For more than 20 years, China's Xinhua News Agency has been trying to become a "world news agency," i.e., an international wire service and news source on a par with AP, Reuters, and AFP.
If you've read Xinhua copy, this may seem unlikely. Xinhua is boring in its choice of news to cover and writing style, has no personality (bylines aren't used), and doesn't even attempt to provide "balance" to news that relates to China and certain foreign news topics.
However, I think Xinhua may have started to get traction in its quest to gain more international stature. The reason is not a change in its standards or an increase in the quality of its reporting, but rather its frequent inclusion in Google News.
Google News is a popular news aggregator, which gathers breaking news and analysis from thousands of news sources. It organizes the news into topics, and then lists the news sources that have articles on that topic. Naturally, a major news story may have hundreds of even thousands of new articles being produced every day, but Google News users tend to visit the ones that are listed at top of the rankings or on the main Google News page. Google, which wants to display a variety of news viewpoints on its news pages, claims the rankings are created through some sort of evolving algorithm, and human editors do not give preference to specific articles, writers, or sources. For this reason, many smaller newspapers and obscure news sources show up on Google News, as well as second and third-tier news agencies in non-English speaking countries, including Xinhua.
In fact, Xinhua news stories seem to appear at or near the top of many news items listed in Google News, even for items that Xinhua doesn't have any reporting expertise in -- European football, breaking "hard" news, the car industry, etc. Looking at the front page of Google News right now (July 7, 12:45 pm EST) I can see Xinhua taking up some very prominent space on this highly-trafficked page:
- Xinhua is the number two source for news about the London terrorism attacks (after the Times Online) and the listed source for the thumbnail picture of the attacks.
- It's the listed source of the thumbnail photo for the jailed reporter story.
- It's the number five source for a deal involving Dell and Napster.
- The photo source for a story about gas therapy for premature infants and the number six source for the news article.
- The number three source for the news about the Philippines president being pressured to step down
- The number six source for a story about Gaza residents receiving compensation.
Interestingly, many of the Xinhua news items cited by Google News aren't even Xinhua's own content, but are copied from other sources. Xinhua's "jailed reporter" photo actually comes from Agence France Presse, and other stories are copied partially or verbatim from other sources: I saw one report on oil prices which was based on a Wall Street Journal story, and the Dell/Napster story came from "Agencies", i.e., AP, Reuters, or AFP.
I don't have access to the traffic data for the Xinhua website, but news sources that get cited in Google News usually get a big spike in traffic when their stories are prominently featured. For smaller newspapers and news sites, a Google News reference can knock out their web servers as many thousands of users beyond their normal readership suddenly try to access news pages. Even if this happens to Xinhua, it is surely enjoying added traffic and stature because of Google News, in a way it never did before.
However, Google News will almost certainly tweak the ranking algorithm in ways that de-emphasize Xinhua; for instance, by giving preference to original news reporting as opposed to recycled news content. If that happens, Xinhua could find itself once again an obscure news agency, longing to join the big leagues.
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