Ed Nash working at the copy desk of China Daily
Striding through the glass doors and attempting to find my desk in the bustle of China Daily's newsroom on my first day was daunting, to say the least.
Coming from a quiet provincial newspaper in the wildest reaches of southern England I was used to a more sedate pace of life.
But walking into China Daily's newsroom I was confronted by crowds of reporters shouting at each other from their glass-walled cubicles.
In the conference room, editors were animated as they pass around pictures from around the world and discussed stories from Shanghai, Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
There was much debate on how much play the story of miners trapped in a flooded colliery and the devastation wreaked by the latest typhoon to blow in from the South China Sea get on Page One.
As newspaper circulation keeps falling in Europe and the United States, China Daily's reporters are responsible for wider array of news for a growing army of readers.
Circulation constantly climbs, buoyed by the increasing number of Western businessmen in China and the growing number of Chinese who read English.
On my first night shift I was told to hurry while checking the pages - not so the news editor could go home early, but in case the first copies off the press missed the plane to West China.
I joined China Daily less than a fortnight ago and, along with a handful of other journalists from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, I am now one of the paper's copy editors.
While sensible people are in bed a small team of us is in China Daily's second-floor office, checking over the next day's news as the paper is prepared for printing.
Before joining China Daily, I worried that the language barrier would isolate me from my Chinese colleagues, but fortunately while I struggle to emit an occasional throttled "nihao," the journalists all speak flawless English.
In many ways, joining the paper has been like being adopted by an extended family we work together, eat and drink together in the staff canteen, and many of us live together in an apartment block conveniently close to the office.
My first weekend in Beijing included a trip to the botanical gardens at Cherry Valley and the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, rounded off with an exhausting game of football, all laid on by the paper.
With plans for expansion in the coming months and more opportunities than ever before for the paper's foreign staff, I'm looking forward to seeing where China Daily is going.
(China Daily 05/31/2006 page4)
