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CNN drops anchor in Beijing
(China Daily)
Updated: 2007-08-06 10:57
Award-winning CNN anchor Kristie Lu Stout is new to sports coverage. She doesn't know who won the FA Cup in 1975, or what "silly mid-on" means, but neither is she green enough to let herself be tagged a gushing fan of new MLS signing David Beckham.
"Who do you think I am?" she joked from a five-star hotel near the Forbidden City on Monday night while on "pre-Olympic" assignment in Beijing. "Come on. Give me some street cred, here. Please."
While here, she hopes to interview Olympic champion hurdler Liu Xiang about the pressure he feels to repeat his Athens gold on home soil, right some wrongs about Beijingers that have been overplayed in the foreign media, and show the world what the Olympic venues really look like.
"I'm not a sports reporter. I don't pretend to be a sports reporterbut there are so many other tangential stories that are still quite central to the Beijing Olympics story, the structural changes and the social changes in Beijing, and that's what we're here to chronicle," she said.
In town for two weeks to prepare for Countdown Beijing, CNN's weeklong coverage of the Olympic host city one year before the 2008 Games that she will co-host from Monday morning, "KLS" is looking forward to her temporary new beat.
"It's basically a chance for the world to meet Beijingers, and see how they live, and what it really is like to be in Beijing at this point in history," she said.
"I think to live long-term in a mainland Chinese city, you know, Beijing is where it's at."
Growing up in Silicone Valley, going to Stanford and reporting for CNN on technology issues is old ground for the 32-year-old former model, who joined the broadcast journalism outfit in 2001. Last year she won the Asian Television Awards' Best News Presenter or Anchor prize for her work on CNN Today.
Having spent several years living in Beijing in the late 90s (her mother was born in Taiwan, her father is European-American), when she studied Mandarin as a post-grad at Tsinghua University before working for Sohu.com, then Reuters, then CNN in Hong Kong, she is well positioned to report on the city's changing skyline.
She may even find occasion to voice her pet peeve about consumer electronics -- that they "are built in obsolescence, which really bothers me, you know, they're basically built so they die in 18 months" -- as they are playing an increasing role in Beijing's 21st-century metamorphosis.
With so much going on there will be much pressure on her to squeeze it all into five days' coverage. Not to mention hobnobbing with celebrities and BOCOG organizing committee officials in front of a TV audience of millions.
So how does she cope with the stress? Humor helps, she says, to keep her grounded.
"If the movie Anchorman told us anything, it's easy for certain characters to perhaps take themselves too seriously, but we always keep things in perspective, it's always about the viewers, and what they want, and also about the story, and getting it right."
What about if she forgets the name of an Athens gold medalist, or trips over a migrant worker when the cameras are rolling? In person and on the "boob tube," as she calls it, she seems flawless, perfect. Is she?
"Oh no, the thing is, I have made mistakes. The good thing is, I've been able to work at CNN for almost, I'm heading towards my seventh year. That experience helps a lot. And you get used to dealing with the cameras, and the lighting, and the equipment, and basically the medium.
"The thing that definitely keeps you challenged in this industry is you have to be extremely well read. You have to follow everything, and be ready for whatever hits you the morning you come into that news show."
But she admits to some gaffes, such as calling Samsung "Sony" during a taped interview with Samsung's South Korean CEO about four years ago. "Fortunately, he kind of took that as a compliment, so he was able to laugh that off," she said. It helped that Samsung was about to overtake its Japanese rival in terms of market share at the time.
Timing, it seems, is everything.
Given her infatuation with Beijing, she is unlikely to crash and burn in the next five working days, however. She LOVES Beijing. She even fell in love in Beijing, almost 10 years ago, with a Chinese-Malaysian lawyer. They married in 2001.
"We like to joke that we met in a three-star hotel in Beijing, because, the thing is, a friend of ours, who was working as a lawyer at the time, was living in an apartment in a three-star hotel and he was having a birthday party (there) and that was how me met."
Now she experiences the full five-star treatment, but you get the feeling she would rather be sleeping in a hutong guesthouse, more in touch with the real Beijing in the guts of the city.
"Do you know the film 2001 by Stanley Kubrik?" she asks. "My room here is so spacious and opulent it kind of reminds me of the ending, where the guy is alone in that big room." She may have used the word "creepy."
"I have to turn on CNN sometimes to remind myself where I am."
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