Yesterday Imagethief received an e-mail from Paul, a contributor to a Swedish English-language news site called The Local. It seems that, in a fit of a Googling fun, the gang at The Local was surprised to discover that they had become unwitting contributors to Xinhua's English website. They join an illustrious club and growing club that includes many heavyweight China blogs, although, to my irritation, not this one. Perhaps its because I use too many obscenities.

The Local has documented Xinhua's hunger for Swedish content on their blog:

Isn’t Google News great? Here at Local Towers one of our guilty pleasures is surfing Google to see who’s quoting us as their source – it’s always a good ego trip.What’s slightly less fun is to find that people are copying and pasting your stuff without crediting you.

When the culprit is Xinhua, the state news agency in China (run by the Propaganda Ministry), I rather doubt a phone call pointing out the finer points of press ethics will cut much ice.

Well, they've got that right. In his e-mail to me, Paul said that they've sent Xinhua a bill for their appropriated content, although they're not spending the money just yet. He also asked:

I was hoping that maybe you could shed some light on how common it is for Xinhua to blatantly steal from other news outlets?

Well, "blatantly steal" is such an ugly phrase. We in the PR industry would suggest replacing it with something more diplomatic and foamy, like "run with insufficient attribution". But let's put it this way: they don't just target the Swedes. In fact, Imagethief is willing to bet that Xinhua has appropriated content from a virtual UN of websites from around the world.

But good luck with invoice. Let us know if they pay up. If so, Danwei, Roland and others may want to follow suit.


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