Screenshot of a Guardian article by Roy Greenslade, published on 12 August 2015, reporting on MailOnline’s partnership with the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. The article discusses how MailOnline had begun republishing content produced in partnership with the Chinese state-linked outlet, including a hospital story about a patient allegedly undergoing a haemorrhoid operation while his wife gave birth. The article is relevant as media-industry context for the wider debate around viral international news, aggregation, sourcing, syndication and editorial standards. It shows that MailOnline, a major customer and competitor in the viral news market, had formal content-sharing arrangements with a state-controlled Chinese publisher at the same time as questions were being raised elsewhere about the sourcing and verification of unusual international stories. The screenshot also records Greenslade’s criticism of the partnership and quotes then MailOnline editorial chief Martin Clarke describing the arrangement as a copy-swap in which MailOnline took around 40 stories a week from the People’s Daily and they took a similar number from MailOnline.