Sports

Testing times of an era gone by

(China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-01 08:30

Byline | Kang Bing

Times have changed and so has the newsroom at China Daily. The one-time bastion of male workers now has more female professionals under its wings, unlike 30 years ago when they were only one fourth of the total staff strength.

Today, as my female colleagues match up to their male counterparts in talent and diligence, and technology usage, I cannot help but recollect the days of an era gone by.

In 1982, when I joined China Daily as a sports reporter, there were no female employees in the sports department. The atmosphere in the department was informal and we were often the envy of most other departments for our relaxed work culture.

Though I quizzed my superiors as to why we did not have female colleagues, I never got an answer but just an enigmatic smile. Soon, I was smart enough to find out the answer by myself.

A few months after joining, I was sent to cover a badminton competition in Shanghai. The first task upon arrival at the venue was to work out the modalities of filing the report back to Beijing. It was a time when new technologies like fax and Internet were not available. There were only two options to send a story - either to phone it in or send it by telegram.

Making phone calls was unreliable as there were usually no phones in the hotel rooms. Even if one could find a phone, the connections were often not reliable.

And in the rare case that one got through it needed someone at the other end to write down the whole thing, a time-consuming process, especially when you have tight deadlines.

Sending telegrams was also equally frustrating. The telegraph office closed early, and most operators were trained to send telegrams only in Chinese, while my stories were often in English.

The only option was to use the telegraph machine and send the telegram by myself. Thankfully, for me, the telegraph machines had English letters on the keyboard.

With a letter of introduction from China Daily, I managed to persuade the telegraph office manager to leave the door open for me until midnight.

The badminton competition went on and on and by the time the final shuttlecock hit the floor at 10:30 pm, I had almost finished my story except the lead. Squeezing out of the gym, I was confronted with a sudden downpour. There were no taxis, buses had long stopped operation and the telegraph office was more than two miles away. With nothing to protect myself from the storm, I had to make a long trudge on foot to the telegraph office. By the time I got there, I was soaked to the bones, but somehow I managed to file my story.

Though I was running a high fever, I still turned up at the gym the next day as I could not afford to miss the finals of the tournament.

That experience made me aware that to be a journalist, especially a sports reporter, one should be physically prepared for some unfavorable conditions - social or natural. It would be unimaginable to leave a woman running around at midnight, in an alien place, amid a thunderstorm.

Today, armed with accessories like a laptop, iPad, mobile phones and many gadgets, filing stories is just a matter of pressing the buttons. I hope the newcomers, male or female, can do a better job than this poor young reporter did about 30 years ago. They are indeed fortunate.

Kang Bing is deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily.

(China Daily 06/01/2011 page58)