the team, felt precious. "Textbooks don't teach students these things. For example, the ability to communicate with people and the insight into society can only accumulate experience in actual combat. The current students have excellent international vision and knowledge reserves, but they are too far away from the grassroots and too far from China's real society. ”
"The new media technology revolution has profoundly changed the way we approach information, and has also subverted traditional research on news communication in all aspects. We need to reframe journalism. Zhang Taofu, executive dean of the School of Journalism at Fudan University, said. With the emergence of new technologies and new platforms, the journalism community and the industry have always played the role of "catch-up". "On the one hand, we need to cultivate students' ability to quickly understand and apply new technologies, and on the other hand, we also need to strengthen the cultivation of core capabilities." The essence of journalism is still close to reality. ”
The "Record China" project was initiated by the School of Journalism of Fudan University and the surging news, and has been carried out for 6 consecutive periods so far. During this period, the footprints of college students covered 23 provinces across the country, from the central and western regions to the poverty alleviation, to the development and opening up of the eastern coastal cities, and then to the construction of large country projects, covering 78 counties and cities, and interviewing more than 500 people. In addition, there are also social research projects "Walking the Yangtze River Delta" carried out in cooperation with the South Wind Window Yangtze River Delta Research Institute, and a series of social practice projects of "News Frontline" independently planned by the School of Journalism.
"How can Chinese journalism education go out of its own way?" This is a proposition that Fudan Journalism School has been thinking about. Only by stepping out of the campus and out of the ivory tower can students have a more complete understanding of the country and society. The place they themselves have walked is the China they really perceive. Zhang Taofu said.
In 2019, the Yantai Dalian group interviewed local residents of Long Island.
"Bringing the classroom to earth"
Wu Zheng first heard "Record China" before enrolling in school. "It can be said that 'recording China' is one of the reasons why I chose Fudan News." She said firmly.
This girl with glasses and round face is from Nantong, Jiangsu Province, loves literature, and has read "Dream of the Red Chamber" 12 times. Her college entrance examination score reached the starting line of Peking University, but the major to be admitted was not her favorite, so she went to Fudan to understand the situation.
In the school building of Fudan Journalism College, Wu Zheng was immediately attracted when he heard the project "Record China" from the mouth of the interpreter.
The theme of "Documenting China" is closely related to the development of the country's times: the theme of 2016 is "Winning the Battle of Poverty Alleviation", 2017 is to retrace the road of southwest United University moving west more than 80 years ago, 2018 is to commemorate the 40th anniversary of reform and opening up, 2019 is to focus on the big country project, and 2020 is to focus on the change of hometown. These reports are not boring because of the grandeur of the theme, but there are characters and details that can be read. There is a report that Wu Zheng was very impressed, it detailed a fisherman's day, showing the current situation of the local fishing industry.
In 2019, the Yantai Dalian group interviewed Xiao Luping, a cadre stationed on the island, and Xiao Luping was emotionally tearful when talking about the separation of the family.
"Change at the national level still has to fall on specific people. As a journalist, you can meet many different people and see different aspects of things. She felt that her passion for journalism as a child was ignited, and she was more determined to study journalism.
Explaining to Wu Zheng was the 2019 master's degree student of the School of Journalism. She is the project leader of Record China. Xu Hui remembers that when the project was first launched in March 2016, the teachers of Fudan Journalism School and the reporters of The Paper sat together to discuss the framework, and the most emphasized point was that "we can't go around and look at the flowers", and we must let students participate in a complete news production process "with real knives and guns", and determine the topic, interview, write, and finally publish the report.
Chen Liangfei, director of the Political Information Department of The Paper, was also present at the time. He proposed that the project should have a large layout and the interview locations should be diverse. "I found that the students' work revolves around the surrounding areas of Fudan, although these are also realities, but the students seem to be able to pay more attention to a wider range of things, and can feel the pulse of the development of the Chinese era." Chen Liangfei said.
Finally, it was agreed that in addition to the faculty teachers of the college, each group would be accompanied by a surging journalist as a teacher in the industry. "It can be said that the classroom has been moved to the ground." Chen Liangfei concluded.
In May this year, near the end of the term, the 2021 summer "Record China" project began to register, with the theme of "Big Country Town", that is, through in-depth interviews with the town, from point to point to face to show the face of national construction and development. The route is mainly divided into 5 routes: Shaxi Ancient Town, Dali Prefecture, Yunnan Province, Moutai Town, Zunyi City, Guizhou Province, Xunhegang Town, Xinyang City, Henan Province, Yaoli Town, Jingdezhen City, Jiangxi Province, and Suxiu Town, Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province.
Some of Wu Zheng's relatives were in Suzhou, and they felt that it was relatively easy to get started, so they handed in the registration form for Suzhou.
Also registering for the first time was Zhong Qinrui, an undergraduate student of the Class of 2019. Zhong Qinrui, who grew up in Zhejiang with a ponytail and typing super fast, reported to the Guizhou group and "wanted to look at places completely different from the coastal areas."
There is also some "veterans" in the registration form.
Liu Haoran, a 2018 undergraduate who has registered for the second time, did not pick a route, "as long as you leave Shanghai." In 2019, he was not originally a Guizhou group, some people wanted to change, he felt that it didn't matter where he went, he changed, and the result was an unforgettable experience - a group of people sat on the dangling engineering elevator, arrived at the bridge deck of the Pingtangte Bridge, which is more than 200 meters above the ground and has not yet closed the dragon, as if they are on the top of the mountain.
In 2019, in addition to visiting the Pingtang Special Bridge, the Guizhou group also visited the Great and Small Well Special Bridge.
Li Dawu, an undergraduate student in the class of 2018, is the third time to register. He is from Hainan, but he claims to be a "spiritual Jiangnan person", so he signed up for the Suzhou group this time. He loves to write, and he always exudes some local feelings between his words. "When I cross the land of China back and forth, its thickness and breadth remind me again and again: to see, to observe the pace of development at the grassroots level, to see big things and small things, to see living people." He wrote.
Break down cognition
On July 4, the Suzhou group set off. However, the first two days of interviews were not very smooth.
Before the farm owner mentioned at the beginning, the students also interviewed the secretary of the village party branch, but they did not get much. "He didn't talk about the conservation of ancient villages that we really care about." Wu Zheng said.
After leaving the owner's house, everyone is reviewing why the interview failed.
It was mentioned that the problems were not adequately prepared and that the general big problems should be disassembled into more nuanced minor problems. Some people analyze, maybe the other party does not like the camera, do not want to tell their own story in front of so many unfamiliar people. Some people speculate that perhaps the other party is hindered by the presence of village cadres and it is inconvenient to speak from the heart.
"The ability to deal with people is also an important factor in determining the success or failure of interviews." Mr. Li said he thought of a detail from last year's participation in "Documenting China." He used to use his laptop for records during interviews. The reporter on the team discussed this with him - when typing on the computer, you may not be able to make eye contact with the interviewee, he does not know what is on your computer screen, whether he will be distracted, he will have a knot in his heart. "I learned to try to dissolve the pimple as much as possible, not to let him produce such a pimple." Li Dawu said.
In the afternoon of the same day, the Suzhou group ushered in a turnaround. The interviewee was very cooperative. Students took turns asking questions, and questions that they didn't have a chance to ask in the morning were answered. Thinking that the content of the ancient village had fallen, Wu Zheng was relieved.
In July this year, the Suzhou group interviewed in the Old Hall of Dongshan Town, Suzhou City.
For students, "documenting China" is a cognitively disruptive process.
Zhong Qinrui's original concept of Moutai Town in Guizhou stayed in the existence of a "Moutai Group", and later learned that there were 3,000 large and small wineries in this town.
Before stepping into these large and small wineries, she thought that the winery was full of wine aromas, but she did not expect that the scene was full of vinegar-like sourness; she imagined that the wineries had modern assembly lines like beverage factories, but she did not expect that some breweries had a very primitive working environment, the wine was piled up like a hill, the workers were working bare-chested, and the visitors had to pay attention to their feet to prevent falling into the pit.
Before going to the bridge in Guizhou, Liu Haoran imagined that the workers who built the bridge might be local migrant workers, but in fact many of them were college students, who operated cutting-edge machinery that could achieve accurate measurements, and that they were proud of their words. The students also went to the staff dormitory, and the result was completely different from the imaginary shed, although the structure was simple, but the living area, leisure area, and seminar area were all available.
The Record China program is problem-oriented, and in addition to breaking the perception, students need to establish their own reporting topics.
It's not easy. Before leaving, in order to determine the topic of Suzhou Mingyuewan Ancient Village, Wu Zheng flipped through the introduction on the government website, and also read a lot of gorgeous recommendations of social platforms for this Internet celebrity punch card, but it was difficult to understand the real town life from these words; a group submitted questions about all aspects of the town, and the reporter jokingly asked: "Are you planning to write a book?" ”
With the deepening of the interview, the reporters in the team found that the students' problems gradually began to be close to reality.
The Henan group intends to explore why Xinyang's Maojian tea leaves do not come out of the circle. But how to cut in exactly? Group leader Chen Zhiqin had no clue at first. It was not until she stood on the local tea hill and saw the old woman who was still bending down to hoe grass in the tea field under the scorching sun, and her understanding of the difficulty of local transformation began to become concrete - although the local tea farmers have been lifted out of poverty, life is still difficult, young people go out to work, and the tea farmers left behind are seriously aging.
Students in the Guizhou group pondered why Moutai wine was so expensive. The focus at the beginning fell on scarcity. They learned that in the local Chinese Wine Culture City, before the epidemic, there were a large number of people waiting in line every day, and the maximum value of the 60 yuan ticket in their hands was that they could buy two bottles of Moutai wine at the original price of 1499. The wine can be sold at a price increase of 1,000 yuan immediately after going out.
At a large hotel in town, they found that such a scarce wine could actually be bought at the original price of 1499 yuan, but there were not many orderers. why? Originally, the hotel asked guests to drink and return the bottle on the spot. "Under the premise of not being able to collect, very few people order a bottle of Maotai just to drink." The team members summed it up in a later essay.
"Digitization brings more information, but it doesn't deliver complex, three-dimensional people; fragmented, fast text on the platform makes it difficult to understand the full picture of the event." Zhong Qinrui concluded seriously.
The dilemma of journalism
"Honestly, I didn't really want to be a journalist for a while." Wu Zheng said. Fudan School of Journalism currently implements the "2 + X" training model, that is, in the first and second academic years, any one of them is selected in the directions of economics, law, sociology, electronic information science and technology; the third and fourth academic years are studied according to the training program of the major in the discipline of journalism and communication. So students will also face a choice when they are sophomores and juniors.
Wu Zheng's feelings are not isolated. Shao Jing, a teacher at Fudan University, is a teacher who "records China" every year and usually has a close relationship with students. She vaguely felt that journalism theory was becoming more and more profound, but many students' enthusiasm for learning journalism had faded, and their papers were "task-based", lacking the sense of harvest achieved after research; some students said that journalists had less income, insufficient sense of achievement, and felt that "it is difficult to influence anything by relying on a report"
Weng Zhihao understands the students' confusion, and he feels that this part reflects the dilemma of current journalism education - not close enough to reality.
In the first week after the end of the summer, on September 3, the School of Journalism of Fudan University held an internal seminar, and Professor Li Liangrong raised a question: "Now the graduation thesis of master's students and doctoral students, the basic theoretical framework is Western, and we can't find one of our Chinese." In 1956, Professor Wang Zhong's goal was to establish a discourse system for journalism and communication, and now more than 60 years have passed, and this task has still not been completed. ”
The professor who has been teaching in Fudan for nearly 40 years and the author of the "Fudan Edition" of "Introduction to Journalism" has always emphasized that journalism research should not drill through the pile of old papers, but should look for problems in vivid practice.
"'Document China' is doing this kind of exploration." Zhang Taofu said, "Out of such an ivory tower on campus, students can have a more complete understanding of the country and society." The place they themselves have walked is the China they really perceive. ”
In addition to the "Record China" project that was first explored, the School of Journalism has successively explored many social practice projects, such as the new social research project "Walking the Yangtze River Delta" launched in cooperation with the South Wind Window Yangtze River Delta Research Institute, and the "News Frontline" series of social practice projects independently planned by the School of Journalism.
On the other side of students' confusion, Zhang Taofu believes that it may also be a dilemma common to the academic community and the industry. "With the emergence of new technologies and new platforms in recent years, in fact, whether it is the academic community or the industry, it is playing the role of a passive catcher. So on the one hand, we need to return to the cultivation of students' most fundamental core competencies, and on the other hand, we need to cultivate their ability to quickly understand and apply new technologies. ”
In 2014, the School of Journalism of Fudan University was the first in the country to offer a data journalism and visualization course, and it was quickly made a compulsory course for undergraduates. Students must learn to mine, cleanse, analyze data, and write code.
At the same time, the postgraduate course of "all-media content production" opened by Zhou Haiyan, a researcher at the Information and Communication Research Center of Fudan University, is also the first UAV news reporting business course to be carried out nationwide.
In practice, students do apply the new technologies they learn in the classroom. This year, every group of Chinese students was recorded to have brought drones to take aerial photographs. Among them, the Guizhou group tried to use data journalism to report.
Zhang Taofu said: "At the moment when the entire industry is undergoing great changes, the school of journalism has a sense of responsibility and a sense of crisis. We need to translate this sense of responsibility and crisis into a way to explore China's journalism education. ”
Expectations that should not be disappointed
After a summer, the transformation has quietly taken place.
Wu Zheng has made up his mind to become a journalist in the future. She said that the change actually happened in an instant, that is, an interview in the small town of Su xiu:
That day, she and a few team members went to the street to collect, and when she entered a small shop, an embroidery lady in her 40s was doing a live broadcast. The door of the small shop is not large, but the depth is very long. The light came in from afar, and the embroidered lady sat in the darkness, and the person looked a little haggard. There were only a few viewers in the live broadcast room, but she still tried to introduce Su embroidery products, and from time to time she stiffly clipped a few words such as "old irons".
After the broadcast, talking about Su embroidery, the embroidery lady's expression was relaxed. She said: "Our generation is the generation that brought Su embroidery out. When she was young, she introduced Su embroidery products in the mall. In order to study Su embroidery, when he was in his 40s, he also went to the Tsinghua Academy of Fine Arts to observe courses. Today, she feels that the Su embroidery industry lacks the participation of young people, and when she said that "some people don't love Su embroidery, but just treat it as a money-making business", she once burst into tears.
At that time, she regarded Wu Zheng as a real reporter, and said earnestly: "Please pass on our voice, I hope that more young people who do not have utilitarian purposes will join the team of promoting Su embroidery culture." ”
At that moment, Wu Zheng seemed to have found the meaning of being a journalist. "No one with the ability and journalistic ideals should live up to such expectations." She said.
Wu Zheng later wrote in his "Record China" speech: "Before that, I had never had the opportunity to really care about the survival of an industry, the loss of a craft, or the lives of a group of people who had nothing to do with me. "What I really want to care about is that the greater China exists in the corners of this vast territory that have not been reached, in every inch of this mountain and river, but it does not exist in my imagination."
"After the practice of 'documenting China' to go to different grassroots levels, I feel that my previous life experience is far from enough for future news production and my own literary writing." Li Dawu said.
In this interview, Li Dawu was deeply impressed by a college student who returned to his hometown to start a business, and he returned to his hometown after graduation to become a tea boss, "He is developing his hometown in his own way." Therefore, the ideal plan he made for himself in his senior year was: to be admitted to the transfer of students to go to the grassroots level for training, to engage in social journalism work later, and finally to return to his hometown of Hainan to do some work to help his hometown develop.
There are also some people who did not choose the direction of news after "recording China", but chose the direction of advertising and so on. "It's also good, isn't it also good to learn about your own interests through 'recording China' and then focus on the things you like?" Liu Haoran said.
On this trip to "Record China", he was also impressed by a college student. In Yaoli Town, Jingdezhen City, Jiangxi Province, they wanted to interview the local three generations of old, middle-aged and young people on the observation of the town, so they found a "post-00s" college student studying tourism management to understand the situation.
The young students reacted flatly: "We are quite ordinary here, and the tourism development is not doing well, there is nothing worth interviewing." As a result, the next day, the student came to Liu Haoran and asked, "Can I re-interview?" ”
It turned out that after the students left, he ran to the town for a walk and found that he had gone to college and left his hometown for many years, and his hometown had changed a lot. "After living here for many years, I rarely pay attention to the changes around me." He said.
Liu Haoran felt that this was very similar to them, and only when he really listened to them did he find that there were still such people and stories in our country.
Column Editor-in-Chief: Zai Fei Text Editor: Wang Xiao
Source: Author: Wang Xiao Xia Jing