The NEXT magazine publisher (from Hong Kong) is starting up a daily newspaper in Taiwan which is supposed to hit the stands in mid-April 2003. It is called APPLE DAILY.
If anyone has a suitable story, perhaps it would be a good idea to contact the main switchboard at 6601-3456, and try to find a reporter.
Of course, this publisher has somewhat of an unusual slant. However, you could always try to contact them if you have something out of the ordinary.
The address on their reporters’ namecards is Suite 8, 5th Fl., No. 294, Tun Hwa South Road, Sec. 1, Taipei.
I was interviewed a couple days ago. Over a year ago I sued the Ministry of Finance for NT$ 980 and the judgement was just rendered in mid-March. I won. APPLE DAILY thought that was newsworthy I guess.
The Liberty Times (the parent paper of the Taipei Times) is scared of the competition and is going all out to print its entire paper in color as a foil. This also means forcing the Taipei Times to move its deadline to 10pm. So if the news in the TT seems behind the others, you know why.
Knowing the Chinese appetite for sensationalist reporting, the Liberty Times will have to do more than print all in color to compete with the Apple Daily.
Before Next magazine became No. 1 in Taiwan what magazine was on top? I think it was Non-No of all things (but I may be out of date on that one).
The Liberty Times should be scared. Sacraficing the quality of the Taipei Times (a meaningless bauble in the marble collection of Lin Rong-san) for the sake of the Liberty Times is almost a tradition now. But what happens when the readers start to catch the “Hong Kong Apple Flu” and the Liberty Times loses reporters to the paper that pays?
Should be interesting since the management of the Liberty Times is rumored to be just as ossified as that of the Taipei Times. God only knows what “sensational” means to them…
Apple Daily was already out on the streets with free special editions, first at the start of the war, then the day after Leslie Cheung’s suicide.
Judging from those issues, they won’t need many writers. It’s all huge color pictures. Their “reporters” will only have to know how to write captions.
[quote=“Spack”]I’m sure Apple could steal a lot of readers from the English papers if they did a bilingual section: “Learn English Through Tabloid Stories”.
Teenagers and adults would find it a heck of a lot more interesting than the Taiwan Snooze, or Let’s Yawn in English.[/quote]
Spack, here is a story that was in the APPLE DAILY today and shows how informative it is, in terms of social reporting. It went something like this with photos of the red tattoo on page 4. I think it’s a very good newspaper and agree it should be bilingual every day, as spack suggests.
The article is about a former Chinese TV newscaster who was arrested here as call girl:
A Chinese TV newscaster was arrested as a prostitute in Taipei yesterday.
Police charged the 24-year-old woman, identified only as Liao, with prostitution.Liao told investigators she used to work as a TV anchorwoman in a Kweichow city, in southwestern China.She was arrested at a hotel on Songjiang Road shortly after midnight. Also taken into custody was her taxi driver pimp, Teng Chien-pin, 35, of Taipei.Investigators found one of Liao’s ID cards certified her as the TV newscaster. She was also legally married to a chef in Hsintien, surnamed Li.Looking every inch like a jet set girl, Liao told her questioners she and her husband were married in Kweichow a year ago.Asked why she had given up her “high-pay” job to come to Taiwan, Liao said she “was fascinated” by Taipei’s “great life style,” which she wished her chef husband would be able to help her enjoy. She drew a monthly pay of 1,500 renminbi or NT$6,000 as a TV newscaster.The former TV news reader came to Taipei in last January and found her husband could not give her what she had desired.Subsequently, said the young street walker, who has a red rose tattoo on her chest, "I began my work."For each tryst, police investigators said, Liao received NT$3,500. She could keep only NT$1,300.
It is news stories like this that make Apple’s Daily so good, since the regulary news papers do not cover this stuff.
The bigger question is this: is the apple daily making any money yet?
I was just talking to one of the writers in the adjoining office of Lih Pao (a daily paper focusing on education). He says one of the ranking editors at Apple Daily - possibly the cheif editor, he’s not sure of the guy’s title at present - is this guy Liu Da-ren. Liu took part in some protests in the 1970s, then when he went to study abroad in the US was blacklisted from returning to Taiwan by the KMT, giving rise to what could be considered a grudge. During the election, my colleague said Liu’s editorials in Apple and also Next Magazine tended to follow the DPP line of attack on the KMT (assets, Lien’s alleged wife beating, etc). Since the election, he’s “returned to the middle.”
Also according to my colleague, the two major evening newspapers, China Times Express and the United Daily Evening News, may be getting ready to shut down. CTE is already offering retirement incentives. He attributes this to the arrival of Apple Daily, which charged into the market with complete disregard to the regional lines along which the other main dailies had divided Taiwan. These roughly correspond to KMT and DPP voting districts. KMT - United Daily News and China Times. DPP - Liberty Times.
There’s also the rumored arrival of another HK newspaper, the Dungfang(東方) Daily. Anyway, I like the Apple Daily. B/c despite what my colleague said, it’s less about political tyranny than the tyranny of the market place. All hail the new era!
I loooooove the Apple daily. Where else can you read only about the darkside of Taiwan and the crazy shit. I actually get a reall kick out the “around taiwan” picture page. I call it my News/Pictures of the Weird daily. The only thing is -they need to run some of their forgien translations by a native speaker. The other day they had a story on gender and the use of the word in a sentence was hillarious.
