Southern Weekly gives awards to stories scrapped by censors

The outspoken Southern Weekly honoured the five "best censored stories" of the past year at its annual meeting yesterday. They included a feature removed from the New Year edition which was at the centre of a rare censorship row between the newspaper's editorial staff and the provincial propaganda department.

Despite the awards, which also covered some of the best stories that made it into print, and the fact that the newspaper has resumed normal operations, the meeting was still eye-catching in the aftermath of the row.

A journalist at the Guangdong newspaper posted pictures of summaries of the award-winning stories, displayed at the meeting, on his Sina Weibo microblog. The post was forwarded more than a thousand times by microbloggers adding their respect and support, before being deleted about three hours later.

The unpublished reports included a feature about young people who remained rational during the waves of anti-Japanese protests that took place in a number of mainland cities in September. The story was ditched for a second time in the New Year edition on the orders of propaganda officials, even though similar coverage had appeared in other newspapers and it was no longer deemed a "sensitive topic".

A story commemorating the victims of a deadly rainstorm in Beijing last summer which killed 79 people was also among the unpublished winners.

Reporters at the newspaper had previously complained that eight pages of detailed coverage were pulled at the last minute and a full-page obituary for more than 20 victims was replaced with one honouring five civil servants killed in the storm.