About Weekend Weekly

Weekend Weekly

Weekend Weekly, known in Chinese as Xin Jiejiari or 'New Holiday', is a Hong Kong Chinese-language magazine of travel, dining and leisure launched in 1999. It was the founding title of the publishing business that became New Media Group, under the Emperor Group, and for years it was described in advertising directories and industry surveys as one of Hong Kong's leading travel and leisure magazines and its most widely read. In 2016 its publisher merged it, in print terms, with sister titles as Hong Kong's magazine industry contracted, and the brand continued as one of New Media Group's flagship digital-first titles.

Founding in 1999

Weekend Weekly was launched in 1999, and its success was the foundation on which its publisher was built: company histories of New Media Group identify the original company as the publisher of the travel magazine Weekend Weekly under Emperor International, with 1999 as the date of establishment. The title's Chinese name, literally 'New Holiday', announced its proposition directly. Hong Kong readers were travelling more, taking short breaks around Asia, and spending their weekends eating out and shopping; a weekly built entirely around holidays, restaurants and leisure answered that demand. From the start the magazine positioned itself as a practical companion for planning time off, rather than as a journal of record or a celebrity title.

Content: travel, dining and leisure

Advertising directories describe Weekend Weekly as one of Hong Kong's leading travel, dining and leisure magazines, consistently among the most popular and widely read in its market. Its pages combined destination guides, restaurant coverage, shopping information and leisure features, built around short-break travel for Hong Kong readers journeying in Asia. Its website developed dedicated sections for readers interested in travelling to popular destinations such as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. The editorial formula emphasised usefulness: where to go, what to eat, what was new. That service orientation made the title a natural vehicle for travel and restaurant advertising, and its brand later extended into dedicated travel platforms within its parent group, including the GOtrip travel title listed among New Media Group's flagships.

New Media Group and the Emperor connection

Weekend Weekly's publisher grew into New Media Group Holdings, a Hong Kong-listed magazine group within the Emperor Group sphere. The group's own accounts describe it as one of the leading magazine groups in Hong Kong, owning and publishing five weekly magazines: Oriental Sunday, Weekend Weekly, New Monday, Fashion and Beauty and Economic Digest, each with a distinguished position in its market and a loyal readership. The company marked its tenth anniversary in 2009, tracing that decade to Weekend Weekly's 1999 beginnings. In 2014 and 2015 interim reports, the group still presented the same five-title portfolio, noting that it had expanded into digital business on the strength of its weeklies' branding and advertising networks. Weekend Weekly was thus both the group's origin and one of its enduring flagship brands.

Standing in industry surveys

In Marketing magazine's annual Hong Kong media benchmarking surveys, Weekend Weekly was a fixture of the local travel category. In the 2014 Magazine of the Year results it took the silver award in the Travel (Local) category, behind U Magazine and ahead of other rivals, with the survey noting its coverage of travel, dining, shopping and leisure news and its destination-focused website sections. The same surveys show the intensity of the category: U Magazine and Weekend Weekly traded the leading positions year after year. For advertisers, these rankings were the market's verdict on where travel and leisure audiences could be found, and Weekend Weekly's persistent presence near the top, a decade and a half after its launch, testified to the durability of its brand with both readers and media buyers.

The digital expansion

Like its parent group, Weekend Weekly expanded from print into digital publishing during the 2010s. New Media Group described itself as leveraging its consolidated strengths in the weeklies market and its established branding and advertising networks to expand into digital business, breaking regional boundaries. Weekend Weekly's own digital version offered interactive functions intended to improve the entertainment and reading experience, and the group's later self-description recast it as a digital-first media and content publisher whose flagship titles, Weekend Weekly among them, specialise in travel and entertainment, food and dining, lifestyle and related topics. The brand's centre of gravity shifted from the newsstand to the phone, following readers whose holiday planning had moved to websites, apps and social media.

The 2016 merger and job cuts

The contraction of Hong Kong print reached Weekend Weekly in September 2016. According to HK01 reporting carried by trade press, New Media Group decided to merge Weekend Weekly and the entertainment magazine New Monday with Oriental Sunday, a move involving about 100 people, roughly half the company's headcount, while Oriental Sunday also cut about 40 per cent of its editorial staff. Trade coverage framed the decision as another traditional media downsizing under the impact of digital media and the internet, noting that the Emperor Group's Chinese-language newspaper Hong Kong Daily News had stopped publication the previous July and that rival entertainment titles had also closed. The merger ended Weekend Weekly's life as a fully independent print weekly, even as its brand and content continued within the group's combined and increasingly digital operation.

Position among Hong Kong travel titles

Weekend Weekly's historic competitor set was Hong Kong's travel and leisure weeklies, above all U Magazine, launched by Hong Kong Economic Times Holdings in 2005 with a three-book format that directly contested Weekend Weekly's territory. That U Magazine generally led the later industry surveys, while Weekend Weekly held second place, reflects a market the older title had created: before 1999, no Hong Kong weekly had been built so completely around the short holiday. Weekend Weekly's longevity also contrasts with the many Hong Kong magazines that closed outright in the 2010s; its publisher chose merger and digital migration over closure, keeping the 'New Holiday' name in front of readers as one of the group's listed flagship titles in its current corporate descriptions.

Readers and the short-break culture

The magazine's readership was the Hong Kong travelling public. Its guides assumed readers who might fly to Taipei, Tokyo or Seoul for a long weekend, who ate out constantly, and who treated leisure planning as a weekly habit. Group materials describing the group's titles assign Weekend Weekly the broadest target of all: 'all people', in contrast to the narrower demographics of its sister titles. That universality was the point of the brand. Travel, food and days out were mass interests in Hong Kong, and a magazine that served them in Chinese, in a weekly rhythm, with heavy practical detail, could plausibly claim to be the market's most widely read travel title, as advertising directories long described it.

Legacy

Weekend Weekly's legacy is twofold. As a magazine, it defined Hong Kong's travel-and-leisure weekly genre from 1999, setting the template of destination guides, dining coverage and weekend planning that rivals, including the later U Magazine, followed and refined. As a business, it was the seed of New Media Group: the listed publisher's own histories begin with the 1999 travel magazine and grow through acquisition and lateral integration into a five-title weekly group and then a digital-first content company. The 2016 merger that folded its print operation into Oriental Sunday, with the loss of about half the group's staff, marked the end of its independent print era, but the brand's survival in the group's flagship roster keeps one of Hong Kong's best-known holiday titles in circulation in digital form.