A search for source (PN China Blog

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A search for source

I had a very unlucky time trying to identify the original source of the Chinese news story about plastic food packaging I referenced in my July 9 blog item.

Let me admit I first saw it on a Chinese plastics web site that has been taking copyrighted Plastics News China stories without our permission and disregarding our complaint for the past two years. More of that you can see in PN editor Bob Graces column China brings flattery we can do without.

So I knew this web site, with minimal editorial staff that sells soft advertising, must have stolen the story from somewhere. I picked a few key words and search online. Guess what? I found hundreds of web pages with pretty much the same story and the same headline.

These web sites include all kinds of portal sites, B2B sites, media web sites, trade group sites, government sites, personal Web pages, etc. Many of them inserted a fine print tagline identifying the source, and more of them dont give any information whatsoever about who wrote the story and which publication it was original published in.

The next challenge came with the wide array of attributed sources for this same story. Apparently, by not citing the source of a stolen story, you enter the lottery where someone may cite you as the source when they copy and paste the story from your web site.

With a tad frustration, I checked the web sites of Chinas largest wire service Xinhua News Agency and Chinas largest daily newspaper the Peoples Daily, which I deemed Chinas Associated Press and the Washington Post when I was a journalism student in Beijing.

Xinhua attributed the story to two sources separate with an ambiguous slash: the Information Times/the China Economic Net. Whats that supposed to mean?

I went to the reputable China Economic Net web site, and the credit was given to the Information Times. People's Daily also attributed to the Information Times but also conscientiously cited the authors names. I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, I thought.

But I failed to find this article on the Information Times web site. I even checked eachand every page of the PDF-formatted online version of its 118-page June 19 issue, according to the dateline in the Web version of the story, and came up with nothing.

That's three hours well spent......in my good will of finding the first-hand source.
Our own stories are appearing on the Web with other publication titles and even some unknown authors name. Ironically, when we stick to professional ethics and try to give the credit to the original source, it almost turns to be mission impossible.

Alright, lesson 101 of online publishing in China.

Posted by Nina Ying Sun on August 6, 2007 5:18 PM | Permalink

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