[Editor’s Note]Fast News, Slow News

For those whose window on Taiwan is its media, the island must have seemed fixated on just four stories in February: the beating of a taxi driver by pop star Makiyo and a Japanese friend, diva Whitney Houston’s death, NBA player Jeremy Lin’s sudden rise to fame, and the passing of singer Fong Fei-fei.

Reacting to the coverage of these events, the noted director Wu Nien-jen remarked on his Facebook page: “After seeing TV news focus on just one story for a whole hour, then watching the 9-p.m. pundits and political talk shows sound off about basketball and Jeremy Lin, I laughed until I cried.”

Shortly after the incident involving Makiyo, a speaker giving a talk on communicating with the media offered a heartfelt comment on the state of the industry. The speaker, a former journalist, noted that in Taiwan’s highly developed media landscape, the media determines whether public figures succeed or fail. The media can play up the smallest of faults and dig into every aspect of the person’s life, conducting in effect a public trial. Its pursuit of an issue soon ceases to have anything to do with the actual events. Rather than weighting coverage based on the importance of an event, the media weights its coverage based on the fame of the parties involved.

“Once you become a figure in a story, anything you’ve said or done in the past, down to the most minute details of your life, becomes fair game whether you remember it or not. And don’t expect the media to discuss root causes with you in any serious fashion.”

As someone still working in the media, I find the criticisms hard to refute.

What’s wrong with the media?

In No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle, two American journalists argue that the quality of the news has been degraded by 24-hour news networks’ insatiable appetite for new stories, that the speed of the contemporary news cycle has wrecked journalism.

Journalism should be a process of exploring causes and effects through interviews, investigation, and elucidation, then disseminating the results of that process. But the present-day need for speed is depriving journalists of time to think. Instead, they have to spit out “unprocessed” and frequently error-ridden information. The authors say that this state of affairs isn’t really a problem for the industry because broadcasters immediately move onto the next story, even though it too is likely full of mistakes.

Some Taiwanese reviews of the book have pointed out that print journalism should have been less vulnerable to the “speed trap,” but as print has sought to become more competitive by merging with online media, its offspring—online papers and blogs—have passed the speed contagion to it, too. Like their counterparts in television, newspaper reporters now instantly publish everything they hear on their blogs and webpages to demonstrate the timeliness of print reporting. In so doing, print journalists have likewise lost the time to reflect.

With timeliness becoming a law of media survival, audiences are being compelled to become more media literate and themselves filter out unhelpful or inaccurate “information.” Over the long term, will this hypercompetitive media environment make the carefully developed long-form journalism of magazines even scarcer? Who’s to say? In our case, the many readers who dropped by our booth at the recent Taipei International Book Exhibition are a large part of what keeps us going.

In commemoration of Taiwan’s 10 years in the World Trade Organization, this month’s cover story looks at our agricultural industry’s success in growing exports. This issue also examines the surprising popularity of marathons. We hope you enjoy it.