Dubbed the world's first online Chinese language newspaper, the Tomorrow Times (明日報, ttimes.com.tw) called it quits and laid off 280 of its staff yesterday, just one week after the paper was scheduled to celebrate it first-year anniversary.
"I feel sorry for the employees ... because I've made up my mind to let Tomorrow Times return to zero," said Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志), CEO of PC Home Publishing Group (網路家庭) which owns the venture.
"It's an end to last year's experiment in digital media," Jan lamented, attributing the paper's closure to the island's slumping stock market. "Huge changes'' in the Internet industry and inadequate financial resources were also to blame for the Web company's demise.
Tomorrow Times was jointly launched by PC Home and The Journalist (新新聞) magazine on Feb. 15 last year, with a paid-in capitalization of NT$190 million (US$5.9 million). Jan indicated that despite his belief that Internet newspapers are the choice of a growing reader population, Tomorrow Times managed to rack up 12-month losses of nearly NT$300 million.
Jan admitted he made some mistakes that caused the online newspaper to close.
"The biggest mistake I made [for the paper] was to misjudge Internet industry growth," he said.
In addition, Jan also admitted that he underestimated the financial resources needed to "establish a newspaper of that scale," he said.
Meanwhile one industry watcher says the business environment for Internet papers looks gloomy for the next year or two in Taiwan.
Ku Lin-lin (古玲玲), a journalism professor at National Taiwan University, said the Tomorrow Times is not much different from traditional printed papers, therefore it would have been difficult for the online paper to see significant growth in advertisement revenues.
While nearly 50 percent of the 280-person staff were reassigned jobs at Hong Kong publishing magnate Jimmy Lai's (
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