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Personal touch 2014: We were there
The vibrant blogosphere, social media and innovations like crowd sourcing have transformed news coverage. The trend is increasingly clear in 2014. Feeling the challenges of the so-called citizen journalism, we are reassured by the fact that the public is still hungry for quality coverage from professional reporters. The need is even more desperate in the past year when the world has seen such upheavals that the end can't come soon enough.

As journalists at a national newspaper, we are never satisfied with the ill-informed commentaries all over the Internet. Our job is to go to places that ordinary people cannot or dare not reach, look into things under the surface, talk to people involved in an event, listen to well-informed people explaining how and why things happen and what can be done to help so as to find out the truth behind hearsays. [more]

Between two worlds
Catherine Wong Tsoi-lai: A Hongkonger working with mainland media confronted by both sides in Occupy Central reporting

Because of my identity as a Hongkonger, I have also been asked many questions from both sides about my personal views on what is going on with the city amid the rising tension in its relationship with the Chinese mainland.
Respecting diversity

Bai Tiantian: Investigating the divisions and kinships in Xinjiang society

I talked to as many locals as I could, and constantly observed. I watched locals chat on the bus, street vendors barbecuing lamb skewers and shoppers browsing head scarves. Yet I felt I knew nothing about them.

No easy way ahead

Chang Meng:Seeking an end to the Sino-Japanese cold war

In late May, I had gone to Japan to talk to politicians, scholars, students and journalists amid increasing tension between China and Japan brought about by Abe's move to ease weapons export rules and his attempt to allow collective self-defense - all this on top of the territorial disputes and historical issues that the two countries faced.

Adapting to crisis

Li Qian: Saddened by the loss of life amid power struggle in Ukraine

I began to feel the weight of history on my way to Crimea.

In March, when the then Ukrainian territory had been taken over by the nominally local pro-Russian militants, I had to change my flight to transit through Moscow in order to be allowed into the region.

No one left behind
Chu Daye: Changes in China need to start at the most basic level

While traveling in Baoding, a city in central Hebei, I almost threw up when my taxi driver described to me how his fellow villagers substitute horse meat for donkey meat to make a local delicacy they call the donkey burger.

Neighbors of outcasts

Huang Jingjing: Discrimination still plagues leprosy victims in rural China

In June, I spent a week in rural villages in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, conducting interviews for my story about leprosy sufferers and the social exclusion of their children.

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