English Newspapers in Taiwan - All the News That's Printed to Fit

Overall, which is the best English language newspaper in Taiwan?

  • China Post
  • Taiwan News
  • Taipei Times

0 voters

The previous newspaper thread, Newspaper “Survivor” - Vote One Off The Island!, has been closed due to its unwieldy size. Please post your new comments on English-language newspapers in Taiwan here.

i love them. quit buying the rags years ago. look at all the money I save!

There should be more pages and more local news with correspondents in other cities in Taiwan. Some look at foreigner’s in Taiwan… I get the feeling I get short changed when I compare it with the chinese newspapers.

What, exactly, was wrong with the old threads? What kind of “manipulating” were you intending to do, Maoman? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” is what I say!

Monkey, it is broke, that’s why I am remedying the situation. I have discovered that if a thread has too much content, I cannot merge or split threads. This makes things messy. Do you know how many newspaper threads have been merged into the two main ones I just closed? Literally dozens. If I can’t merge and split threads, things become pretty messy. How many newspaper threads do we need, after all? Maybe one for English newspaper threads in general, and another one for the Taipei Times since that seems to be such a favourite topic for discussion, but certainly not dozens.

(Off-topic, but it seems to me that there are a kazillion SARS threads that could do with a good merge) :wink:

A big thumbs-up for the consistently excellent Taipei Times. No day would be complete without it. Its two “competitors” could cease publication tomorrow for all I’d care.

If I had to invest my NT$15 anywhere I would probably invest it in the Taipei Times. That’s not to say I think it is the greatest newspaper, but it is definitely better than the opposition. I think it was an excellent paper when it was first published in 1999, but it seems to have progressively declined in quality since then.

I completely refuse to buy the China Post until they change their name.

I don’t buy any of them, but I find TT convenient to read online.

I don’t know if anyone else noticed (or cared) but yesterday’s China Post ran a story about a shooting in the US - twice.
On page 3, we had the AP story complete with picture and and on page 2 we were given the later write through from the same agency. The China Post is the only paper I know of that updates its stories on the same day.

Did anyone notice the cover of the Taiwan News (Sat or Sun I think). The cover photo showed a man laying on the ground with two small children on top of him. The caption read something like; “A drunk Taiwanese man falls down with his two grandchildren outside of the Wanhua housing complex.” At first I was discouraged by the sheer irrelevance of such a photo but my spirits were lifted when I thought of the possibilities of me becoming a news photographer in Taiwan. I can camp outside of 99 on a Saturday night and get a front page photo in the local newspapers with a caption that reads; “Drunk foreigner pukes and falls down drunk outside of a popular drinking establishment in SARS affected Taipei.”

Is this what you are talking about? It struck me as weird.

wix, a similar photo, taken a few seconds before this one, also appeared in the Taiwan News. Evidently, the man was drunk and his grandkids got into the picture. In the News photo, he had fallen on top of them and one of them was crying. But IMHO both pics are powerful symbols of exactly what is happening to Taiwan, in Taiwan, right now. The drunk man is the government, and the KIDS R US!

yes, the photo on the front of the was a diffent one, where the children were on top of him crying. Though, the caption didn’t mention that he was a resident of the complex, as does the online version. It noted only that he was drunk and fell down in front of the complex. I just that it humorous that this was somehow considered newsworthy enough to be a front page photo.

From the Taipei Times:

This is a translation but could “What a shitty government!” be avoided or used differently…

What a ________ government!

Put in the correct adjective.

I wonder if any foreigner is even looking at the translation.
Of course, you have to remember that the article first appeared in the Apple Daily, so perhaps they are trying to retain its pizzazz.
Still, it sounds more like something in a junior high school newspaper written by a skateboarder.

Also in the same article on the Web site are these weird hyphenations:
[i]KMT Chairman Lien Chan (

Well some Chinese are only just coming to grips with the idea that every line does not need a carriage return - could be the same with hyphenation.

Actually, I know how this strange hyphenation happens.
The text for the Web site is taken directly off of the newspaper file and the copy editors, at least to my understanding, have been told time and time again not to force hyphenate anything for this very reason

Aside from the style mistakes in the Taipei Times’ lead today (May 16), what can we make of this:

[quote]Presidential Office spokesman James Huang (

Anybody notice - the chinapost seems to have shrunk to 16 pages recently. I don’t buy it everyday, but as soon as I picked it up, I realized it felt thinner, and lighter.
What gives?
Kenneth

[quote=“wolf_reinhold”]Aside from the style mistakes in the Taipei Times’ lead today (May 16), what can we make of this:

[quote]Presidential Office spokesman James Huang (