About Hong Kong Daily News

Hong Kong Daily News

Hong Kong Daily News (Chinese: 新報; Cantonese: San Bou) was a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in Hong Kong in traditional Chinese characters. Founded on 5 October 1959, it was one of the territory's oldest Chinese dailies when it closed in July 2015 after 56 years of publication. Under its final owner, the Emperor Group, it was best known to many readers for its horse-racing pages, which were strong enough to outlive the newspaper itself as separate racing publications. Its history traces the arc of Hong Kong's mass Chinese press: founded in the post-war expansion of the industry, caught in the brutal price wars of the 1990s, and finally closed, in its owner's words, after years of "staggering" losses caused by free newspapers and changing reading habits.

Founding in 1959

The paper was founded on 5 October 1959 by Lo Bin, the proprietor of the Universal Books and Magazines publishing house. It appeared in a fertile moment for Hong Kong journalism. The same year saw the launch of Ming Pao, founded in May 1959 by Louis Cha and Shen Baoxin, and Hong Kong's Chinese-language press was expanding to serve a fast-growing population of readers in the British colony. The Hong Kong Daily News established itself as a general mass-market daily covering local news, entertainment and property, in a market then dominated by long-established titles and enlivened by new entrants. Its founding date made it, by the time of its closure, one of the oldest surviving newspapers in Hong Kong, a point emphasised in coverage of its demise.

Ownership changes

Ownership of the paper changed several times across its life. After its founding under Lo Bin's publishing house, the title was at one stage listed in Hong Kong and was bought by a Taiwanese businessman surnamed Kuo. In 1992 it was acquired by Albert Yeung Shing-cheng's Emperor Group, and the Macau casino magnate Stanley Ho was also among its shareholders. Under the Emperor Group, the newspaper formed the newspaper arm of a wider print-media business: the group's New Media Group, established in 1999, published popular weeklies including Oriental Sunday, New Weekend, New Monday and Economic Digest, while the Hong Kong Daily News remained its daily title. The publisher of the paper in its final period was Peter Kuo.

Content and its racing identity

The Hong Kong Daily News was a popular rather than elite newspaper, and its most distinctive franchise was horse racing. Racing is one of Hong Kong's great mass pastimes, and the paper's racing pages — form guides, tips and analysis for the Hong Kong Jockey Club's meetings at Sha Tin and Happy Valley — were the section for which it was best known and a key reason readers bought it. Alongside racing it carried local news, entertainment coverage and property news; its final issue ran to 32 pages, with two double-page spreads of local news, entertainment advertising, and advertisements in the racing and property pages. For a period between 2007 and 2010 the paper suspended its "wind and moon" section, the risqué entertainment coverage traditional in Hong Kong's popular press, before restoring it.

The price war of the 1990s

The paper was a combatant in the Hong Kong newspaper price war of the mid-1990s, one of the most destructive episodes in the industry's history. Contemporary trade-press reporting described how, beginning in mid-December 1995, the mass-circulation Oriental Daily News slashed its cover price from five Hong Kong dollars to two; Apple Daily, launched that year, cut to four dollars and Tin Tin Daily News to two, and the Hong Kong Daily News cut its price to a single Hong Kong dollar. Two rival dailies, the 32-year-old Express News and the pro-Taiwan United Daily News, were forced out of business in the battle, with the loss of some 550 jobs, and legislators called for competition laws to stop large groups destroying smaller rivals. The Hong Kong Daily News survived the war, but the episode showed how thin the margins of Hong Kong's mid-market dailies had become even before the internet.

Into the free-paper era

The deeper structural threat arrived in the following decade. Hong Kong's first free daily, Metro Daily, appeared in 2002, followed in 2005 by Headline Daily and am730; the English-language Standard converted to free distribution in 2007. Academic study of the market by the Chinese University of Hong Kong found four of Hong Kong's seventeen dailies were free titles distributing together around a million and a half copies a day — more than the total sales of the paid press. Paid dailies across the market lost circulation year after year, and a mid-ranking paid title such as the Hong Kong Daily News, dependent on newsstand sales and advertising, was squeezed between the big mass dailies, the free sheets and, increasingly, online news on phones.

Closure in July 2015

On the afternoon of 11 July 2015 the paper announced on its website that it would cease publication from 12 July. Its last edition appeared on Saturday 11 July, timed a day before the end of the horse-racing season on which so much of its readership depended. The statement said that with the advent of free newspapers, sales of traditional newspapers had fallen sharply in recent years, and that combined with changing reading habits the paper had been in deficit for a long time despite repeated attempts at reform. Around 130 employees were affected; the company said they would receive reasonable compensation and proper arrangements. Publisher Peter Kuo described the losses accumulated over the years as "staggering" and admitted that running a newspaper had become a difficult business. The Hong Kong Daily News was the second Hong Kong newspaper to fold in that period, following the short-lived Sharp Daily, which had closed in 2013.

The racing publications live on

Unusually, the strongest part of the newspaper survived it. The paper's racing book, published under the Sun Po Ma Bo name on the days when race entries were declared and priced at thirty Hong Kong dollars, continued to appear from September 2015 after the daily closed. Its racing section was also split off as a separate publication, Sun Po Ma Jing, issued from 4 September 2015 at seven dollars a copy on the afternoon before race days, keeping the original racing desk's staff. In July and August 2016 the registered trademarks and operating equity of the Sun Po racing publications were wholly acquired by iRace Media Pte Ltd, a Singapore racing-media company, formally separating the titles from the Emperor Group. The afterlife of its racing arm — the part of the paper its most loyal readers had always bought it for — continued in Hong Kong racing publishing after the daily itself was gone.

Place in Hong Kong press history

The Hong Kong Daily News occupied the broad middle of Hong Kong's Chinese press for more than five decades: not a paper of record like Ming Pao or the South China Morning Post, nor a circulation giant like Oriental Daily News or Apple Daily, but a durable popular daily whose racing pages made it a fixture of betting shops, tea houses and newsstands. Its 1959 founding placed it in the generation that built Hong Kong's modern mass press; its death in 2015, explicitly blamed by its owner on free newspapers and digital reading habits, made it an early and clear marker of the contraction that would reshape the whole industry in the following years. That its name survived longest on racing publications sold at racecourses is a fitting epitaph for a paper that always knew exactly which pages its readers turned to first.