About Inkstone

Inkstone

Inkstone was an English-language digital news brand launched by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) in March 2018 and closed in 2021. Published at inkstonenews.com, through mobile apps and a daily curated newsletter, it was a daily brief designed to explain China — its politics, business, technology and everyday life — to readers in the United States and around the world who were curious about the country but not specialists in it. Inkstone was part of SCMP's strategy, under its owner Alibaba Group, to lead the global conversation about China, and it was one of three experimental digital brands, alongside Abacus and Goldthread, through which the Hong Kong newspaper tried to reinvent itself as a global media company. All of its content was published in the three years of its operation, and it is described here in the past tense.

Launch in March 2018

Inkstone was introduced on 28 March 2018, in an announcement issued from New York and Hong Kong. It was available on the web, via mobile apps for Apple and Google devices, and through a daily curated newsletter. It was led by Senior Editor Juliana Liu, an alumna of BBC News and Reuters, and its daily brief covered politics, business, technology and human interest, delivered through editorial and visual storytelling. Its editorial staff included veteran reporters embedded in mainland China and Hong Kong, providing first-hand, on-the-ground coverage. SCMP's chief executive, Gary Liu, presented the launch as part of the Post's mission "to lead the global conversation about China", and Malcolm Ong, SCMP's head of product, described Inkstone as a daily briefing of China-focused news and stories. It was SCMP's second news product aimed at American and global audiences that month: weeks earlier the company had launched Abacus, covering China's technology industry.

The idea: explaining China to the world

Inkstone existed because SCMP believed a large audience existed that wanted to understand China but found existing coverage unsatisfying. The Nieman Journalism Lab, reporting in May 2018, described Inkstone as a daily digest on Chinese life and politics "with an eye towards explaining China for people who might just be glancingly interested in the country or newly aware of its influence in global politics". The New York Times, reporting on SCMP's reinvention days after the launch, said Inkstone was aimed at young people and readers in the United States — by then the Post's largest market — offering "a conversational take on China". Its headlines were written in that register: "Diss the national anthem? That's up to three years in the slammer", on proposed penalties for mocking China's national anthem in Hong Kong, was quoted by the Times as characteristic of its voice. The brand's promise, in its launch wording, was a new perspective on today's China, its relationship with the United States, and why it all mattered.

How the daily brief worked

Inkstone published six stories on China each day. Around half of them built on reporting already produced by SCMP's newsroom; the rest were originated by Inkstone's own team. The presentation was designed as a product rather than a conventional news site: it carried a countdown to the next daily brief and a progress meter telling readers how many of the six stories they had completed. The team even worked on patenting a template it designed for presenting two contrasting opinion pieces on a single page, a format that was also adopted at SCMP.com. The fixed daily ration was deliberate. Inkstone was not trying to be a comprehensive China wire; it was a finite, finishable briefing that a busy reader in New York or London could complete, in an app or a newsletter, and feel they understood the day's China.

The team

Inkstone was staffed quickly and internationally. The Nieman Lab reported that the new SCMP verticals had about eight people each dedicated to editorial work, many recruited from established Western media such as the BBC and The New York Times, with a similar number again working on product management, design and engineering. Juliana Liu had joined SCMP from BBC News in November 2017, when a design prototype and loose editorial concept already existed; most of the Inkstone team officially started work on the day the brand launched. Liu was candid about the challenge: Inkstone was being built from scratch, in a crowded market of strong existing China publications, and without a physical presence in the United States. The team drew on the resources of a parent newsroom that had hired about 80 people in the previous year, bringing SCMP's total newsroom to around 350.

Part of SCMP's global strategy

Inkstone cannot be understood apart from its parent company's transformation. SCMP, founded in 1903 and headquartered in Hong Kong, where it was the city's newspaper of record, had been acquired by Alibaba Group two years before Inkstone's launch. Its chief executive Gary Liu, who joined in January 2017 from Digg, pursued a portfolio strategy, telling the Nieman Lab: "We're building new brands, not just editorial products", and comparing the approach to the way Vox Media grows. Inkstone, Abacus and the food-and-travel brand Goldthread were to be workhorses in turning SCMP from a Hong Kong newspaper into a news organisation for the "globally curious" — reporting on China in all its complexity from Hong Kong, and building an international audience that the print newspaper had never had. Inkstone's role in that portfolio was the generalist one: Abacus took technology, Goldthread took food, travel and culture, and Inkstone took China as a whole.

Partnerships and visibility

The brand featured in SCMP's international deal-making. When SCMP announced a strategic content partnership with POLITICO in 2018, aimed at deepening coverage of US–China relations through shared content, expert contributions and events, the announcement highlighted that SCMP had launched two new products primarily aimed at the US market that year — Abacus and Inkstone — as part of its mission to lead the global conversation about China. Inkstone thus carried weight beyond its own readership: it was evidence, offered to partners and advertisers, that the century-old Hong Kong paper had become a producer of purpose-built digital brands for the American market.

Reception and the soft-power question

Inkstone's launch drew scrutiny as well as praise. The New York Times' March 2018 account of SCMP's revival placed the new products inside a larger story: Alibaba's ownership, the Post's mission of improving China's image overseas and countering what it saw as anti-Chinese bias in foreign media, and the scepticism of critics who called the paper a propaganda tool. Inkstone and Abacus, the Times noted, also helped blunt that criticism — polished, conversational, staffed by journalists from the BBC and the Times itself. The tension defined the brand's short life: it had to be credible to the Western readers it courted, while serving an owner and a mission statement explicitly framed around changing how the world saw China.

Closure in 2021

Inkstone was closed in 2021, three years after its launch. The experiment ended as SCMP consolidated its digital strategy around its core brand. What survives of Inkstone is its place in media history: it was one of the most deliberate attempts ever made by an Asian news organisation to manufacture, from Hong Kong, an English-language China explainer for the American mainstream — complete with a patented page format, a finishable daily brief and a newsroom hired from Western media. Its closure, like the later fading of its sister brands, showed the difficulty of sustaining standalone verticals, however well designed, against the gravity of a parent brand and the economics of digital news.

Legacy

Inkstone's legacy is twofold. For SCMP, it proved techniques — app-first briefings, newsletters, visual storytelling, product design treated as editorial strategy — that shaped the parent company's digital development. For media scholars, the brand remains a case study in state-adjacent soft power attempted through quality journalism: funded within an Alibaba-owned, Hong Kong-based company, aimed at the United States, and staffed precisely to be trusted there. That it lasted only from 2018 to 2021 does not diminish its documentary value. Few news brands have stated their purpose as plainly as Inkstone did: to give the world a daily look into China, and to explain why China mattered.