A story about an online department trainee – Part II
Date:2007-03-28
Since we have two new experienced overseas trainees who work for our online department, we want to provide our readers a chance to share their sagas and legends.
We published a piece last Friday about Nancy, so today is the small biography of Wolfgang, a pianist from Munich, Germany.
Wolfgang, a 25-year-old with blue eyes and legendary life experience, is a composer and pianist.
His mother runs two galleries in Germany, which sighed with many famous German contemporary artists. Even a painter from Shanghai sighed with one of his mother’s gallery, and it was him introduced Wolfgang to Shanghai because Wolfgang once told him he want to go far east after completing university course. The Shanghai painter also gave Wolfgang a Chinese name—Wang Wujiang.
As a music lover and player, Wolfgang used to hold small musical events in his hometown for people who love music. Having a small band in Munich, Wolfgang even produced a CD of his original music.
Wolfgang was also a computer hardware and mobile phone distributor, which almost made him the Michael Dell of Germany. During the period, he bought motherboards, video cards and other computer parts and added them to computers before selling them to customers, which also makes him an IT expert.
He was kind enough to make us a power point presentation to introduce us to German portal news Websites. Both the lively content and his skillful handling shocked all of us, many of whom are good at programming and Webpage designing.
Wolfgang said he lived on his own since he was 20, which makes him able and tough in tackling problems he encounters.
As a graduate from Ludwig Maximilious University in Munich, he has a masters degree covering three subjects— musicology, philosophy and politics.
He told us the most precious knowledge he learned from the university was the skill to organize workflow. That is something all of us agreed upon.
We just hope his brightness brings us more good ideas and his high-efficient workflow based on a German view fits our future strategy, which is to bring our readers more useful and insightful information.
No more 'refresh' button clicks to view latest news
Date:2007-03-27
Avid news readers on ShanghaiDaily.com will no longer need to press the "refresh" button to view the latest news stories links on the front page and the separate list page.
Our technical support company has just incorporated AJAX technology, which enables the list to refresh automatically every five minutes.
New addition to Transport section
Date:2007-03-27
The online department has published a dedicated to Shanghai Public Transportation Card in the Transport section of the feature site "Live in Shanghai." It covers the latest information on purchase and refund of the transport cards and a newly established customer center for transport card users.
Many thanks to our former intern Wu Junyi, who wrote this information, and Tan Xian, who revised it.
Find your feet around a Metro station
Date:2007-03-23
The online department is proud to announce that the Metro line pages on the feature site "Live in Shanghai" are undergoing a dramatic expansion to include all Metro station maps. The maps for the 25 stations along Metro Line 1 are now online. Those for the remaining four lines will be uploaded in the next few weeks.
By clicking the name of a station on a Metro line information page (for Line 1, ), you can now view the map of the station and its surroundings in a separate window.
This is a huge project that the online department started last summer. Many thanks are extended to our techies Li Hualiang (Xiaobai) and Zhu Moqing (Laozhu), who started the first few maps, and our hard-working intern Shen Xinyi, who painstakingly continued with the rest of the workload of more than 70 maps.
We’d also like to express our sincere gratitude to our former intern Lu Feiran, who rushed among all the Metro stations to take pictures of the official maps. Lu is now a full-time reporter in Shanghai Daily's Metro department.
A story about an online department trainee – Part I
Date:2007-03-22
The Shanghai Daily online department now has two new overseas trainees. Both of them have legendary life experiences. Today we will bring you the story of Nancy – a girl born in Shanghai but grew up in London, Great Britain.
Nancy graduated from London University last September, where she received two degrees – a Masters Degree on Chinese studies from the College of oriental and African studies and a Bachelors Degree on engineering from Imperial College London.
Having completed her studies in the university, the 24-year-old didn’t do what many of her school mates did – find a good job at a London-based multinational company, but chose to return to Shanghai, her homeland where she lived till she was eight.
Nancy said she just wanted to learn more about China, Shanghai and Chinese culture.
We believe that it’s the perfect match for her to work as a trainee in Shanghai Daily, which may ignite her pre-university dream.
Currently, Nancy is involved in the review of “live in Shanghai – tourism.” We look forward to her useful opinions from the view of a Shanghai expat.
Besides her every day work at Shanghai Daily, Nancy also enjoys the colorful city. In the morning, Nancy goes to Fudan University for Chinese and Chinese culture learning, which gives her a chance to make friends among overseas students who are interested in China.
Nancy also go to local clubs and pubs at night with her new friends, or enjoy typical Chinese snacks and fare at local restaurants as well as visit scenic sites of the city, which make her an expert of Live in Shanghai, especially for local tourism and nightlife.
Three members from Shanghai Daily’s online department participated in this year’s junior reporter training course last week. Together with another four colleagues from the business, opinion and editing departments, they hoped to enjoy a four-day break from their daily grind and smoothly get the press cards from the government after an “easy” test on Saturday. However, the situation in the following days was not what they expected.
On Tuesday, the first day of the training course, Winny Wang, writer for the online department, lost her way in the training center, though she lives nearby. When she arrived at the classroom hours late, the morning session was almost over.
The next day, Fu Chenghao, a business reporter, had to leave the classroom a few minutes after he arrived to go do an interview. Fu also missed lessons in the afternoon to write breaking news stories for the newspaper.
On the same day, Dai Qian, another business reporter, accomplished a macro-economy story during the classes but failed to catch up with what the teachers were saying both in the morning and in the afternoon.
On Thursday, Li Xinran, news writer for the online department, took Fu as an example and chose to stay in the office to write the week’s buzzwords. For fear of missing important tips that might be useful for the preparation of the test on Saturday, he hired a taxi and rushed to the classroom during his lunch break and returned to the office soon after.
Even on Friday, the last day of the training course, this year’s Shanghai Daily team still couldn’t gather up all its members. Wang went to the office instead of the classroom to report Premier Wen Jiabao’s press conference online, while Zhang Shunyi and Tan Yuanyaun, two night shift editors, fell asleep in the classroom after days of sleepless nights working and studying for the test.
On Friday night, everyone wished for an easy test the next day, especially Dai because she had already reserved a friend’s night out and didn’t have enough time to go through her text books.
However, the test on Saturday was not so easy, especially for Zhang Shunyi, who arrived late and failed to fill in all the blanks on the paper. Others also said they made dozens of mistakes because they were “beyond exhausted.” Since the prospect of acing the test is not very optimistic, the group is now wishing for a better performance on the make-up exam.
For now, Shanghai Daily’s newsroom is filled with anxiety as they wait for their scores, which is expected to be released on April 10.
