台灣動物新聞網 (Taiwan Animal News Network)

» see tanews.org.tw as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The Animal Protection Association of the Republic of China is old, conventional and unglamorous: a Taiwanese charity that runs shelters and lobbies for legislation. In 2014 it did something charities of that description almost never do. It opened a newsroom.

台灣動物新聞網 launched on 9 April 2014 from an office in Taipei's Da'an District and it was a real publication rather than a press-release page. It covered cruelty cases and the slow progress of Taiwan's animal protection law. Around the reporting it ran the utilities an animal charity is good at, adoption and lost-pet listings on one side and a searchable index of the legislation on the other. Within a few years it was being described as the largest animal information platform in the country, and its articles were carried on The News Lens, which put a nonprofit's coverage in front of a general Taiwanese news audience.

On 1 July 2020 it stopped. The association's notice attributed the closure to internal operational adjustment, and elsewhere put it more directly: a range of circumstances beyond its control had reduced donation income, and with animal welfare as the first priority, this was the decision. The site's news content and reference material were moved onto the association's own website to be kept as a queryable database.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ four and a half years of getting ready ~

The preparation is the part that deserves recording. The association began recruiting and training citizen-journalist volunteers in November 2009, more than four years before the site accepted its first article. That is a nonprofit deciding that ordinary animal-welfare supporters could be taught to report, then actually putting in the years to teach them, in an era when most organizations with a cause were skipping straight to a Facebook page.

It also means the newsroom was cheap to run and still too expensive. Volunteer labor was most of the input. What the association had to pay for was editorial supervision and hosting, and when the donation line moved, even that was more than the budget would carry.

~ the word temporarily ~

The closure notice used 暫時, temporarily, and said the association would push the news network forward again as a public service if it later had the capacity. Six years later tanews.org.tw does not resolve in DNS at all. There is no parked page and no redirect. Whatever the intention was in July 2020, nobody renewed the address.

I cannot read most of what it published without a translation layer, and a Chinese-language animal-welfare newsroom in Taipei was never going to cross my path in Ankara. What made me want to write this one down is smaller than the journalism: a shelter charity that thought reporting was part of the job, and kept thinking so for six years.

~ where the archive went ~

The content survived the publication, which is rarer than it sounds for a small nonprofit site. Six years of articles sit on apatw.org under the association's own domain, browsable a thousand pages deep, and a separate copy of the syndicated material is still on The News Lens under the TANews byline. Two commercial-grade hosts are now keeping the archive of a newsroom that could not afford to keep itself.

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