May 19 Taiwan News page 5 lead:
While peace talks continue, Aceh braces for
makes you want to read the story though doesn’t it?
a couple of years ago, the Taiwan News had a headline along the lines of Indonesia sends troops into Acer
must’ve been looking for some tech support
Today’s Taiwan News, front page
[quote]Yesterday, a Palestinian suicide bomber on a bicycle blew himself next to an Israeli patrol in the central Gaza strip, slightly wounding three soldiers.[/quote] :shock:
These types of errors seem to happen in all three of the English dailies in Taiwan. I’ve seen partial headlines and large blank spaces on some pages, nevermind the grammar errors or the issue of ethics behind the reporting. It is truly a sad state of affairs.
Less advertising dollars=less newspaper.
This was the lead headline on the front page of the Chine Post today:
Third wave of SARS attack remain strong: Lee
Now I thought the Taipei Times had its problems, but what kind of illiterate fuckwits are working at the Post? How embarrassing! :shock:
Actually the “print to fit” comment is very clever, but it only welcomes critical posts and leaves no room for positive words.
Quirky, if you’ve got something positive or negative to say about Taiwan’s English newspapers then this is the thread to do it in. I don’t think anyone said you can’t say nice things about the papers here. Although plenty of people have nothing nice to say about them 
Less advertising dollars=less newspaper.[/quote]
It is unlikely Taiwan can support three English language newspapers in the long term. Would anybody like to predict which paper will be the casualty?
Please do go ahead and post any positive comments you may have, Quirky. If I remember correctly, you work as a copy editor at the Taiwan News. I am sure that many of us would like to hear about your experiences there. Generally speaking, it is easier to criticize than it is to create. So, I take my hat off to you for trying to put out a quality newspaper (or maintain and improve a Web site) every day.
Please let us know about some of the challenges (or rewards) of working at the Taiwan News.
Okay. Stay tuned. I am doing the word processing, and will get back to you on it. 
The China Post may be an abomination but I’ve got the feeling it will out live us all. The rag’s been running for 50 years and I’m sure it will run for 50 more, grammatically incorrect headlines and all.
A canny advertising staff has cornered the lucrative supplements market and there’s not a week goes by where the Post doesn’t run some two-page pull out on Latvia’s trade and economic office or the latest mold and die exhibition. By contrast, the Taipei Times has no ads, save for a Subway and Brass Monkey scattering, and surely must be surviving off the deep pockets of its Liberty Times benefactors.
The China Post is shameless about doing business articles. The theoretical wall that should exist in a newspaper does not exist. The ad sales guys used to come downstairs all the time and “ask” me to write articles about certain companies. I didn’t really consider that part of my job description but that didn’t stop them from asking.
The China Post’s real revenue source has got to be the TESOL market, selling subscriptions to high school English classes etc. That’s how they can claim to be the largest circulation English language daily. That also explains why it has such amazing brand recognition among Taiwanese locals. Locals have never even heard of the other papers, but the China Post, everyone from xiaopengyou to ahmah have heard of it.
This all said, I realize now that the paper wasn’t making very much money. The staff was not well paid and everything about the operation was cheap. Just trying to scrape by is my impression, so I feel somewhat sympathetic to their situation. At the time, I was frustrated at being asked to write corporate articles, but now I realize it was driven less by greed and more by economic survival. So I hope they survive, even if the paper isn’t god’s gift to journalism. The people including the managers were all nice enough, and I made at least one friend that I’m still in touch with.
Without putting too fine a point on it, none of the English-language newspapers here stay afloat for traditional reasons (advertising and subscriptions).
The Taipei Times breaks about even as the vanity publication of Lin Rong-san, big swinging Dirk at the Liberty Times. It’s a pride thing and a sort of vehicle to play in the English media. The money made or lost at the TT is peanuts to Mr. Lin.
The China Post has the ads and makes money off its English teaching gigs.
The Taiwan News is funded by the government in a recent lucarative award. They also get money from I-Mei, which also uses the paper as an ad flyer.
In short, the papers don’t have to sell copies to you or me. They could print any old thing they wanted. Just as long as it looks vaguely like a newspaper should.
All very true. And it should be added that none of these papers are audited, a very standard practice in other countries.
Now, what I don’t understand is why people need to have endless discussions and bitching about the quality of the English papers, since they are more or less privately owned companies that can print blank pages everyday if they want, and there are other alternatives (WSJ, South China Morning Post, the Internet).
Unfortunately, those are hardly alternatives when it comes to news about Taiwan. But the printing of blank pages would be one way to take care of all those errors and typos. 
Fyi, auditing is a voluntary practice, and it’s usually only done when it’s a foregone conclusion the result will be to the publication’s liking (since the publication pays for it). Also, the only benefit of auditing is making your ad sales pitch more attractive. I have a feeling media buyers in Taiwan either aren’t too sophisticated or they can’t be that picky since there are limited English language outlets for advertising. So an audit probably wouldn’t change their buying decision anyways
My understanding is that auditing’s purpose is to let advertisers choose the best value for money and that most papers, or at least the States, do it. An audit would show who among the three are the biggest liars about circulation here (tough call though).
Media buyers here are not that dumb – they’ll choose the paper that gives them the most free stories with the least amount of critical ones.
My favorite story ever is the one (at the request of the trade office of a SE Asian trade office) about how healthy palm oil was and how it did not have cholesteral. (It sort of left out that palm oil clogs your arteries with cholesteral after it is processed in the liver.) Another one was when a certain airline threatened to pull its ads after one of its crashes was mentioned in a “worst crashes ever” list. Apology printed the same day.
Or more recently, did anyone notice the glowing stories about a certain European luxury SUV brand that sort of failed to mention obvious rollover and fuel inefficiency questions. I guess you are right – who needs auditing to sell ads when you can offer positive coverage.
All good publications (including magazines) get audited, plenty of bad ones don’t. Most of the ones we’re familiar with are audited. The fact that we’ve heard of them probably means they’re fairly successful already. But those smaller niche publications are probably unaudited.
You’re spot on, positive news coverage is a great sales tactic. I learned this indirectly just by observing behavior; the ad sales people always seemed to take positive coverage and show it to advertisers, hoping to hit them up for an ad.
I made the ad sales staff’s lives miserable on accident because I always went out of my way to be critical. (I naively thought that’s the job of a journalist: muckrake.) The PR group of a certain major foreign bank froze me out for a while, after I did some negative stories on them. Business journalism is definitely seen as free PR by corporations; after a while, you learn how your are expected to play the game. Since the English newspapers in Taiwan don’t make any money, it’s really hard to be a muckraking journalist, since the papers are so dependent on handouts from their advertisers.
Hello Neo,
Great posts. It is interesting to hear the inside story from a (former ?) insider. If you have left the China Post, can you tell us how long you worked there? Were you a copy editor or staff writer? I’m just curious, because I always had thought that many of the paper relied on freelance writers–and got by with a skeleton crew of (usually foreign) copy editors. Or were copy editors expected to write business articles, as well?
How was the pay when you were at the China Post? Are you working in journalism now?
Lots of questions. Sorry. Don’t mean to be noisy, just curious. Finally, do you value or regret your experience working at an English-language newspaper in Taiwan?
Thanks.
Glad to hear you enjoy my recollections about the China Post. I’m a former “insider”, actually. Sounds funny because it’s not like it’s an exclusive club or anything. I left before it became boring, so I guess I have good timing. I was a full time staff journalist covering the business sector.
Most of the reporters were Taiwanese. My impression was the foreigner freelancers were mostly doing things like travel articles or articles covering the foreigner community. And of course the whole copy editor staff was foreigners. If your Chinese is at a certain level, you can be a journalist covering local news, business, etc.
We had such a small staff that we had to rely on Chinese news sources as our initial feeds- TVBS, news wires, etc. Once we knew what the big story of the day was, we’d go out to press conferences and do interviews etc etc.
Pay wasn’t so hot, in fact I replaced a local Taiwanese, so I probably was getting paid a local salary. I made $40K/month if I recall. But I was going to school full time (language school + regular classes) and I didn’t have to put in face time. I wouldn’t have done it if I couldn’t have worked quickly and left, as I did all the time. It’s a big advantage to be an English native speaker; you can pump out a well written, grammatically correct story much more quickly than the Chinese journalists can. I left early all the time, and the editors weren’t forced to wait to the last minute for my stories.
I’m definitely glad I did it. It was my only real experience interacting with Chinese co-workers in a Mandarin-speaking environment, which was important for me to get because they wouldn’t let you speak Chinese at the bushibans. And at the time, I lucked out because there were a lot of major financial stories at the time, so I got to write a lot of front page stories. Call it narcissism, but it’s pretty damn cool to see your name on the front page! 
Overall, just sort of a cool experience to get under my belt I’d say, but not a career for me. I’ve been in finance since then.