Applications for our summer Global Engagement Internship at ABC News in Beijing are OPEN! To celebrate this amazing position, we thought we’d look back to one of our past interns, Emily Williams ’16, who completed the internship last year, for some insight into her time in China’s capital city.
My internship at ABC News in Beijing was by far the craziest summer of my life. I was exposed to a range of situations I never thought I would experience, such as walking through the construction site of a new Disney park, spending 6 consecutive hours in an IKEA, and standing less than a kilometer away from an explosion site watching potentially toxic smoke fill the air. During this internship I learned about the realities of reporting for television overseas, both through personal experience and conversations I had with my wonderful coworkers. While I am unsure of whether I will pursue a career in journalism, I spent a significant amount of time considering my future career during these 10 weeks.
While I think I adapted well to the flow of the office, my previous work experience and academic work definitely did not prepare me for the sporadic work that is done in the Beijing Bureau. As a Wellesley student, I have gotten used to scheduling and planning my weeks, and developing clear plans to accomplish my goals. While I could apply this strategy to a degree, the reality was that I had to be very flexible and adapt my goals as events unfolded. This included accepting that sometimes there was no work to be done (particularly before the correspondent arrived) and finding ways to be useful, or juggling many minor tasks at once that did not necessarily relate to my personal goals. While this was not a traditional approach to a college internship, I learned much more about journalism by working in the field with my coworkers than I would have by strictly focusing on my initial goals.
The highlight of my internship was working on TV stories that were broadcast in the USA. My first experience with this was covering the unveiling of Shanghai Disneyland. Prior to Shanghai there had been no foreign correspondent in the office, so my daily routine primarily consisted of following China-related news articles online and writing for the website. At Disneyland however my job suddenly became much more hands on and required me to think quickly and learn on the job. Here I learned how much quick decision-making and organization goes into television production. For example, minutes before going on Good Morning America I had to manage a group of 10 young Chinese kids whom we had found that afternoon, and move them back and forth between the different Disney characters around the room. We had spent three days preparing the piece that I had assisted writing, and the entire team was running around the studio until the very last moment. I could not believe that all the work we had put into this piece boiled down to several minutes of screen time and then suddenly was over.
While the first story I worked on with ABC was very light and fun, I ended on a very intense story. As my supervisor told me “I went out with a bang.” At 11:30pm August 12 (2 days before m
y internship was meant to end) a chemical warehouse exploded in the Port of Tianjin, less than 200 kilometers east of Beijing. As always, I was asked if I would like to come along with the team to cover the explosion at 7am the next morning. Although my internship was almost over and I considered staying behind, I couldn’t leave without covering some major breaking news. The scene at Tianjin was astonishing. There were mangled shipping containers, collapsed houses, shattered glass, and a plume of black and white smoke coming from the blast site. At Tianjin I witnessed and experienced the difficulties associated with reporting in China. While we had been asked to stop filming on several smaller pieces we produced around Beijing, it was nothing compared to the resistance we met filming in Tianjin. Because I am not Chinese, the producer told me it was best for me to stay behind while filming at certain locations where foreign journalists were being told to leave. Reports critical of the government were removed from the internet within hours of being posted. Public statements released by the government ranged from purposefully vague to obvious understatements regarding the severity of the situation at hand. We saw families of lost firefighters crying in the streets. All the while, we were concerned that we were breathing in toxic chemicals (even though we all wore facemasks) and that a drizzle could cause another explosion or turn into acid rain. I contributed to the reporting by taking photos for social media, sound checking, transcribing and logging interviews, keeping the team updated on development, and setting up filming equipment. While I can’t point to any one thing regarding the coverage that was “mine,” I can confidently say that I actively contributed to the team effort.
I have always been interested in Chinese policies and current events, and this internship helped me to more fully understand the complexities of the challenges the country is facing. I will definitely be applying what I learned to my classes in the East Asian Languages and Cultures department. However, while my coworkers and I would often discuss these complexities, we rarely reported on them. I learned during this internship that television journalism focuses on easily understandable problems. Topics like explosions, cute animals and typhoons make good television, but topics that require context or for viewers to consider complexity do not do well. My coworkers and I all found this frustrating, as there were many compelling and important stories happening in China that we did not cover because they would not interest the “average American viewer.” While through this internship I have decided that I would like a career involving Chinese policy and current event analysis, I am unsure if I will pursue television journalism.
From the weeks I spent stuck in the office focusing on computer based work to the 20 hour days I worked covering the Tianjin explosion, I believe that I made the most of the opportunity I had this summer and gained a comprehensive view of the industry. In the coming months as I look for a job the experiences I had during this internship will influence my choices.