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Tag: media in Taiwan

Taiwan’s Shared Media Challenge

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in News and Trends.

In Taiwan, the pressures bearing down on the news industry are an open secret. Platform monopolies, cutthroat competition for clicks, and an advertising market that rewards sensation over substance have hollowed out public trust in journalism. Yet these are precisely the conditions that make the problems so hard to report on and so easy to ignore.

A public interest documentary released this month by the Hsiao Tung-tzu Culture Foundation (蕭同茲先生文化基金會), a Taipei-based foundation dedicated to journalism education and press culture, is now trying to raise awareness of these issues. Spark 5: A Virtuous Cycle (星星之火5：共好的循環), the fifth installment in the foundation’s ongoing Spark series, premiered on June 4 and aired the following evening on CTS (華視), a public broadcaster. The film is the first in the series to bring advertisers, ad-tech platforms, and international news credentialing systems into its examination of Taiwan’s news ecosystem. According to a 2025 report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, public trust in news in Taiwan stands at just 30 percent, ranking 39th among 48 markets surveyed globally.

Interviewees, including journalists, technology platforms, advertising agencies and major Taiwanese brands, arrived at a shared conclusion, according to outlets reporting on the film — that the trust crisis facing Taiwan’s media is no longer a problem for the news industry alone, but a challenge facing the whole society.

READr Signs Off

Written by Mark Chiu on . Posted in News and Trends.

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!”