The News Lens, a Taiwanese media startup, wants to move the island away from gutter journalism

Consumers the world over often accuse their domestic media outlets of sensationalism. Political pundits hijack issues worthy of real debate, real tragedies are played up for shock value, and the personal lives of celebrities receive inordinate amounts of attention.

This is perhaps no more apparent than on the island of Taiwan. Despite political polarization (though almost no one is content with the regime at the moment), the media remains an entity that almost everyone laments, regardless of party affiliation. When not espousing political diatribes that support the views of large family conglomerates, an overwhelming majority of news stories in Taiwan cover nothing but food safety, celebrity gossip, and lightweight petty consumer advocacy issues. To the chagrin of many, it’s not uncommon to find an article about the latest exploits of a Japanese porn star alongside a piece on the most recent brawl in the legislature.

Perhaps that’s why The News Lens, a new media startup that’s barely three months old, has gained so much traction. Emerging seemingly from nowhere, it now clogs the Facebook mini-feeds of Taiwanese students and young professionals – it’s simply a can’t miss if you’re active on the platform.

Go to the website for The News Lens, and at the top of the homepage, one might see a Chinese-language summary of international news, drawing from Reuters and CNN as sources. This might be placed above a summary of Michael Polanyi’s writings on tacit knowledge as they apply to business, written by a Taiwanese blogger who’s been living in Japan for fifteen years. To the left, at the top of the most-shared list: “A professor’s warning: don’t be like these six types of students.” Every piece is accompanied by a lengthy author profile. Pieces written by non-natives are accessible in their original English via clickable tabs.

This is all firmly in “popular zeitgeist” territory, but it nevertheless starkly contrasts the front page of online news site UDN, which, at the time of writing, features a piece on the romantic exploits of pop singer Dee Hsu.

It’s 2013. Where has a site like The News Lens been all these years? Wouldn’t the absence of a Chinese-language perspective-driven media company confirm that there’s no demand for one?

News for people who don’t read the news

Joey Chung, co-founder and CEO of The News Lens, disagrees.

“The number one pushback we get is that people argue that media in Taiwan is so messy because of supply and demand. It’s all meaningless nonsense because that’s what the Taiwanese want to read about. Or there’s no international news because Taiwanese don’t want to know about international issues. This might be true, but at the same time, everyone wants change too. So now’s the perfect time for us to do something different.”

Chung has the numbers to back up his claim. Launched officially on August 1, the The News Lens raked in 220,000 unique visitors by the end of its first month – above and beyond the 10,000 the team originally hoped for. At the end of September, that number increased to 620,000. On Alexa, the company ranked around the 3,000th most-visited site in Taiwan during its first week live, and since then has increased by about fifty places every day. Right now it sits at #292 in Taiwan, two places ahead of 7-11’s Taiwanese website. Its staff consists of about six full-timers and eight interns, and it has accumulated 70 individual content contributors.

Mario Yang (left) and Joey Chung (right), co-founders of The News Lens

Beyond Taiwan screens

Maintaining ideals in a changing media environment