Winds
of change blow across Taiwan media. MALUM NALU reports
In Taiwan, where I spent my three weeks R&R in
last month, a media revolution is sweeping the country and giving more power to
the people: Citizen Journalism.
This is particularly so at the Public Television
Service in Taipei where PeoPo - short
for People’s Post – has been hailed as the new media frontier of Citizen Journalism
in Taiwan.
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| PeoPo host Julia Wang on air.-Pictures by MALUM NALU |
The winds of change are blowing across Taiwan and
the world as the shift is made towards web media (broadband net), convergent
media (two-way interaction), and cloud media (cloud computing)
“Peopo”, according to Phil Harding of The Guardian newspaper, “could well be a
model for Citizen Journalism in the future.
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| Citizen Journalism poster in Taipei |
Taiwan, a hi-tech small island country of 23 million
people, has a flourishing and prolific media that consists of four major newspapers
(which already face an uphill battle against the Internet, with a steady
decline in penetration rate and advertising revenue).
As of June 2011, Taiwan had:
·
171 radio stations;
·
Five
terrestrial television stations;
·
62 cable television operators;
·
7,160 audio (compact disc, etc)
production companies;
·
107 satellite broadcasting programme
providers on 281 channels;
·
2,156 newspaper publishers;
·
8,122 magazine publishers;
·
13, 257 book publishers; and
·
1, 886 news agencies.
The rise of Web 2 in recent years has given rise to
citizen journalists in recent years from passive consumers to active
participants.
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| Popular PeoPo host, Julia Wang, live on air |
PeoPo was launched in 2007 and is focused on
grassroots, autonomy, empowerment, social issues, facilitating dialogue, and on
freeware and creative commons.
It uses a multi-media platform for videos (50%),
photographs and text; has no editing or censorship; has had over 75,000
accumulated stories as of last month; and has over 6,000 citizen journalists.
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| Inside the studios of Public Television Service in Taipei |
These citizen journalists have covered breaking and
exclusive stories such as accidents, controversial land cases, background of
presidential candidates, the immense disaster of Typhoon Morakot in 2009, and
many others.
Journalists from 28 countries around the world, who
were invited for a workshop in Taiwan last month, could not help but be
fascinated by the impact of citizen journalism there.
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| International journalists from 28 countries at Public Service Television |
Ley-chyn Lin, director of the international
department at Public Television Service and a journalist himself, said Citizen
Journalism was the trend of the future.
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| Ley-chyn Lin, director of the international department at Public Television Service and a journalist himself, says Citizen Journalism is the trend of the future.- |
“I think in the future, we’ll have traditional media
working with people like this (citizen journalists) side-by-side, because we
can no longer cover every side of society,” he tells us.
“We still will have journalists covering regular
beats like presidential office, congress, as citizen journalists are not going
to do that in a very-efficient way, and we have to have season reporters doing
in-depth journalism – I think that’s still the core of journalism.
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| Visitors to Public Television Service in Taipei |
“But at the same time, for local stories and
important stories happening in rural areas, we need to work with the local
people, who need training in citizen journalism, to work hand-in-hand.
“That will probably be the best situation in future,
I think.
“But for us as professional journalists, we have to
consider that citizen journalists have certain merits, before they can work
with us.
“The basic reporting skill, even the video reporting
skill, is not that difficult to acquire.
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| News department at Public Television Service |
“There are a couple of hundred people here (in
Taiwan) who are very active, who acquire their own equipment, they work very hard,
they are probably better video editors than many of the regular reporters.
“The operate as a one-man band.
“They can shoot (videos), they can write, they can
edit.
“They don’t do very well in the first year or second
year, but they are going to be very good in the sixth, seventh, or eighth year
– and they are often much specialised.”
Lin gave the example of a Taiwanese professor who,
before attending an international convention some years ago, was handed a video
camera by PeoPo and turned out to be an excellent reporter.
“Once they (citizen journalists) acquire these basis
video reporting skills, they will produce more-credible stories than
journalists who have no specialty,” he said.
“These are things we (journalists) have to watch out
for.
“I think the media has been democratised.
“The walls are falling down!
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| At Public Television Service in Taipei |
“I think this army of bees (citizen journalists) is
going to hit us (journalists) hard in the future.”
The citizen journalists trained by Public Television
Service and do not get paid for their stories.
“The incentive is they have a story to tell and
there is a platform for them to tell their own stories,” Lin said.
“This is an Internet platform.
“We have more than one physical workshop a week.
“We have online tutorial material, but we go to
different places, different groups like community colleges, community centres
and schools to teach them the basic idea of journalism, video reporting.
“This is really the key to making the platform work.
“You get people involved, they have a sense of belonging,
they communicate with people who run the platform, and they get trained in the
skills and ideology.
“We don’t really have that much money, but it’s our
staff that go out every weekend to train.”
Asked about the future of journalism with the
onslaught of Citizen Journalism, Lin said: “I think it (journalism) is still
very important to us.
“I think we still need professional journalists to
do their job.
“I think journalism education needs reforms,
constant reforms.
“That’s the challenge for all the journalism schools
because the technology and the Internet change so fast.”
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With
the popular host of PeoPo Julia Wang at Public Television Service
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