Posted 27 July 2014 21:09 GMT
Screen Capture of the House News’ Facebook Page. The site had more than 230 thousand Facebook followers before it shut down.
The House News, a popular pro-democracy news site in Hong Kong modeled after the Huffington Post, was shut down without warning on July 26.
Tony Tsoi, a House News co-founder and key investor, announced the closure in a note posted to the site at 5 p.m. He explained that political pressure against critical voices and a lack of advertisers drove his decision to shutter the site.
Launched in July 2012 as a news curation and blog site, The House News grew to become one of the most popular online media outlets in Hong Kong, ranking 57 in traffic from Hong Kong on Alexa with 300,000 unique visitors per day. Yet over the past two years, the news platform failed to attract enough advertisers to keep afloat.
Tsoi, who supports protest movement Occupy Central’s plans to peacefully take over central Hong Kong and demand the right to choose candidates for the city’s next chief executive election, said in the shutdown announcement that he is “terrified” by the political atmosphere:
I am terrified.
Hong Kong has changed. To act as a normal citizen, a normal media outlet and to do something right for society is becoming difficult, or even terrifying — not that you feel alienated, but fearful. The ongoing political struggle makes people very anxious — many democrats are tracked and smeared. Their past records have been dug up. A sense of White Terror lingers in society and I feel the pressure as well. As a businessman who travels frequently to mainland China, I admit that every time I walk past the border, I am scared. Am I being paranoid? It is difficult to explain the feeling to outsiders.
My family feels the pressure and they are worried about me. As the atmosphere gets more tense, the pressure around me becomes more disturbing.
A former British colony, Hong Kong is a special administrative region of communist China and enjoys a high level of autonomy from the communist country under the idea of “one country, two systems.” Relations between the two have become tense in recent months. China has promised Hong Kong a direct vote for the next chief executive in 2017 for the first time, but insists that a committee approve the candidates.
The mainland considers “love of country” to be important criteria for Hong Kong’s administrators, according to a white paper released by the government. Some Hong Kongers suspect they will only have pro-Beijing candidates to choose from, defeating the purpose of a direct vote.
Businesses aren’t keen to advertise with pro-democracy media for fear of souring their relationship with the Hong Kong and Chinese governments, making it nearly impossible for sites to develop a sustainable business model based on advertising. Tsoi described the market in Hong Kong in his shutdown note:
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