media International Herald Tribune/China Daily start cooperation

The online edition of the International Herald Tribune had this morning a remarkable articles on Chinese soccer. Not the article itself, but the attribution was interesting: it came from the China Business Weekly, a subsidiary of the China Daily. It was an article of last week and not available anymore at the China Business Weekly site, but through a Google-cache I was able to retrieve the original article.
The ritual of looking into what secondary sources papers like the International Herald Tribune use for their foreign reporting is becoming more important, now the number of foreign correspondents is diminishing and you will have to wonder how trustworthy those secondary sources are. In this case it was the first time - as far as I could establish - that the IHT used a state-owned paper for direct sourcing of its information.
The Business Weekly has already for a long time been much better in quality than its parent, the China Daily, whose online edition did get a new lay-out last week, but otherwise had more trouble is getting rid of its old image of a useless propaganda machine of the Chinese government.
As the quality of the Chinese media goes up, this might be the beginning of a trend.