Today Daily News (Toronto)
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Today Daily News (現代日報) is a Chinese language newspaper in Canada, launched on November 1, 2005. It is published by Today Daily News International in Scarborough.
It is called the Canada Eastern Edition (加東版) even though it is the only edition published at the moment.
The paper is published 7 days a week in traditional Chinese in the broadsheet format. News coverage includes headline news, news at the metro and national levels, news from Greater China, Chinese community news, international news, entertainment, financial news, sports, and supplements.
The paper does not own its own printing press; printing is being contracted out to a printer.
Compared with the other three main Chinese newspapers, the reporting style of Today Daily News is relatively sensationalist. The reporting style seems to be approximately comparable to the Toronto Sun, but not as sensationalist as the likes of Apple Daily or the Hong Kong Sun.
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[edit] The online version
Today Daily News is also published online on the world wide web. The online version contains an exact copy of the day’s newspaper; back issues are not online, however. Access is free of charge.
The online version of Today Daily News works in a way similar to the “ePaper” version of Oriental Daily News and Apple Daily and is very different from the way most online newspapers work:
- When a visitor visits the web site, the visitor is presented with a text menu for selecting the three publications (the paper, and the two supplements)
- Clicking on one of the three text links gives a GIF thumbnail image of the front page of the paper or supplement.
- Clicking the image leads to a new page with GIF thumbnail images of each of the major sections.
- Clicking any of the thumbnails of a section leads to a new page with GIF thumbnail images of each of the pages in that section.
- Finally, clicking the thumbnail image of any page leads to a new page containing an image of that page, consisting of 9 JPEG sub-images.
In other words, the online version of Today Daily News aims to give the visitor an experience comparable to reading a printed newspaper.
The way the online version works presents a number of accessibility problems:
- There is no search function;
- It is not possible to read the paper with text-based browsers (nor with screen readers, but screen readers for Chinese are not known to exist);
- Search engines will not be able to index the news stories reported by Today Daily News;
- It would not be understood by people who can only read simplified Chinese (who normally would be able to benefit from third-party utilities like NJStar, which can convert traditional Chinese text into simplified Chinese on the fly).
Nevertheless, some users like this format and cites a number of advantages:
- It feels like reading a real paper;
- It is possible to look up advertisements, which is sometimes helpful.
[edit] Supplements (magazines)
Two weekly magazine are distributed free of charge as supplements:
- Saturday—Today Life Magazine (現代生活雜誌), a lifestyle-and-entertainment magazine;
This magazines is tabloid size, and contain a mix of original local content and content from Hong Kong. The origin of the non-local content is, however, not clear, since Today Daily News International seems to be entirely based in Canada.
[edit] Launch
The appearance of a new competitor has caused the other established Chinese language newspapers to either lower their retail prices before Today Daily News’ scheduled launch date, or launch other promotions near the launch date.
There was some confusion on the first day of its launch, when a one-page flyer in broadsheet format (containing no news stories but rather a brief introduction of the paper and a form for a lucky draw) appeared in retail outlets early in the morning; a real paper was available for free pick-up later in the day. (As a promotion, the first 4 issues of the paper were free of charge.)
