Ever since a link appeared on the Drudge Report pointing to an article at the Taipei Times about Beijing ordering women married to Taiwanese men to get abortions the entire site has been FUBAR, it seems. That’s funny. I guess they’re experiencing 20x the traffic their crap server can handle.
(I’m sure they’ll get around to fixing it, so if you’re just tuning in this has been going on, AFAIK, since I checked at midnight on the 19th until at least 9:30 am on the 19th, when I checked again.)
FB
It’s been down since last night, the date on top reading January 1st, 1970.
What they should do now is come up with a page of news from that day, just for the hell of it.
Well, if the site is indeed flooded with traffic cuz of the link (Drudge gets a huge number of hits per day), then I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s getting server bombed by people in Mainland China. The government there is pretty savvy about what gets printed in the media about them. They’ve probably got every student at the U. of B. mobbing the TTimes web site.
FB
The Taipei Times’ big chance to be on the international spotlight and they show their true stripes.
One of those lame-brain copy editors must have pushed the wrong button (again)!
Yes, the world hasn’t been exposed to that level of incompetence since the Bai Xiaoyan kidnapping.
26,000 plus hits as of today, Sunday, maybe more. Does the Times usually get so many hits for an important news column? Did the newspaper ever report that event to its readers? Getting bombed by Drudge and Red Cheena at 26,000 hits is NEWS, no?
By the way, that story was almost certainly false. It must have been planted to make the mainland look bad.
Look at the elements. No substantiation – the women who brought this up would not say if they had been subjected to abortions or anything. “Because it’s private”? Please, why bring the issue up at all if it is a private matter?
The TT should be taken to task for printing such obvious clap-trap. Why not just make up the stories…oh, wait…I think they do that already.
It can’t be as bad as having the Taiwan News put that the population of Nauru, the world’s SMALLEST country, has a population of 11+ million. On the front page, no less.
Nauru (We love our phosphate!):
Area: total: 21 sq km
land: 21 sq km
water: 0 sq km
Area - comparative: about 0.1 times the size of Washington, DC
Population: 12,088 (July 2001 est.)
(From CIA World Factbook)
Well, so they had a population boom since last July…
I just checked the Times story again , now with 28,000 plus hits. Who the hell is hitting that site even a few days later? Maybe Wofl is right: not a true story. Has the wire services ran anything even remotely similar anywhere? But Wolf, you used to work at TT, right? Is it normal to get 28,000 hits on a story like that or any story? Just curious from yr experience.
28,000 hits isn’t many for a newspaper that sells, what is it?, 200,000 crisp copies a day.
Well, if you look at the total number of hits on any random story, you will see that 28,000 is way out of whack. That’s what a little international promotion will do.
Interestingly, a partner in crime of mine checked the infamous “e-commerce” site of the Taipei Times and found, or so it appeared, that for each “hit” that was made by this individual, the counter went up like 7 or something. I guess it was considered a BIG hit…
Don’t laugh. The president of the paper was waxing a couple of years ago about the day, should it come, that the paper was only available online, where “reporters could file their stories directly on the Internet.” I asked about the need for copy editors, but they didn’t seem to figure into the etherial equation.
WOLF: "Well, if you look at the total number of hits on any random story, you will see that 28,000 is way out of whack. That’s what a little international promotion will do. "
So what is normal for hits there, Wolfmeister? I just looked at other stories and most of them get 64 hits, 300 hits, tops is around 500 hits per normal story. Who sent the TT story to DRUDGE and even after it was taken off DRUDGE, where did the other 5,000 hits come from?
Maybe divide by 7, but still 3000 hits. Just for a silly abort story that might have been planted?
And most important of all, Wolf, since u used to work there yrself, why didnt the TIMES report this news to its readers in a pge 2 or 3 story the next day, like “TT gets 25,000 hits from international Drudge” or some such head title? If you were editor there, Wolfman, what would have done? Btw, WHO is the editor there? The mastheader never says who the editors are? Why not? Every paper worth its salt prints a list of its top editors, names and all. WHy not Taiwan papers? Modesty?
You can see as well as anyone that stories get between several dozen hits to several hundred, normally.
I have no idea how Drudge got wind of it so soon.
Yes, Mega,
Thanks for the information , Wolf. So you mean that Mr Rick Chu who is the chief editor there now, he sits at a desk in the newsroom with all the other reporters? That’s pretty modest, I guess. I though all top editors aspired to working like legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and having a big office with windows of their own.
What is the layout of the TT newsroom then? Do they all work together in one large unit like in a TV show, or is the ad department on one floor and the copy editing on another floor and the reporters on a third floor? I guess you didn’t really much like working there, from your earlier posts. What other papers have you worked for here in Taiwan or Thailand?
Did Mr Chu ever live in Korea, since he always seems to write about Korea alot? Is he Taiwanese or overseas Chinese? Do you know, Wolf?
The TT is laid out like a supermarket with the editing section, the translation section, the frozen management section…
Jeez, the stories I could tell…
Tell, tell …
I’m not the only one who knows where the bodies are buried…and I don’t want to ramble.
31908 hits to date on the forced abortion story.