TNN 滔新聞

» see tnntoday.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A public relations agency starting a newspaper is a conflict of interest with a business plan attached. In Taipei in 2016, the Sensemaker group did it openly, and the woman who signed off on it was Huang Ding-ling, chief executive of the agency and editor-in-chief of the news site at the same time.

She was asked the obvious question in an industry interview a year in. Why should a PR company start its own media? Her answer was that the objection had it backwards. Precisely because we are a PR company, she said, we are better placed to develop our own media, on the reasoning that both jobs come down to producing content continuously and knowing an issue well enough to write about it fast. The agency already wrote for clients and promoted government policy. The skills transferred.

By August 2017 the site had passed two million pageviews and its Facebook page was reaching somewhere between seven hundred thousand and a million people a week. Coverage was lifestyle, and increasingly video: more than two thousand original video pieces in the first two years.

~ the dossier ~

~ the arrangement ~

On 3 January 2019 TNN paired up with YAM 蕃新聞, the news channel of the old Taiwanese portal Yam, and ran a joint dual-channel service off the back of a year of quieter content-sharing. Huang's framing was audience arithmetic, that the two sites drew different readers and would do better addressed separately than merged. Yam by then was a portal past its peak, and its blog arm has its own grave on this site.

What the site actually published is legible from the files it left behind. The images still sitting in the archived pages carry filenames like 【PChome 24h購物 新聞稿附件】, press release attachment, from client campaigns for a shopping platform's outdoor-sports range and its International Women's Day promotion. That is the model working exactly as designed, with the client's own press material reaching readers under a masthead.

~ what the archive says ~

Chinese Wikipedia gives the closure as December 2021 and cites nothing for it. The archive disagrees. The front page captured on 2 March 2022 carries articles dated 1 March and 25 February of that year, both of them new. A capture from 28 April 2022 has a story from two days earlier at the top.

So the site was publishing at least four months past its recorded death, and the real end falls in a gap in the crawl between the end of April and the middle of October 2022. April 2022 is the last month anyone can show it working, and that is the date this grave uses.

~ what the domain became ~

By 13 October 2022 tnntoday.com was serving a Russian-language landing page for Leonbets, a sportsbook, under the title Зеркало leonbets 2022. A mirror site, in the gambling sense: a spare address for when the main one is blocked. The WordPress install underneath it was the same one, with the betting logo uploaded into a folder dated May 2021.

The domain started answering 301 on 6 December 2022 and was returning 404 by November 2023. It is listed for sale today. Six years of a Taiwanese agency's carefully managed lifestyle coverage, and the last thing the address did was point at a bookmaker in a language nobody at the company spoke.

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