Well spotted… :bravo:
The Taipei Times was a decent paper, until the first election. It has been losing credibility since it’s inception but, still is the top Englsih paper in Taiwan.
What was originally created to be Taiwan’s first non partisan national daily has turned into eight sections of editorials, whitewashed and written with a pro-DPP slant.
The opinion section, where opinions belong has gotten so bad, the editors now use the pseudonym Johnny Neihue to avoid embarrassing themselves.
Perhaps it’s time for the creation of an English newspaper that prints the same news as the Chinese dailys and reflects the opinions of it’s readers.
Good Lord Man…would that be advisable?
Ethically? Legally? Morally?
Probably not, but it would be a great read and good laugh. It might even make a profit???
Yes indeed.
A Taiwanese acquaitance, well educated, domestically and advanced in the USA and who is also a damn sharp guy, told me he reads the Apple Daily for his Taiwan news. He says that while the island papers are either pan-blue, pan- green or pan-fucked, he usually gets both sides of each story in the Apple. He regards it as an adventure in reading between the lines.
Not a ringing endorsement, but perhaps a logical one.
It would be relatively easy to do. Just pick the most interesting stories from the local Chinese papers, send them to a local bulk translation company, hire a sketch artist to copy the pictures and all that is left is the printing.
I agree with that sentiment 100%. Yeah, yeah, the Apple loves to lay on the lurid details and crude CGI re-enactments for their crime stories, but their political reporting is actually pretty decent. I never understood why some blogging foreigners in Taiwan think that the Apple is anti-democratic. They’re more in touch with electorate than any of the other more partisan dailies, which is why their circulation is higher than everyone else’s despite being 50% more expensive (boobie shots don’t hurt either.)
Well, actually I do understand why the pan-green fringe thinks the Apple is undemocratic. Their ownership is HKese, which is the same as mainland Chinese, so they’re clearly trying to brainwash the Taiwanese people into having a low opinion of the democratic process here. It’s Jimmy Lai’s secret weapon for reunification!
Kind of silly. High school kids “trying it on” with the teacher to see what kind of innuendo they can get into print. Har de har har indeed.
“The Chinese’ll never get it,” they probably think to themselves in between snickers – that’ll soon change with just a simple explanatory email.
ANd tehy won’t be the first to get fired for this exact same kiddy nonsense. Remember that sports section TT guy who got his arse canned when someone complained about his ham-fisted double entendres and described to the guy’s boss just exactly what the photo captions were saying?
Did anyone catch page 10 today? Lovely photo of the new Bangkok airport.
With one guy sitting on a chair, half his finger up his nose. “Easing Congestion” was the caption.
Call me childish, but I had a giggle.
TaipeiTimes had it’s major backslide something like 4-5 years ago when they decided to reduce the page count and reorganize the paper. This was about the same time when much was written about the way senior management backstabbed the foreign editors, writers and copyeditors. I think the lose of Editor Lawerence Eyton last year also lowered the quality of the paper somewhat. I liked reading his local politics articles.
What makes the Taipei Times worthwhile to me is that every once in a while, one of Taiwan’s hidden treasures: Richard Hazeldine, Bo Tetards, Henry Blackhand, Micheal Turton, Erick Heroux or Jerome Keating submits an article or letter to the editor. I also like reading articles from Sushil Seth, Mac William Bishop, Martin Williams, Bradford Delong, Ruan Ming, Orville Schell, etc.
Today’s paper was pretty good (Sep27). I liked the PFP editorial and Jerome Keating piece. TT is hit or miss. Some days it sucks, some days its a good read. At least they are not kmt/ccp asskissers like the chinapost. (I could care less about the comics). chinapost is a disgrace to Taiwan. I will be glad to see the day that rag goes out of business. (unlikely since Xinhua will probably prop them up in a year or two).
Friday’s PopStop by Jules Quartly is also a good read for my 10am constitutional.
I kind of like the witty headlines too. I don’t think its childish, I think its creative and a bit of fun.
The worst was the title to an article about the sinking of that Russian nuclear sub. Something like, “That Sinking Feeling.” Absolutely crass.
I couldn’t agree more. I also love witty headlines. I’ve yet to see one in the TT though.
If the TT was a more serious paper, I would expect higher standards and put the jokes aside. Since we know the history & finances of the paper and how management does things there (and in Taiwan), that’s not likely to happen. It’s somewhat depressing that Taiwan, a country that has been trying to promote itself as an international gateway for many years, can’t even do the simple things like have a decent international paper, radio or TV news channel.
Keep in mind that the China Post does not expect to make money with its newspaper. What it makes money with is its newsmagazine “The Student Post.” The newspaper is advertising for this English-teaching weekly; as well, the student weekly seems more prestigious because it is published by a newspaper, according to some of my Taiwanese acquaintances.
The Taiwan News is in a similar situation, I think.
For those of you complaining about the comics in the TT, let me say this.
I was responsible for selecting the ones that were used in the paper as it was first put out (later, someone added others that I would never have picked, and some of the Sundays ones, even in the beginning, came from who knows where).
The fact that you have to understand is that the syndicates said that if a comic strip was being used by either the Post or the News, it was off limits to the TT. The Post scooped us on Dilbert by about a week.
I picked Zippy the Pinhead thinking of what it was when I was in university, and have to admit that it might not have been the best choice. I also wanted “Life in Hell” by Simpson’s man Matt Groening, but it was only once a week and very expensive.
I can’t see how anyone would prefer to read Peanuts or Beetle Bailey reruns for the millionth time when they can have something fresh.
As for the paper in general, killing sports pages for the totally useless Youth Central was key. This was the idea of the now-retired president CK Lee and he pitched it as making millions (really) for the paper. No one has ever done a review of the situation and the worth of the section since he departed. Those who actually work for the paper, this excludes management who just pose and draw very large salaries, know that the section isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on and could be better used for actual news.
The Johnny Neihu articles severely hobble the quality of the paper. What is clearly a blog entry, and often having the professionalism of one, the column should either be attributed to an actual person or pulled. Better to just pull the whole thing. It simply smacks of something you’d see in a high school paper that has no adult oversight.
As for the political slant, there was always a bit of “green” going on, but it was rarely anything that actually made a copy editor stand up and take notice (although there was a time when the Nutty Professor said that the front page lead pic – should it be political – should have more green, as in the actual color green). The op-ed page has for years been largely unreadable. Those who enjoy it are either new to Taiwan and have not heard the same six or seven views ad nauseum or brain dead, or both. The problem is that the purely one-sided green op-eds have been staining the rest of the paper to the point that now even copy editors don’t seem to realize when something is biased.
There is something to be said for an English-language paper that has exactly no native speakers in any position higher than on the copy desk.
Does anyone remember that 1999 TV ad where Bill Clinton says something like “I wonder what’s going on in Taiwan today” and then proceeds to read the Taipei Times. Presumably this was the newspaper’s original mission – to influence US foreign policy at the highest level. Whether they achieved this objective or not, I’ll leave up to you to decide, but it’s damned shame the TT didn’t keep up its advertising campaign, because this would shed some light on what exactly what it is the the newspaper thinks it is achieving these days.
“Politicians and media outlets inhabit their own world, one that often has no relationship to reality,” says the editorial in today’s TT. So there’s your answer, people – the Taipei Times and its ilk have no idea what reality is – and this from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
If that’s not intellectual bankruptcy, then I don’t know what is.
He thought it would make millions because the English-teaching weeklies at the China Post and the Taiwan News do make a lot of money for their publishers. Is that all the Taipei Times aspires too, though - to be an English-teaching vehicle for the Taiwanese? If so, I think they should expand Youth Central and give up all pretense of being a real newspaper.
Did anybody see Joe Hung’s opinion piece in the China Post today? Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be online yet. In it he criticizes those Danish cartoonists whose depictions of Muhammad make “…most of us doubt they have any understanding of Islam, a religion which is, like Judaism and Catholicism, a part of Judio [sic]-Christianity.” The Koran, we learn, “differs little from the Bible” though Hung pointedly wonders whether it has the Sermon on the Mount in it.
You think somebody ought to forward this to Al-Azhar or somewhere, and get them to protest Hung’s editorials?
I am reviving this thread not to answer the question definitively but to note that the awesome @StevenCrook, one of forumosa’s finest, has announced in today’s Taipei Times the end of his “Highways & Byways” travel series. The series covered, according to Crook, 172 articles spanning 49 months. It rarely (if ever) repeated things that I already knew or had already read.
We spend quite a bit of time on this site bemoaning the countless ways things could be better—and sometimes we even have concrete solutions. Allow me to use this post to say life in Taiwan is unambiguously better with Mr Crook’s contributions, which happily will continue through what he calls “the occasional travel piece” to the Taipei Times along with his not-to-be-missed twice monthly column on the environment in that same newspaper.
Guy
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I noticed this morning when clicking on TT website that it put you to yesterday’s news. It did not change until later on in the morning. Usually by midnight they change to the next day. Not sure why there was a glitch. Tried it on several devices and it was the same–yesterday’s news