Introduction: WunDeBroadcasting Explore Team of Changhua County Fengyuan Township Wun De Elementary School participated in the 2009 Cyberfair, with “Far-reaching world of broadcasting － The Broadcasting Corporation of China” as the topic and on Thursday, January 15, 2009, it went to BCC Formosa Network to pay a special visit to Director Cheng-ching Chen in order to understand the operation condition and future outlook of BCC.

Mr. Bao-chia Wu (teacher): Is the market for radio broadcasting clearly distinguished by target audiences?

Director Cheng-ching Chen: Many elderly folks speak only Taiwanese dialect, and we have a BCC Formosa Network for the entire area on which everyone conversed in Taiwanese only, so people who speak Taiwanese are willing to listen to it. So, if you ask what kind of program is most popular, well, because the stations are clearly distinguished, I mean, look at the tower across from our building. There’s a station called “Classical Music Station”. Only people who like classical music listen to that. If you were to ask them to listen to news, they feel that it’s too noisy. If you were to recommend them listen to i Radio, I mean, our “i Radio”, he may not like the popular music we play on that program. They only like classical music. Therefore, different groups like different programs.  

Director Cheng-ching Chen: Because radio broadcasting has become quite professional. For example, people in Miaoli area speak Formosa and there are Formosa stations there. As a matter of fact, there’s an Earth…um…Earth Village or Earth’s Voice, which is Formosa-language only. Its purpose is to serve the Formosa people near Shenggang and Dongshi inTaichung County, so they listen to that.

Ya-jun Hsu (student): I have a question, each semester BCC offers us scholarship and I would like to know the source of the scholarship.  

Director Cheng-ching Chen: Scholarship is sponsored by our company, it is one of the aids of our Ai Xing Yuan Foundation, which I just mentioned. This aid is to help individuals or families who desperately need help, as well as scholarship to the general public or even for the development of focuses that we seek to promote.

As for the scholarship for the children at Wun De Elementary School, part of it comes from the foundation and part of it comes from our friendly neighborhood fund. What we wanted to do, because we had a transmission station next to Wun De Elementary School at Fengyuan for a long time and we were like part of the community; you know that there’s a BCC station near Dachu Village (everyone knew), and we hoped that …we hope that whenever we wanted to propose a plan to give back to the community or start a friendly neighborhood program, we wanted to give to the children first and slowly express our concern for the community…

Oh, the scholarship! Well, the scholarship is that as long as you live there and works there…make a family and work there; have children attending Wun De Elementary School; so if the children worked hard on academics, they could get scholarship. Even though it’s not a lot of money, but we hope to show our sincerity, and the rest of the money your community will use for the community overall. We know that we’ve been interacting with the community for a long time and we hope that people can learn starting at a young age that…if a morally good enterprise had any opportunity, it can go out and help anyone that needs help or provide necessary assistance to students at any age level and encourage them. That’s our starting point.  Because your school is called the highest academic institution in Changhua, and because of your geographical condition, we feel that you can develop different specialties. I’ve observed your last few principals and all of them did their best to create a special group of students. Even though there aren’t a lot of students…children, but I feel that the development process has been done well. If there’s any opportunity, we hope to interact with the community or the children, and the school. So when Director Cho proposed the project, even though we knew that it would add to the workload of our colleagues, we were all for it.

Jing-yu Hsu: Hi director, my name is Jing-yu Hsu. During this era where public radio stations are diversifying and getting sponsorship, at what time does BCC usually finish news presentation? 

Director Cheng-ching Chen: The development of internet and the opening up of media registration are the greatest changes that BCC has faced, and also…I don’t know about other media nationwide, but I think the changes we made are obvious. So I can tell the children that BCC is 81 years old. When there weren’t that many stations, you were probably hearing stations…the only civilian run stations that really sounded like civilian run was us; otherwise, you had Voice of the Army, Losheng Radio, Police Radio Station, and Fuhsing Radio.

We provide free e-news to anyone that needs it, so we’ve been doing well online. As for news for the 9 major portals, in the past we provide news to them for free; portals like Yahoo, Google, or Yam came and grabbed our news; we used to provide them with news for free and we didn’t pay them, people were just doing platform exchange. It evolved to if you want to use my news, I’d charge a certain amount of fee; the 9 entry portals use our news and we charge them. Even though we don’t get much, like, we probably get 2 or 3 million (NTD) from the 9 major portals. But that represents a change for BCC because after the diversification of media we became a platform for news agency. We have this many news to give to online media and they need

I imagine that in the future BCC will stay true to its core value, especially the BCC news core value, which we have been updating and continually improving. We hope that you children will continue to listen to BCC from now to when you become adults. We have already traveled for 81 years and we will continue to travel another 81 years. We’re constantly changing…constantly changing.

Mr. Bao-chia Wu (Teacher): that means “81 years” doesn’t represent aging but the continuing of youthful development. Thank you very much! Let’s give a round of applause. Ready go! (Everyone claps)

Director Cheng-ching Chen: Thank you.

Report of Visiting BCC Formosa Network