中国网站品牌栏目（频道）
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.
Related stories:
Making knee-jerk changes is not in our DNA
Bury the hatchet& have an ax to grind
本文仅代表作者本人观点，与本网立场无关。欢迎大家讨论学术问题，尊重他人，禁止人身攻击和发布一切违反国家现行法律法规的内容。
About the author:
Zhang Xin（张欣） 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.
Journalists travel off the beaten track to give news a different perspective, Cui Jia, Wang Yan and Jiang Xueqing report in Beijing.
