Taiwan Today

Although Typhoon Morakot made landfall in Hualien County, eastern Taiwan on August 7, 2009, the morning of the next day appeared peaceful for many of the country’s residents. August 8 is Father’s Day in Taiwan and most people were celebrating the day with their families, says Lin Leh-chyun (林樂群), director of Public Television Service’s (PTS) International Department. According to Lin, the lingering pleasant weather in Taipei in the northern part of the country, where most government agencies and media organizations are headquartered, made many there optimistic that Taiwan would escape unscathed. Few realized at the time that in the south, the storm was turning into one of the deadliest typhoons to strike Taiwan in the past 50 years.

With the attention of the mainstream media focused elsewhere, Lin says a video clip uploaded to the website of “PeoPo”—an abbreviation of People’s Post—by a citizen journalist (CJ) was one of the earliest reports on the unfolding disaster. The video captured a scene in which floods destroyed the bridge connecting the townships of Taiwu and Laiyi in southern Taiwan’s Pingtung County. The video posted from the typhoon-stricken area, together with messages circulating on social networking and microblogging sites such as Plurk and Twitter, quickly spurred the mainstream media to begin reporting on Morakot.

The growing influence of Internet-based citizen journalism has had a large impact on the media landscape and was one of the themes highlighted at the 2011 International Press Institute (IPI) World Congress held in September last year in Taipei. At the annual event, more than 250 media representatives from 45 countries exchanged their experiences and views on discussion topics. As a global network dedicated to promoting press freedom and improving journalism practices, the IPI has a long history of interaction with the Republic of China (ROC), President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said at the opening ceremony for the congress. The ROC’s work with the IPI began in May 1970, when late President Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) received a delegation of more than 200 IPI members, Ma said. The next big step in the relationship came in 1999, when the IPI Congress was held in Taipei. “Now, 12 years later, I feel it is particularly meaningful that the IPI has once again chosen to hold its annual meeting in Taipei,” Ma added.

An important topic discussed at the congress centered on the social media revolution and the use of the Internet as a tool for investigative journalism. A panel discussion titled “Taiwan’s PeoPo Project—a Model for Citizen Journalism in the Future,” for example, provided a forum for foreign and local journalists to learn more about the country’s most reputable citizen journalism program.

PTS launched PeoPo in 2007 as a state-sponsored online platform designed to allow citizen reporters to create their own blogs, cover news content of their choice and upload their reports to www.peopo.org, the organization’s website. By the end of September 2011, PeoPo’s 5,300 registered members had filed more than 62,000 stories, half of which were video reports. The number of visitors to PeoPo had reached almost 1 million each month, Lin said at the panel discussion.

PeoPo does not edit or censor news content submitted by members, Lin said. Instead, the platform maintains reporting quality by requiring mandatory identity authentication for every prospective CJ who registers on the website, offering training programs and instituting a peer-monitoring mechanism. The management team will only remove a story that is “obviously pornographic” or “a groundless vicious attack on a person,” Lin added, noting that no stories had been removed for either reason so far.

The majority of PeoPo’s reports are slotted into 10 socially oriented categories designated by the website. The social welfare category has collected the most stories, Lin said, followed in order by education and learning, life and leisure and environmental protection.

As seen in its early report on Typhoon Morakot, PeoPo fills an important need by reporting on news and issues that have not been picked up by the mass media, a situation that can occur for any number of reasons, one of which is a simple lack of resources. “We have low budgets. We’re short of staff. We can’t cover all the stories we want to,” Lin said, adding that citizen journalism provides a possible solution to those problems.

PeoPo broke another story in June 2010, when local police in Miaoli County went to destroy crops
in the county’s Dapu Township after local farmers refused to allow the expropriation of the land for a science park development. “The farmers videotaped the whole process and called up a CJ they trusted,” Lin said at the IPI panel discussion. “The CJ went down to their area right away, interviewed the farmers and used the footage supplied by the farmers to report the story [on PeoPo].” In less than a week, the story had been viewed 100,000 times, which attracted the interest of the mainstream media, Lin said. Six weeks later, Lin said, Premier Wu Den-yi (吳敦義) issued a public apology on behalf of the government for the way the matter had been handled.

Hung Chen-ling (洪貞玲), an associate professor in the Graduate Institute of Journalism at National Taiwan University (NTU), currently teaches Taiwan’s only university-level course on citizen journalism and also served as a panelist at the PeoPo discussion. In an interview ahead of the IPI Congress, Hung pointed out that there are several ways to evaluate a citizen journalism project. “[CJ] news reports should cover public issues [rather than personal experiences],” she said. “It’s also important to see whether the program empowers its citizen reporters.” According to the NTU professor, PeoPo scores high marks in these areas.

Growing Confidence

Hung noted that PeoPo’s extensive training programs set it apart from other citizen journalism networks, some of which passively receive news reports without interacting with their members. With such training, PeoPo’s CJs have generally shown growing confidence in themselves and increased interest in public affairs after participating in the project—sure signs of empowerment, she said.

Lin agreed that training plays a significant part in empowering PeoPo’s members. “People are not born with storytelling ability. It’s an acquired ability,” he said. “We have online training courses, tutorial DVDs custom-made for CJs and have held more than 400 [face-to-face] workshops so far. … We also have annual regional CJ gatherings, annual CJ symposiums and annual CJ summer camps.”

At the PeoPo panel discussion, a member of the audience raised the question of what citizen journalism projects have to do with the mainstream media. Solana Larsen was a panelist for the session and is the managing editor at Global Voices, an online community of bloggers and digital activists that publishes news stories in 20 different languages. Larsen replied that citizen journalism projects “are not set up in an oppositional way to mainstream media, but always to support or to do something they perceive mainstream media as being [uninterested] in.” Larsen cited the example of CJs playing an important role by providing information and building contacts if the mainstream media does not have a correspondent in the region where an event takes place. “We’ll be able to report the news quicker or in a different way or help journalists get in touch with people on the ground,” she said. As traditional media still has the advantage of being able to reach a large number of viewers, however, Larsen said that partnership between the two types of media would offer the most benefits for the public.

Pointing to iReport, a citizen journalism program started by US-based Cable News Network (CNN) in 2006, Larsen said such initiatives launched under the aegis of large news organizations are changing the way mainstream media communicates with and attracts audiences. She encouraged media representatives at the PeoPo panel discussion to begin experimenting with similar projects in their companies and allowing them to grow to become part of their corporation’s infrastructure.

Speaking of citizen journalism, Larsen said “You need this community. Because when natural disaster strikes in your country, everyone has his cell phone camera, but where will they take the photo to, how will they choose and who will they choose to share the information with? And they will not choose you unless you have an existing relationship with them. You have to create a respectful environment for them to share that information,” she said. “If possible, you should keep tracking those [citizen journalism] websites, not in a competitive fashion, but in a way to boost what they’re doing already, support their work, collaborate with them and try to elevate this to a higher level.”

Although Larsen sees citizen journalism as complementing the mainstream media, Taiwan’s PeoPo project also represents an effort on the part of the ROC government and the public to improve local journalism practices. PeoPo gets two-thirds of its funding from PTS, which is state-sponsored, while public donations make up a large part of the remaining third. In his opening speech at the PeoPo panel discussion, Lin said “Many people in Taiwan feel that the media has descended into chaos,” adding that one of the biggest concerns was “sensationalism in the news,” which causes the mainstream media to lose credibility. Lin noted that Taiwan has five terrestrial television channels, nine 24-hour news channels, 19 national evening news broadcasts, 120 cable channels and a more than 80 percent household cable penetration rate, all to serve a population of 23 million. The presence of so many television stations was one reason Taiwan ranked No. 4 in Asia for press freedom in a 2010 survey by Reporters Without Borders.

Intense Competition

Such media saturation has also spurred intense competition for viewers, however, which has led some stations to push the boundaries of journalism ethics. Lin cited a survey by Singapore-based Edelman Asia-Pacific, a large public relations firm, noting that it “ranked Taiwan last in Asia for media credibility, with only 1 percent of people trusting the media.” In fact, one reason for the establishment of PeoPo was to provide viewers with an alternative to mainstream media outlets, he said.

Looking to the future, Lin said citizen journalism projects help interest Taiwan’s younger generation in the media and public affairs, as the biggest age group among PeoPo’s registered members consists of those between age 21 and 30, who account for 49 percent of the platform’s citizen reporters. According to Lin, few members of that age group typically read print media or watch television news programs regularly. Hung added that by making the flow of information bidirectional, projects such as PeoPo can help traditional broadcasters like PTS to increase the number of their younger viewers, as the demographic enjoys “giving feedback on and contributing to news reports.”

Political freedom and press freedom often go hand in hand. In his remarks at the IPI Congress, President Ma said that only a combination of efforts in both areas could guarantee the country’s ongoing advancement in human dignity. “Only a free, well-informed people can form a government able to rise to all challenges and create a prosperous and secure environment in which people can pursue their dreams with equal opportunity,” he said. By supplementing the reporting of and setting an example for mainstream media outlets, citizen journalism projects like PeoPo have the potential to help Taiwan’s public become better informed than ever.

Write to Audrey Wang at audrey@mail.gio.gov.tw