They’re on track to turn a news startup into a new media empire

The News Lens’ Mario Yang (left) and Joey Chung (right). Photo credit: Tech in Asia.

While the media industry flails and self-flagellates over fake news and the inscrutable powers of the Facebook newsfeed, Joey Chung sounds like he has no doubts as he explains that his media startup is now maturing and ready for primetime.

Joey, the CEO and co-founder, started The News Lens mid-2013. It has now grown to six million readers across four editions of the site in Chinese and English, staffed by 70 people.

In a coup, he this week announced the hiring of Taiwanese TV news anchor Jennifer Shen – whom he likens to influential American reporter Katie Couric.

“The number one, the most well-known, the most respected, the most awarded news anchor in Taiwan history,” says Joey of Shen. The veteran journalist, 57, recently left her cable TV role. She and the startup boss then had a “three-month conversation,” explains Joey, about being a global news anchor for The News Lens’ live streams and recorded interview segments, backed up by its eight-person video team.

“It signals the coming of age of digital startups” in Taiwan, he tells Tech in Asia. It’s not easy for them up against seven cable news channels, plus a myriad of fighty newspapers and feisty magazines in what’s rated Asia’s freest and possibly most ferocious media landscape.

“We’re considered the biggest independent media in Taiwan, and we have the highest ratio of that so-called Facebook generation – the millennial crowd, the 15 to 40 crowd,” says Joey. “However, we’re still lacking, as you can imagine, in the 40, 50, 60 crowd. So by having a highly respected and famous anchor join us, it really symbolizes that we’re growing up. It symbolizes that we’re able to go after the masses, our parents’ generation.”

The team. Photo credit: The News Lens.

Likening Shen to Couric is apt in another way. The journalist and author, formerly of NBC and CBS, left ABC in 2014 for Yahoo News.

Joey’s startup today announced it has secured an undisclosed round of series B funding from a mix of local and international investors, nearly two years after its series A, to fuel expansion.

The team is bucking the trend of a serious decline in investor cash going into media startups.

In the gutter

While Taiwan has a problem with gutter journalism – remember those salacious news animations a few years ago? – Joey insists that fake news, in the mold of “BREAKING: ‘Tens of thousands’ of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse” and all that malarkey from the recent US election, is not an issue.

Joey sees the startup moving closer to what Vox Media is doing with its eight outlets.

Vox populi