Media professionals slam `Min Sheng Daily' closure

The abrupt closure of Min Sheng Daily generated nasty words for local media moguls and editors from seasoned media professionals yesterday.

Min Sheng Daily, an entertainment newspaper owned by the United Daily News group, folded yesterday after the newspaper's director Hsiang Kuo-ning (項國寧) broke the news on Wednesday.

Hsiang cited "rapid changes in the market" as a reason for shuttering the 28-year-old paper and laying off more than 200 employees.

Chad Liu (劉昌德), a journalism professor at National Chung Cheng University, said Min Sheng Daily staff were only informed of their paper's closure on Tuesday evening.

"These media bosses can shut down their organizations on a dime," Liu said at a conference yesterday hosted by the Association of Taiwan Journalists.

Cabinet Spokesman Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦), who also attended the event, said the sudden closure was common among moribund newspapers, which succumb to cutthroat competition "without warning."

Cheng attributed the sudden closures, which he said often catch even the doomed newspapers' own employees off guard, to media groups' lack of financial transparency.

"Here we have the media calling on the government to be more transparent with its finances, but media organizations are even less open about their own finances," he said.

He added that, due to the lack of openness, very few employees -- except top managers -- in local media organizations have any inkling of how financially healthy their organizations actually are.

Sanlih E-Television (SET) anchorwoman and chief news editor Chen Ya-lin (陳雅琳) said that the pressure of competing with profitable tabloid newspapers like the Apple Daily means "[other] newspapers have to be tabloid papers, too" to keep their heads above water financially.

She added that market demands encouraged newspapers to drift toward sensationalized coverage, a phenomenon that has led to the decline of more professional news outlets.

At the end of the conference, a member of the audience confronted Chen, accusing the SET editor of being unclear on her TV network's finances and calling on Cheng to "pay attention to SET."

"Reporters run around all day interviewing and scrutinizing people, but maybe they should stay at their respective organizations and interview and scrutinize themselves," added the man, who identified himself as a local reporter.

Liu said that slanted coverage was the fault of editors and news directors, who he claimed distort coverage or pressure reporters to cover their beats in a certain manner.

"The reporters themselves are not the problem," Liu said.

With Cheng nodding his agreement, Liu added that the central government had relied on local authorities to restrict Apple Daily's coverage after the newspaper had published a photograph on its front page of Taichung Mayor Jason Hu's (胡志強) wife Shaw Hsiao-ling (邵曉鈴) following a traffic accident on Nov. 18 involving the couple.

The photograph, published on Nov. 19, showed Shaw lying on a stretcher, half-naked and covered in blood.

Liu called on the National Communications Commission (NCC) to regulate the market so that large newspapers will not form monopolies that drive out smaller, respectable print media organizations.

Liu also called for subsidies for small newspapers to keep them afloat, a proposal that Cheng said the government "could discuss."