China’s Internet portals are not allowed to gather their own news, so since the start of the dot com boom, they have republished news stories from state-owned news agency Xinhua, and from China’s thousands of newspapers.
The newspapers have been giving away their content for free, seeing it as a form of advertising, but because of this, have lost out on the new media boom.
On the other hand, if the newspapers stopped giving away their content for free, the portals would have a serious problem.
ESWN has translated two articles about this issue: