Hello there -
I’m a British newspaper journalist with five years’ experience and I’m hoping to move to Taiwan soon. Which is the best website for vacancies for this kind of work? I have found a couple on taiwanted.com, but there have not been many.
I’m hoping to work as a copy editor on a newspaper, English language magazine, or business to business publication. I’m very flexible.
Any tips would be gratefuly received.
Such jobs are few and far between. Taiwanted.com and Tealit.com in the jobs offered - non-teaching sections. Occasionally jobs are advertised in the newspapers and magazines themselves, or on their web sites.
There was an ad in the China Post on Sunday.
No offense, but I’m guessing that five years’ experience on a real English newspaper would make you extremely unhappy with what you’ll be doing here (or what changes are subsequently made to it without your knowledge…) 
[quote=“chinamac79”]Hello there -
I’m a British newspaper journalist with five years’ experience and I’m hoping to move to Taiwan soon. Which is the best website for vacancies for this kind of work? I have found a couple on taiwanted.com, but there have not been many.
I’m hoping to work as a copy editor on a newspaper, English language magazine, or business to business publication. I’m very flexible.
Any tips would be gratefuly received.
Neil Macfarlane[/quote]
Government agencies -MOFA, MOE, etc.
Trade agencies as TAITRA, trade offices.
City government level, too.
Check each website for openings.
That’s fine. I’ll happily put up with that as long as I can trade life in rainy North-East England for tropical Taiwan!
You mean rainy Taibei? Might I suggest heading further south during your search?
You’re coming at the start of winter. Your line of work will require you to live in Taipei in the north of the island. Cold, rainy and grey for the next several months. Not North of England cold – 9 Celsius is about as low as it gets – but the houses don’t have heating and that, coupled with the constant humidity, makes it seem much colder. Think Newcastle in February.
You don’t want to work there.
Five years experience at a real newspaper means you could probably get a job at the Taipei Times. I’m guessing you won’t like working there either.
As for the weather - I personally found it worse than England’s. It can get awfully cold in the winter - because of the humidity and lack of heating - and the summers are unbearably hot. The humidity and the air pollution make it seem worse. It’s not like being on the beach in Hawaii.
And… you could possibly make more money teaching English, with less of a time commitment. But it would be absurd for a professional journalist to end up working at Hess or the like.
There are only 3 English-language newspapers in Taiwan, all of them seriously strapped for cash in the ailing international industry. The best-paid is Taipei Times, mid-50k NT/month or more if you have Master’s; Taiwan News low 50s (52k I think?) and then The China Post, at the Filipina wages of 48K/month. There’s a big turnover in copy editors in Taiwan, who often either turn to more lucrative teaching hours, or move between newspapapers or to other, GIO publications such as Taiwan Review, Taiwan Journal; and Central News Agency, Taiwan’s only wire service. That job is usually part-time, about 600NT/hour and involves quickly copyediting a lot of translated government press releases.
Taipei Times has a hiring freeze right now, even for contributors. It’s based in Neihu. Long hours six nights a week, no vacation - I didn’t see a weekend at all for a year. Known as the DPP/green party mouthpiece, they manage to utilize resources/reporters from their parent organization, the Chinese-language Liberty Times. Their Features section is their best point, and would have the best jobs, if they were hiring and you spoke Chinese, preferably Taiwanese too.
Taiwan News, another pro-green newspaper went through a huge turnover in staff, notably long-term editor-in-chief Luke Sebatier left; in terms of distribution of your original work they are the worst choice, as you can rarely find a print version of it, even in Taiwan. Taiwan News has mostly moved online, in the past only allowing access to paid subscribers.
The China Post has undergone a “Revolution in Soft News” with its new editor in chief, Roger Lo, rivalling The Sun with its recent adoption of assinine headlines. Known as the KMT’s mouthpiece and for its old-school management and skeleton staff of writers, mostly inexperienced (cheaper to get ABC new college grads), its long-time international distribution is its most attractive feature for professional writers. But self-respecting experienced writers would rarely settle for the salary, and its rapidly declining reputation.
Really helpful comments guys, thanks very much for taking the time.
The weather shouldn’t be a problem for us. We lived in China for a bit, and experienced some pretty tough winters and summers there.
I think I’ll keep plugging away and hope for an opening at one of the papers, but from what you say it sounds like an English language magazine would be a better bet.
I was looking at the China Post online today. They may not be looking for one, but they d*mn sure need a good English copy editor! Good luck!
One more quick question - do I need to be in Taiwan to land a job of this kind, or could I get one lined up before I leave? Would I be better off taking a teaching job, to get myself into the country, before I look for work as a copy editor?
I would rather not do that to be honest, but if needs must…
Working at one of the local newspapers will get old really quickly. Expect no gratitude for doing a good job because it is likely that the management and the majority of your coworkers will be too incompetent to recognize the value you bring – or even that you have done any work at all.
Do you like to make sure stories are unbiased and all facts are checked? Expect hissy fits from reporters for daring to change even one of their golden words.
How about completely rewriting a 1,500-word slab of Chinglish only to find the designer now wants to cut two thirds of it so it can fit her hideous layout. So you have to completely rewrite it again – and then get attitude from the reporter for cutting their story. Sounds fun huh?
How about having to do a fellow editor’s work as well as your own because he or she couldn’t be bothered to show up today or had a tantrum and went home early? They’ll still get paid and you won’t get any credit.
Imagine sitting in a meeting and being told to shut up before you’ve even said anything because whatever you say will undoubtedly spoil someone else’s cushy ride.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, starting salaries at the Taipei Times (which I believe still pays better than the others) have dropped something like 25% over the last 10 years.
On a side note, why the wall of silence from the newspaper crowd? I haven’t read any insider posts here for a long time. In particular I would like to know why the China Pots advertises for editors every day. Is that just a filler they use when there’s not enough transvestite masseur ads?
Maybe that’s too slummy of a job for the people on this board? I’ve never heard a positive word about working at the local papers.
To the OP: What some people do is teach English while looking for editing work, then switch over. AFAIK you have to be physically present here to do that kind of searching. Good editing jobs are scarce because a lot of people want to get away from teaching. However, when one comes up, your experience might, just might, give you a leg up in getting the job. Some employers (e.g. Academia Sinica institutes) are more interested in advanced degrees relevant to the institute’s area, however.
What’s there to say? The Post dropped the pay to $42k after I left a few years ago and they haven’t been able to keep people since. Everyone complains about the paper but try putting a 20 page paper full of chinglish to bed every night with all of two editors. It was non-stop thankless work as you said.
Plus, every time someone left, their job simply went away and their responsibilities got divided amongst the people who stayed. It was miserable.
Now I hear they want people to work for free on a “trial basis.” It just never ends.
The Taiwanese editors there are very offended if you correct their English. Two of them even told me that they were scared to hire a native speaker of English because it would make them look bad, the head editor told me that it was pointless to correct mistakes because no one notices them anyway (!), one editor spent months advertising for a native speaker, rejected many good applicants, and then ended up hiring a native speaker of French because she couldn’t tell she had an accent (an accent which was obvious to even some of the reporters whose English was minimal), plus I found that if you correct something, the correction will somehow be screwed up before reaching print - i.e., a third of the time the correction will be made, but a new mistake will be added.
The Taiwanese editors there are very offended if you correct their English. Two of them even told me that they were scared to hire a native speaker of English because it would make them look bad, the head editor told me that it was pointless to correct mistakes because no one notices them anyway (!), one editor spent months advertising for a native speaker, rejected many good applicants, and then ended up hiring a native speaker of French because she couldn’t tell she had an accent (an accent which was obvious to even some of the reporters whose English was minimal), plus I found that if you correct something, the correction will somehow be screwed up before reaching print - i.e., a third of the time the correction will be made, but a new mistake will be added.[/quote]
I have NO doubt that this is gospel truth!
The Taiwanese editors there are very offended if you correct their English. Two of them even told me that they were scared to hire a native speaker of English because it would make them look bad, the head editor told me that it was pointless to correct mistakes because no one notices them anyway (!), one editor spent months advertising for a native speaker, rejected many good applicants, and then ended up hiring a native speaker of French because she couldn’t tell she had an accent (an accent which was obvious to even some of the reporters whose English was minimal), plus I found that if you correct something, the correction will somehow be screwed up before reaching print - i.e., a third of the time the correction will be made, but a new mistake will be added.[/quote]
I have NO doubt that this is gospel truth![/quote]
Thats my experience of editing anything in TW - the idiom “stepping on eggshells” springs to mind
Any idea what kind of hours the work entails?