Journalists travel off the beaten track to give news a different perspective, Cui Jia, Wang Yan and Jiang Xueqing report in Beijing.

My comments:

The beaten track is the road everyone travels by. In the beginning, of course, there was no road. People going in the same direction created one, the common track – which was beaten out of the ground by the feet of these travelers, each following another’s footstep. Hence, the beaten track.

To go off this track is to go sideways, like a train going off the rail.

Well, you would never like to see a train go off the rail but for journalists, it’s good to see them going off the beaten track sometimes. That means they’re not copying each other’s work, for one thing. They’re looking for new angles, doing their own investigations and digging out hidden materials and thus, as told above, giving news a “different perspective”.

It means, in short, they’ll not be writing the same old same old as everyone else has always been doing.

The same old boring stuff, that is.

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Go to Zhang Xin's column

本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（張欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.