READr Signs Off

At a farewell gathering in Taipei earlier this month, the staff of READr said goodbye to readers — and to eight years of trying to answer a single question: can data drive journalism in Taiwan?

READr (讀選) was founded in 2018 as a side project of the programming center at Mirror Media (鏡週刊), an outlet founded in 2016, built around the conviction that data could do more than illustrate a story — it could generate one. Over the years, the outlet produced notable work including an analysis of COVID-19 misinformation trends across more than 5,000 international fact-checking reports, and a data visualization of nearly 10,000 distress messages posted online during the 2022 Shanghai lockdown. The outlet also launched Mesh, a news aggregation platform designed to return advertising revenue directly to participating media.

READr has made no formal announcement of closure, and its website remains live. But editor-in-chief Jian Xinchang (簡信昌) announced his resignation on Facebook in late February, and producer Li Youru (李又如) followed in late March. At least one attendee of the farewell party, a reader who had followed READr since 2018, expressed shock at the closure. Posting on Threads, they said READr had enjoyed unusual freedom from commercial pressure — and they could not understand why the team had chosen to disband. “The funders didn’t ask you to leave — how could you dissolve yourselves!”