E-Post comes back with five online trade publications

E-post Inc, the company which published the first online Chinese-language newspaper, the Tomorrow Times, will publish five subscription-only online trade journals starting July 2nd, and will add five more in each of the coming two years.

E-post Inc has been planning to publish the new online newspapers since the Tomorrow Times' closure on Feb. 21. In a bid to avoid the fate of the Times, E-post decided to produce a completely different product by focusing on trade information instead of being a comprehensive newspaper like the Tomorrow Times was. The five trade journals will cover telecommunications, biotechnology, insurance, investment and venture capitalism.

He Chi-yu (何琦瑜), the executive editor of the IT Home online newspaper, owned by the same parent company as E-post Inc, PC Home Publishing Group (網路家庭), who has been involved in development of the five new publications, said that they want to publish the new titles using a different approach from that of the Tomorrow Times.

"Taiwan doesn't really have specialized trade publications, since circulation would be too small. We want to combine two elements in the new online publications: providing invaluable professional information and exploiting the advantages offered by the Internet. So we decided to publish trade newspapers online," He said.

"We chose the five industries after considering their potential and high degree of reliance on the Internet. We were also looking for industries with three elements: finance, technology, and China. Finance is a very important industry in Taiwan, but it's also a very conservative industry here. We believe that online information will be very important to the financial industry's future development. On the other hand, China has been a hot issue for industries in Taiwan, and that's why it was a factor in our choice," He said.

According to He, two dedicated news editors will maintain each publication's Web site, providing six to ten news stories every day.

The Tomorrow Times hired 280 employees to operate its Web site.

Fang Nien-hsuan (方念萱), a journalism professor at National Chengchi University, questioned whether new online newspapers could succeed by charging for use. "From the experience of other countries' online newspapers, charging for online information is not successful," Fang said.

Voicing similar doubt, Fan Ming-Yu (范明玉), media planning director of M Digital, said that she was not very optimistic about the new publications' prospects for success.

"The issue is not only whether the experiment can succeed, but also whether the public is willing to depart from their habit of getting free information from Net," Fan said.