media - China Daily, IPR and incompetence

Danwei has another look at the problems the website of the China Daily is suffering from and republishes a comment by what is called an insider of the operation:

The web-editors are arrogant bastards who know nothing about journalistic standards.
The CD website is an absolute joke, no editorial control and no communication with the print edition. Working at the print edition, I'm totally embarrassed by the idiots who work there ... the paper has its problems, no secrets there, but the website ... does nothing but drag the name of the paper down even further. Mistakes occur in every paper, but if you trawl through a list of China Daily errors of the past couple of years, the majority and the most serious (eg plagiarism) are all on the website, totally beyond the control of the print edition.
There are people at this organization who are progressive and are making changes, but the problem is that nobody will notice the vast improvements in the paper in the past couple of years because the idiots at the website continue to act with utter abandon.

Danwei actually ends up defending this sloppy operation at the core of this English-language flagship, holding the viewpoint that the Chinese internet users are better served by the current anarchy at the internet than an effort of actually controlling it. Although there are some drawbacks:

it difficult [makes it] to find authoritative sources, muddies the waters of Internet media business, and results in flagrant violations of intellectual property rights.

That is where we come in, in trying to get sime clarity in these muddie waters.