Not long ago, I finished the three-month internship at a local station of a national newspaper. My tutor, or the chief editor of the station asked me to write a summary of my work, if I wished to. Yes, I do want to sum up and think deep about all the things I’ve experienced as a start-up journalist. But I do not want to take it as another writing task, I prefer to write it my own way with a hundred percent of my true feeling injected , so here I am.

This paper can’t wrap up every moment I’ve experienced, but I do have one main point to make. When you are working for the country, especially at a press, you have to always remember , part of you belong to your country, and part of you belong to yourself. Actually, that’s what’s said to be a core value taught in China: social responsibility and personal freedom, you can have both at the same time or you can have none. You have to keep the balance.

Because the news station just got started a year ago, so most of news resources were offered by the local government when I was here, though sometimes we did conduct independent interviews and write columns. That sort of defined my job: “witness of important reforms and progress made by the government.” It’s not only for one time I saw the word propaganda in documents offered by a news conference, and for every time I tried my best to ignore this word in case it contradicts with the tenet I was taught: news should not equal to propaganda. But later I had to face the question when I began to write the reports.

You know what’s the most difficult thing about being a journalist？You are supposed to know everything but actually you don’t. It is especially so for a intern, being lack of time and proper way of doing so.

Still, I had to grapple with a report, with the abyss of being the mouthpiece looking at me. Luckily I finally found a way to look it back. That is to let the truth go first and even though propaganda may be inevitable, don’t let it become the leading role.

There is a line in the TV series newsroom, one of not many shows on the work and life of news people: “There is a hole in the side of the boat. That hole is never going to be fixed, and it’s never going away and you can’t get a new boat. This is your boat. What you have to do, is to bail water out faster than it’s coming in.” I think that’s the main reason why I want to be a journalist in the future, because I see there is the tool to bail water out, that’s my faith and my pen.

So keeping the balance and also to know what is the pivot is what I learned during the work.

Finally, I would like to end this article with a saying by a young Chinese singer, it may not be his original word and it goes like: If I am a scales, what I need to do, no matter what people are putting on me, is to keep myself stable. That’s my wish for myself too.