{"id":41196,"date":"2014-07-28T15:11:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-28T15:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=41196 "},"modified":"2014-07-28T15:11:00","modified_gmt":"2014-07-28T15:11:00","slug":"41196-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=41196","title":{"rendered":"Bloggers reboot democracy site"},"content":{"rendered":"
Monday, July 28, 2014<\/div>
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A group of bloggers has set up a Facebook page for people’s commentaries on politics and other issues following the sudden closure of House News, a pro-democracy news site with strong ties to media mogul Jimmy Lai Chee-ying.<\/div>
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Within 20 hours of it being set up on Saturday night, the House News Bloggers Group received more than 20,000 likes.<\/div>
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One of the netizens, Alan Lau, proposed that everyone should financially support the webpage if needed, while another, Chu Nabuo, said: “The freedom of expression and the press will never die.”<\/div>
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House News, a news website and blog founded in July 2012, was seen as pro-democracy.<\/div>
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ADVERTISEMENT<\/div>
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But on Saturday afternoon the website’s co-founder, Tony Tsoi Tung-ho, announced its closure, citing fear of political pressure and low advertising revenues.<\/div>
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“As a businessman who always travels between Hong Kong and the mainland, I need to admit that I am really scared every time I cross the border,” Tsoi said.<\/div>
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Tsoi also revealed that many pan- democrats have been followed, their histories investigated and their names smeared, creating an atmosphere of “white terror” that is spreading in society.<\/div>
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Tsoi is also one of the 10 professionals behind Occupy Central.<\/div>
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At the beginning, most of the capital for House News came from the “Financial Centre,” a joint project with Apple Daily, which involved several hundreds of thousands of dollars.<\/div>
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However, it’s schedule was reduced from five days a week to once per week. In January, Apple Daily revealed that its advertisements had been pulled because of its political stance. Apple Daily’s budget fell by 5 percent and House News lost its major funding.<\/div>
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Well-known cultural critic Leung Man-tao, another co-founder of House News, said it cost several million dollars a year to run the website and that Tsoi had been digging into his pockets to make up the shortfall.<\/div>
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The last post of House News, which announced its closure, received 22,000 likes and was shared over 10,000 times with more than 3,000 comments.<\/div>
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Most of the netizens said they felt helpless and ashamed though a few said they were happy it had closed down.<\/div>
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Beaky Ng said: “I really miss House News. I did not care about political news until House News appeared. You changed me.”<\/div>
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But Seatigerz Bak said: “House News is down. Congratulations!”<\/div>
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 <\/div>Continue reading the original article<\/a><\/strong>.<\/span>
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<div>However, it's schedule was reduced from five days a week to once per week. In January, Apple Daily revealed that its advertisements had been pulled because of its political stance. Apple Daily's budget fell by 5 percent and House News lost its major funding.<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}