About New Monday

New Monday

New Monday, in Chinese Xin Monday, is a Hong Kong Chinese-language weekly magazine for young readers, published by New Media Group within the Emperor Group. Targeting readers aged fifteen to twenty-nine, it covered entertainment news, popular culture, fashion, movies, games and the latest gadgets, and its publisher described it as one of the most popular youth magazines in Hong Kong. Later rebranded NM+ New Monday, it was merged with sister titles in print in 2016 as Hong Kong's magazine industry contracted, and the brand continues in New Media Group's digital-first flagship roster.

A youth title in the New Media Group portfolio

New Monday was one of the five weekly magazines owned and published by New Media Group Holdings, alongside Oriental Sunday, Weekend Weekly, Fashion and Beauty and Economic Digest. Group filings describe each of the five as holding a distinguished and well-established position in its respective market, with loyal readerships from different sectors and age groups. Within that portfolio, New Monday had the most sharply defined demographic job. Group materials summarise the titles' targets by assigning Weekend Weekly to all people, Oriental Sunday to working women and New Monday to teenagers. The magazine's very name, mixing English with the Chinese character for 'new', was pitched at a generation comfortable with Hong Kong's bilingual youth culture.

Readership: fifteen to twenty-nine

New Media Group's published descriptions of New Monday are consistent across its annual and interim reports. The magazine was 'one of the most popular youth magazines in Hong Kong', targeting youths of both genders aged fifteen to twenty-nine who pursued hot and trendy lifestyle topics. That age band spanned secondary school students, university students and young workers, a readership united less by income than by attention: to stars, to films, to games, to devices and to fashion. For advertisers in entertainment, consumer electronics, fashion and youth lifestyle, that concentration was the title's commercial value, and industry surveys of marketers repeatedly placed the magazine among the leading youth titles in the city.

Content: entertainment, pop culture and gadgets

The content mix set out in the group's reports combined entertainment news, popular culture, fashion, movies, games, and the latest gadgets and accessories. Later descriptions of the rebranded NM+ New Monday add sports and lifestyle to the list. This was the standard grammar of the Hong Kong youth weekly: celebrity coverage to draw the casual buyer, film and music to track popular culture, and technology pages to serve readers for whom a new phone or game console was a major purchase and a badge of currency. The magazine's digital front complemented the print edition with a multimedia website and mobile app, reflecting a readership that was the first in Hong Kong to live primarily on mobile screens.

The NM+ rebrand

By the early 2010s the magazine had been rebranded as NM+ New Monday. The change is visible in the group's 2013/2014 and 2014/2015 interim reports, which list the portfolio as Oriental Sunday, Weekend Weekly, NM+ New Monday, Fashion and Beauty and Economic Digest, and in industry surveys, which note the title was previously known simply as New Monday. The 'NM+' styling signalled an attempt to refresh a print-era brand for digital-native readers, adding the suggestion of expanded, plus-sized content across platforms. The rebrand kept the equity of the New Monday name, which Hong Kong youth readers had known for years, while presenting the title to advertisers as a multimedia property rather than a paper weekly alone.

Standing in industry surveys

In Marketing magazine's annual Hong Kong Magazine of the Year benchmarking, based on surveys of the city's marketers, NM+ New Monday placed in the Youth category in 2014, taking bronze behind Milk, the gold winner for the third consecutive year, and FACE, published by Next Media. The survey recorded that New Monday had placed second the previous year, so the 2014 result represented a slip in a fiercely contested category. Even so, a top-three finish among Hong Kong youth titles, in a survey of the advertisers who funded the industry, confirmed the magazine's continuing relevance well into the digital era, against competitors that included both print weeklies and the digital platforms absorbing young readers' attention.

New Media Group: the publisher's story

New Monday's publisher began, by its own account, as the publisher of the travel magazine Weekend Weekly under Emperor International in 1999, took the name New Media Group Holdings in 2007 after a 2006 privatisation, and grew by lateral integration, bringing in Oriental Sunday and the other titles. The group described itself as one of the leaders in the Hong Kong weekly magazine market, leveraging its weeklies' branding and advertising networks to expand into digital business. Its current corporate description calls it a digital-first media and content publisher, listing NM+ New Monday among flagship titles covering travel and entertainment, lifestyle, fashion and local culture. New Monday's history is therefore inseparable from a group strategy: build or buy weeklies for distinct demographics, then migrate their brands online as print economics fail.

The 2016 merger

In September 2016, according to HK01 reporting carried by trade press, New Media Group merged New Monday and Weekend Weekly with Oriental Sunday. The move involved about 100 people, around half the company's headcount, and Oriental Sunday itself cut about 40 per cent of its editorial staff. Trade coverage placed the decision in the context of traditional print media's continuing decline under digital impact, noting other Hong Kong closures of the period, including the Emperor Group's Hong Kong Daily News newspaper, which had stopped publication in July of that year. For New Monday, the merger ended its existence as a standalone print weekly with its own full editorial operation, consolidating its youth content within the group's surviving structures.

Hong Kong's youth magazine market

New Monday operated in one of Hong Kong publishing's most volatile segments. Youth readers adopted new media earliest, and the youth weekly market saw constant churn: Milk, founded in 2001, led marketer surveys in the mid-2010s; Next Media's FACE competed in entertainment and gadgets; Easy Finder had earlier built a large audited circulation on youth and student readers before ceasing publication in 2007. Against that background, New Monday's survival from the print era into its publisher's digital flagship list is notable. Its formula, a broad sweep of entertainment, fashion, film, games and gadgets for fifteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds, was the mainstream centre of the youth market, neither as fashion-led as Milk nor as tabloid as some entertainment rivals.

Digital continuation

New Media Group's present-day description of itself lists its flagship titles, including Weekend Weekly, NM+ New Monday, Oriental Sunday, Economic Digest and newer digital brands such as GOtrip and SSwagger, as specialising in travel and entertainment, food and dining, lifestyle and fashion, sports, finance and local culture. NM+ New Monday remains in that roster, which means the brand created for Hong Kong teenagers and young adults in the print weekly era continues to be presented by its owner as a live flagship rather than a retired masthead. Its content now reaches readers through the group's digital platforms, in line with the group's stated identity as a new-generation media company specialising in digital and print content and experience development.

Legacy

New Monday's legacy is that of Hong Kong's archetypal mainstream youth weekly. For its target generation, it packaged the whole of popular culture, stars, films, fashion, games and gadgets, into a single weekly habit, and its publisher's filings could credibly call it one of the most popular youth magazines in Hong Kong. Its rebrand to NM+ New Monday captured the industry's attempt to carry print brands into the mobile age, and its 2016 merger into Oriental Sunday captured the cost of that transition in jobs and in independent titles. That the name still appears in New Media Group's flagship list shows the residual value of the brand it built with Hong Kong's young readers.