The Reporter: Ten Years of Rescuing Investigative Journalism from a Commercial Line Item into a Public Good

30-second overview: The Reporter (《報導者》) is a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet co-founded on September 1, 2015 — Journalists' Day in Taiwan — by Ho Jung-hung and Chang Tieh-chih, with ASUS co-founder and Pegatron chairman Tung Tzu-hsien's (童子賢) initial personal donation of NT$5 million establishing the Reporter Cultural Foundation. ¹ It voluntarily ties its own hands: a "Three Nots" donor covenant — no ownership, no interference, no clawback — is written explicitly into its published articles. ² The newsroom accepts no advertising, no government contracts, and displays no internal traffic metrics; all content is free. Over ten years, its investigation Blood and Tears at Sea directly prompted Control Yuan censure of the Fisheries Agency; ³ the Ruins Youth duology won the Excellence in Journalism Award; Storm of Child Predators involved eight months of undercover work to expose a child sexual exploitation supply chain; and MIT Machine Tools Flowing Into Russia's Defense Industry won first place at the 2025 SOPA Outstanding Economic Reporting Award. ⁴ Annual fundraising rose from NT$34.47 million in 2022 to NT$52.98 million in 2025. ⁵ This island's civil society, through monthly automatic payments from one stranger to another, has turned investigative journalism from a commercial media line item into a public good — one that sustains itself, and keeps going.

The Morning of September 1, 2015

That day was Journalists' Day in Taiwan. Ten in the morning, a press conference in Taipei.

Ho Jung-hung was forty-nine, having stepped down a few months earlier from his position as editor-in-chief at CommonWealth Magazine. Standing beside him was Chang Tieh-chih. ⁶ The two announced to assembled colleagues that a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet called The Reporter had been founded. It had a single donor — Tung Tzu-hsien, co-founder of ASUS and chairman of Pegatron — who had contributed NT$5 million personally to establish the "Reporter Cultural Foundation" (財團法人報導者文化基金會). ⁷

Choosing Journalists' Day to make the announcement was deliberate. The most significant title in Ho's career was "founding chair of the Taiwan Journalists Association" — an organization he had initiated in 1995, explicitly dedicated to defending journalistic professionalism and editorial independence. ⁸ Twenty years later, the media outlet he founded was launching from zero on that same day. The first-term foundation board chair was Weng Hsiu-chi, a visiting professor at Shih Hsin University. ⁹ The foundation legal structure meant that board governance and the newsroom were organizationally separated. That wall would later become the organizing principle of the entire operation.

📝 Curator's note
The Reporter is not Taiwan's first independent media outlet. The Journalist (新新聞, 1987), Coolloud (苦勞網, 1997), PTS's Our Island (公視《我們的島》, 1998), Newsmarket (上下游, 2011), and Watchout (沃草, 2013) all predate it. ¹⁰ Its genuine distinction lies in a more specific identity: "the first nonprofit media outlet established by a public welfare foundation, bound by a Three Nots donor covenant, with all content free online." That's the accurate characterization.

No Ownership, No Interference, No Clawback

"No ownership, no interference, no clawback." Nine characters in Chinese (不擁有、不干預、不回收), posted on The Reporter's "About Us" page ¹¹ under the heading "Donor Covenant."

The meaning is plain: those who donate to The Reporter do not own it; they cannot influence any editorial decision or content; they cannot demand their money back if a story doesn't serve their interests. Tung Tzu-hsien's NT$5 million was purely to get the foundation incorporated — he has never requested involvement in any single story. In a profile interview, Ho recalled a colleague's observation: Chiu Chang-te compared him to Akagi Haruko from Slam Dunk — "You don't always have the best teammates around you, but you'll keep going." ¹² Li Hsueh-li recalled when Ho persuaded her to join: "I was convinced within three hours, because he's an incurable romantic." ¹³

But romantics usually don't last long. The key to The Reporter surviving ten years is that it transformed "remaining uninfluenced" from personal will into organizational discipline.

The first discipline is money. The foundation operates under the Charity Solicitation Act (公益勸募條例) and publicly discloses annual fundraising income: ¹⁴ NT$34.46 million in 2022, NT$35.75 million in 2023, NT$44.78 million in 2024, NT$52.98 million in 2025 — 1.5x growth in four years. In an era when Taiwan's commercial media is seeing subscription numbers shrink and advertising revenues fall, a nonprofit that refuses advertising is growing steadily. Within the media industry, that's an economic anomaly.

The second discipline is cooperation. The Reporter functions as a complement to commercial media, not a competitor. It licenses its investigative journalism for a fee to Business Weekly (商業周刊), Today Business (今周刊), Apple Daily, Yahoo News, and LINE News for simultaneous publication. ¹⁵ Ho has repeatedly said in public forums that The Reporter and traditional media are not in opposition. This upends the "independent media vs. mainstream media" binary narrative. What The Reporter does is very simple: long-form investigations too costly for commercial media to sustain, topics that generate no traffic — The Reporter takes them on, completes them, and licenses the finished work back to commercial outlets for wider reach.

💡 Did you know?
The Reporter's newsroom backend does not display article traffic counts. After a journalist files a story, they cannot see how many times it has been clicked. This design is intended to prevent editorial selection from being driven by audience metrics.

The Eyes of Fishermen at Sea

From 2016 to 2017, The Reporter partnered with Indonesian magazine Tempo to send journalists across the South Pacific to trace Taiwanese-flagged vessels employing migrant fishermen. ¹⁶ The resulting investigation — Fraud, Exploitation, Blood and Tears at Sea: A Cross-Border Investigation into the Truth of Taiwan's Distant-Water Fishing Industry ¹⁷ — exposed a complete exploitation chain: labor brokers, forced boarding, compulsory labor, passport confiscation, and sexual assault.

Following publication, the Control Yuan censured the Fisheries Agency ¹⁸ and directed prosecutors to reopen related investigations. The Reporter won three first-place awards at the 2017 SOPA Excellence Awards — Outstanding Human Rights Reporting, Outstanding Investigative Reporting, and Outstanding Infographic Reporting, all first-place — plus the Excellence in Journalism Award for investigative reporting the same year. ¹⁹

The methodology of this investigation is worth recording: cross-border reporting, collaboration with Indonesian journalists on the ground, cross-referencing of original maritime records, audio recording of fishermen's oral testimony throughout, and a photography team aboard the vessel. These methods are standard toolkit for traditional investigative journalism. What The Reporter truly demonstrated, in Taiwan's post-2015 media environment, was the continuing capacity to mount investigations at this scale. Commercial media's first budget cut typically targets cross-border travel and long-cycle projects; nonprofit media, with ring-fenced fundraising, can sustain the kind of "produces no measurable traffic in the short term" work that makes this reporting possible.

✦ "What corrodes most severely is not the petrochemical pipelines — it's the human heart." — Fang Hui-chen, "Kaohsiung Environmental Refugees in the Wind and the Petrochemical Serpent Coiling for 40 Years" ²⁰

After Blood and Tears at Sea, Ruins Youth: The Forgotten Children of High-Risk Families was another landmark. Journalists Li Hsueh-li, Chien Yung-ta, and photography director Yu Chih-wei spent over a year inside Taiwan's institutional care system, exposing the sexual abuse of minors placed in residential facilities. ²¹ The investigation was collected as a book published in 2018; a 2025 sequel, Gazing Into the Abyss: The Excluded Youth and Their Collaborators in Redemption, won the 24th Excellence in Journalism Award for explanatory reporting.

The Newsroom That Doesn't Show Traffic Numbers

In a profile interview for the Excellence in Journalism Award, Li Hsueh-li said: "We sleep well every night, because we've done our best every day." ²²

Reading that sentence in Taiwan's 2025 media environment gives it unusual weight. Over the past decade, journalist attrition rates have climbed, median salaries have declined, and mutual plagiarism and content-farming have become pervasive. "Sleeping well" is actually a luxury. The Reporter's editorial structure makes it possible: story meetings don't look at traffic; the editor-in-chief has final say based on professional judgment; salaries are pegged to commercial media median levels but not tied to advertising revenue share.

In September 2018, Ho Jung-hung handed the editor-in-chief role to Li Hsueh-li and shifted to executive director; ²³ in August 2023, another restructuring saw Fang De-lin promoted to editor-in-chief and Li Hsueh-li move to COO. ²⁴ All three editors-in-chief have been internal promotions — none parachuted in from outside — a rarity in Taiwan's media industry.

📊 Data source
The Reporter's complete annual fundraising history, organizational change announcements, award records, and financial reports are all publicly available on its official "About Us" page. ²⁵ That transparency is itself part of the "public good" commitment.

The Bao Bin Affair

But over ten years, The Reporter has also made mistakes it has publicly acknowledged.

On June 21, 2017, journalist Chang Tzu-wu published "When Fang Si-qi Becomes Concrete: Lin Yi-han and Two Kinds of Perfectionism in the Doll House." ²⁶ The article, citing anonymous sources, accused "a well-known publisher's" editor-in-chief of signing and then canceling a contract with Lin Yi-han. Parenting Pressroom (寶瓶文化) publisher Chu Ya-chun was identified as the target, subjected to a public trial by online commenters, and attempted suicide — she was rescued.

The Reporter's editorial team issued a statement of apology on June 26, 2017: "We relied on Lin Yi-han's prior interviews and communications records she left behind with the publisher as our evidentiary basis, without interviewing the parties directly implicated in those records, failing to fulfill the journalistic norm of balanced reporting." ²⁷

This apology is brief but structurally complete: it states what evidence was used, identifies which reporting step was skipped, and explicitly names which journalistic norm was violated. It doesn't invoke motive ("our intentions were good"), doesn't deflect responsibility ("they should have stepped forward"), and doesn't avoid the word apology. In Taiwan's media industry, editorial teams willing to write "failed to fulfill balanced reporting" into a public statement are rare.

In June 2023, The Reporter's senior journalist Fang Hui-chen publicly accused Up Media (上報) chairman Wang Chien-chuang of sexual harassment, ²⁸ touching off a #MeToo storm. Wang denied the allegations and counter-accused Fang of "manufacturing Taiwan's first #MeToo miscarriage of justice," drawing both sides into litigation and prolonged public dispute. The core of this incident was not internal to The Reporter, but as a controversy involving one of its journalists going public, it generated some reader debate about The Reporter's editorial direction.

Including both events in this article is necessary: a nonprofit media sustained by external donors and operating in public trust must publicly account for its errors. No investigative media outlet is without an error record — there are only two kinds: those that publicly acknowledge errors, and those that don't.

Readers Aged 10 to 15

In 2022, The Reporter for Kids (《少年報導者》) launched. ²⁹

Ho Jung-hung was the initiator; Yang Hui-chun, whose background spans Children's Daily, Minsheng Daily, and Apple Daily, serves as director — a resume that reads like a condensed history of Taiwan's youth news media. The Reporter for Kids targets readers aged 10 to 15, with the tagline "Understand the World × Engage with the Future." Yang has acknowledged in public interviews that the outlet's real competition is TikTok, YouTube, and similar short-video platforms.

That statement carries more weight than it sounds. It doesn't claim "we'll bring down TikTok and YouTube," and it doesn't invoke the language of niche audiences. What it acknowledges is an industry reality: Taiwanese children and teenagers aged 10 to 15 receive an average of three to five hours of algorithm-curated content daily; the attention economy has long since been captured by short-video platforms. To place a product about "deep news reading" in that market is to fight a structural battle for attention — an order of magnitude more complex than standard media competition.

The Reporter for Kids' approach is to rewrite long-form investigative pieces as 600–1,200 character youth versions, paired with comics, interactive quizzes, and teacher curriculum guides. ³⁰ In 2024, its piece "Gaps in a Life: Taiwan's First Leukemia Patient to Fight for His Own Medical Rights" won the 23rd Excellence in Journalism Award for television and online (video) short-form deep reporting.

📝 Curator's note
For Taiwan.md, The Reporter for Kids presents an interesting parallel. Taiwan.md itself is a nonprofit open-source knowledge base for readers of all ages; The Reporter for Kids is nonprofit investigative journalism translated for ages 10–15. Both ask the same question: in an algorithm-driven attention market, is depth content worth a dedicated children's entry point? The Reporter's answer is yes — and they've kept burning money to prove it for over a decade.

Red Lines Under Export Restrictions

From 2024 to 2025, The Reporter delivered another set of results.

Storm of Child Predators: Exposing the Dark Industry Chain of Child Sexual Exploitation Content ³¹ — journalists spent eight months undercover inside secret online groups, tracking collective child sexual assault cases, exposing the symbiotic structure between online gambling industries and child sexual crime (the "Room N" and "YOYO幼幼" channels). The investigation won the 2024 Excellence in Journalism Award for investigative reporting, the 2024 Tseng Hsu-pai Memorial Prize for public service reporting, and first place at the 2025 SOPA Outstanding Scoop Award.

Red Line Trades Under Export Restrictions: Exposing How MIT Machine Tools Flow into Russia's Defense Industry in Hiding ³² — journalists collaborated with a Russian journalist in exile to obtain exclusive access to Russian government procurement data, revealing that Taiwanese machine tools were flowing into Russian defense companies and nuclear physics research institutes blacklisted by the United States. The investigation won first place at the 2025 SOPA Outstanding Economic Reporting Award.

From Blood and Tears at Sea (fishermen exploitation), Ruins Youth (disadvantaged minors), to Storm of Child Predators (child sexual exploitation), and MIT Machine Tools to Russia (geopolitics), The Reporter's first-decade topic arc traces a clear expansion: from investigations of disadvantaged populations within Taiwan, progressively extending to transnational crime, geopolitics, and international sanctions regimes. The driver is the portability of investigative methodology: the cross-border collaboration, original data cross-referencing, and long-cycle field reporting skills accumulated in the first decade transfer directly to larger topics.

Li Hsueh-li wrote in The Reporter's 2022 award record: "What we hope readers see is not just the sad stories under the fires of Ukraine, but that we keep searching for precise language and frameworks to help readers understand the aggressor's actions, claims, lies, and face." ³³

Rolling On

September 1, 2025 was Journalists' Day — and The Reporter's tenth anniversary.

From December 4 to 7, "OPEN — The Reporter's Tenth Anniversary Exhibition" was displayed for four days at Huashan 1914 Creative Park. ³⁴ During the same week, the "Rolling On — The Reporter's Tenth Anniversary Gala" invited musicians, reporting subjects, and donors together. The same period saw a lecture series in collaboration with the National Theater & Concert Hall's 2025 Autumn Arts Festival — "Good Philosophy Stool Debate: Does the Way We See the World Also Shape Who We Are?" — and a tenth anniversary online bookfair in collaboration with Readmoo, themed "Depth-Seeking Truth, Many Voices Together."

Ho Jung-hung had already received the 23rd Excellence in Journalism Award's "Special Contribution to Journalism" award in November 2024. ³⁵ An excerpt from the jury citation: "In 2015 he crowdfunded through small donations to found the nonprofit civil public online media The Reporter — free from external forces, advertising, and traffic metrics, using innovative narrative formats to produce deep investigative reporting on public issues, blazing a trail unprecedented among journalism peers."

But annual fundraising growing from NT$34.47 million to NT$52.98 million will not automatically continue into the next decade. For a nonprofit media outlet, sustainability is always a dynamic question: donors age, new readers require fresh cultivation, the cost of major investigations will only increase, and AI algorithms are slicing long-form reading attention into finer fragments. The question The Reporter must answer in its next decade has shifted from "can we keep doing this" to "will civil society continue renewing this trust."

In the week of The Reporter's tenth anniversary, Ho Jung-hung was already fifty-nine; Li Hsueh-li continued as COO; Fang De-lin sat in the editor-in-chief's seat. Whether this island will continue committing NT$100, NT$200, NT$500 per month — sustaining investigative journalism as a public good — that answer won't come in 2026. It will come in 2035.

But the tenth anniversary exhibition was titled OPEN, not The End.

✦ "No ownership, no interference, no clawback." — The Reporter Donor Covenant ³⁶

Further Reading

• Social Movements and Civic Participation — The Reporter's birth and operation are tightly coupled to Taiwan's civil society; this piece traces the broader social movement and civic participation spectrum in which The Reporter is rooted
• Taiwan New Media Art — Another Taiwan-DNA case driven by civic communities and growing across disciplinary lines
• Taiwan Independent Music Scene — Another public-good ecosystem sustained by strangers paying voluntarily
• justfont and Taiwan Typography — Another 2015 crowdfunding case study that reshaped Taiwanese public perception; a parallel in cultural infrastructure
• Submarine Cables — The Reporter's 2024 deep-dive on submarine cables is a key source for this topic

References