I came to journalism through the people a story usually walks past. At the Communication University of China, where I studied international journalism and communication, I wrote for the campus volunteer federation about a sign language class taught by deaf instructors, and about a mother explaining her son’s autism in her own words.
From January to March 2024 I reported for Economic Information Daily, Xinhua News Agency’s economic newspaper, covering clean energy, carbon markets, cars and the economy around the Spring Festival. Some of those stories carry my name alone; on others I was the intern doing interviews for a staff reporter, and I label them that way. I also worked as a media intern at Renmin University of China’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, and in public relations at Tencent. With a classmate, Yiyang Xue, I made Memory Guardians, a short documentary about Alzheimer’s disease that won a Grand Prize in a Beijing competition.
I’m now at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, studying Journalism and Media Studies alongside Computer Science and Data Science. Technology consulting at KPMG and building small software products of my own have given me a second way to think about my first subject: how a story actually reaches a reader, through a feed, an app, a page laid out for a phone.
That is where my curiosity sits now: digital storytelling, the tools newsrooms publish with, and the editorial judgment that has to come before both.
“Jiangnan is small, small enough to fit inside the hopes of three friends. Jiangnan is vast, too vast for a camera to hold a ten-thousandth of it.”