The Chinese-language China Times (中國時報) newspaper will reduce its number of pages and lay off part of its work force by the middle of next month in a bid to streamline its organization, a company official said yesterday.
“The media environment in Taiwan has become over-competitive over the past few years. In addition, the economic slowdown and our huge drop in advertising revenue have made it very difficult for the China Times to maintain our current operations,” China Times president Lin Sheng-fen (林聖芬) told reporters in front of the company’s headquarters in Taipei yesterday.
Despite an increase in the number of media outlets, the nation’s advertising revenue has dropped from NT$100 billion (US$3.3 billion) in 1990 to NT$50 billion in 2006, Lin said.
He attributed the difficult operational environment to the soaring price of paper stock, which has surged nearly 50 percent from US$600 per metric tonne last year to US$900.
A company employee who wished to remain anonymous told the Taipei Times earlier yesterday that the China Times planned to downsize from its current 52 pages to 40 pages by Sept. 1, and lay off half of its employees, which would amount to about 600 people, before the end of August.
Lin said he could not provide the actual figure for layoffs, but that the company would announce more concrete plans by the middle of next month.
“There is a very tough road ahead for traditional news media like newspapers,” Chou Sheng-yuan (周盛淵), publisher of the China Times, said in an e-mailed letter to employees yesterday.
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