Chinese websites feed appetite for real news Beijingcream's Anthony Tao. We write what we find interesting. STRICT government controls on China's mainstream media have opened the way for the growth of a number of independent websites that deliver news that skirts the tight censorship laws to a growing online audience. The most popular websites, Beijingcream.com, shanghaiist.com and the daily newsletter Sinocism, have been started in the past few years to meet the increased demand for China news that is not covered by state media. The largest of those sites, Beijingcream.com, is earning a solid reputation for breaking news ahead of the major media companies which have bureaux in China. The website was the first to reveal that 19,000 dead pigs had been found in Shanghai's main waterway earlier this year, a story that was picked up around the world. It also led the pack on the story when Chinese media seriously reported the spoof story in The Onion last November that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had been chosen as the sexiest man alive in 2012. Both stories attracted hundreds of thousands of readers in China and internationally. The websites, which are considered blogs in China, skirt the strict censorship laws that the government has in place and report stories not covered by the staid state media outlets. One of Beijingcream's best-read stories this week was an article that revealed Chinese doctors had successfully grafted a nose on to a man's forehead after an accident left his face severely disfigured. It also recently posted a video on its site of a crammed west Beijing subway station considered to be one of the busiest in the world. The clip was then streamed on YouTube and attracted more than a million hits. Beijingcream was co-founded four years ago by Anthony Tao, a former journalist who was born in China, but left at the age of five to grow up in Kansas. Tao, 29, was working for the ESPN magazine website in New York when he returned to China to cover the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The idea to start the website that primarily focused on entertainment and human interest stories was hatched by Tao and British journalist Robert Foyle-Hunwick during a late-night drinking session in Beijing. "We decided we wanted to start a website that was something different to the usual Beijing media," Tao told Media. We thought that if no one wanted to read it, then it would still be worth doing and that is the way that it has been for four years. In China, there are a lot of news outlets, blogs and websites, but a lot of them do not place any emphasis on the idea of entertaining the reader. The websites have gained a solid following among China's large expat community. The poor quality of most state media news has also helped the websites grow their readerships. Tao now runs Beijingcream from his home in Dongzhimen, in Beijing's inner north. The site has one paid advertiser and while its readership is growing soundly, Tao admits it is a labour of love. Beijingcream has been modelled on the Gawker concept, and has a team of contributors and regular columnists. "It is interesting that I don't see us as a mainstream media outlet with traditional journalists, but we are not micro or social media either," he said. I don't consider myself a journalist or a blogger. We don't have PR companies ringing us trying to get their press releases in the paper and there is no editor sending you out on a job to cover a local council meeting. China has recently ramped up its already-tight media censorship laws, a push which has primarily focused on the major organisations. The New York Times and Bloomberg websites are blocked in China, after the organisations revealed last year that former Premier Wen Jiabao's family was among the richest in the world. Foreign newspapers are physically examined each day by censors and stories negative to China are removed. Beijingcream has so far avoided being blocked by censors, but some of its story headlines have been removed on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. The Sinocism site was also blocked, which prompted founder Bill Bishop, an American journalist, to focus solely on the daily newsletter that is subscribed to by thousands of readers. "I think the government has taken the approach that it will target individual websites and I think we have avoided some of that censorship because we are an English-only website," Tao said. I tend to think at the moment that China is more focused ... on cracking down on people they think are starting rumours on the internet. Tao admits the hardest part of running Beijingcream is ensuring the validity of the dozens of oddball stories the site publishes each week. "I was a journalist," he said. I have a pretty good bullshit radar.