According to a 2019 report, there were 82 daily newspapers and 531 periodicals (including a number of electronic newspapers) available in Hong Kong. This included 53 Chinese-language dailies, 12 English-language dailies (including one in Braille), 13 bilingual dailies, and 4 Japanese dailies (HKSAR, 2019). Hong Kong is also a major international media centre in Asia and a regional base for international media organisations, including Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, and CNN.
The eleven most influential local paid newspapers are Apple Daily, Hong Kong Commercial Daily, Hong Kong Economic Journal, Hong Kong Economic Times, Ming Pao, Oriental Daily News, Sing Pao Daily News, Sing Tao Daily, South China Morning Post, Ta Kung Pao, and Wen Wei Pao; there are also five free newspapers, namely, am730, Headline Daily, Lion Rock Daily, Sky Post, and The Standard (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2019). Free dailies are not new in Hong Kong, with the first free Chinese-language newspaper, Metropolis Daily, having been launched in 2002 and freely distributed at Mass Transit Railway stations. It reached a daily circulation of 400,000, with approximately one million readers among the population of seven million. Headline Daily and am730 joined the free-daily market one year later, with Headline News later becoming the city’s biggest free newspaper, with a circulation of 800,000 copies (SCMP, 2013).
However, Hong Kong’s traditional paid and free newspapers have suffered from the availability of free online news content, with plunging circulation numbers and financial decline. Despite the extremely low online advertising revenues, only a few paid newspapers have moved to charge readers to access their website, and most only charging for a portion of their content. Some free newspapers, including Sharp Daily and New Evening Post, quit the market, while Metropolis Daily stopped the free distribution of printed copies and moved online (Vines, 2019). The actual circulation figures for traditional newspapers are difficult to ascertain, as only two Hong Kong newspapers are independently audited. For example, Oriental Daily News, one of the largest newspapers in Hong Kong, made the impressive claim that it had a readership of over 3.54 million in 2018, but there was no way to prove the accuracy of these figures. Looking at the positive side of the current situation, an abundance of news content from a wide range of traditional news media is freely available online for Internet users, and 99.1 per cent of all households in Hong Kong had access to the Internet, either at home or on a mobile phone in 2018 – a proportion that continues to increase. Mobile subscriber penetration rate is 283.7 per cent (Census and Statistics Department, HKSAR, 2019).
Politically, the major newspapers can be categorised according to their pro-establishment or pro-democracy stance. Apple Daily was the most outstanding example of a newspaper aligned with the pro-democracy camp, while Wen Wei Po, Ta Kung Pao, and Hong Kong Commercial Daily represented the pro-establishment viewpoint. Newspapers sitting somewhere between these two stances were under intense political pressure (Lee, 2007a, 2007b).
In 2019, the household broadband penetration rate was 93.6 per cent in Hong Kong, and the percentage of persons aged ten and over who had used the Internet during the previous twelve months using a mobile phone or personal computer was 99.3 per cent and 87.7 per cent, respectively. The increase in smartphone usage was particularly remarkable among the elderly: approximately two in three persons aged 65 and over had a smartphone in 2019, compared to only around three in five persons in the same age group in 2018 (Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, 2020). This might indicate that the information gap between different generations is narrowing.
Regarding broadcast media, Hong Kong had three domestic free-television broadcasters, two domestic pay-television broadcasters, twelve non-domestic television service providers, one government-funded public service broadcaster, and two audio broadcasters (HKSAR, 2019). In 2017, penetration rate of domestic free television was around 99 per cent. Nearly 90 per cent (more than 2.2 million) of households in Hong Kong have switched to digital terrestrial television, representing a very high level of digital terrestrial television penetration (HKSAR, 2020a). Among the television broadcasters, TVB continues to dominate free television news and online news, despite constant criticism over self-censorship and ties to mainland China (Chan et al., 2019).
RTHK is the only public broadcaster in Hong Kong, and it is fully government funded. Since 2014, RTHK has added three new television channels and seven new radio stations and faces a challenge to fill the airtime with enough fresh media content. It has been criticised by a government audit for not creating enough new programmes, and thus repeatedly broadcasting the same content (Chan et al., 2019).
Fantastic Television Limited launched its Chinese channel in 2017 and a channel in English in 2018. However, TVB still has a very dominant role in the free-broadcasting market, and the new operators have been unable to break up the TVB monopoly. The Hong Kong government was criticised for the decision in 2013 not to issue a licence to HKTV, despite the popularity of their programmes among the general public. It is believed that the decision was politically motivated, with the government not wanting to promote competition in the free-television industry, fearing that it could lead to more critical coverage of the central government in Beijing (Kwak, 2018).
Nevertheless, Hong Kongers can access a large number of television channels, with more than 800 local and overseas television channels being delivered through free-to-air terrestrial and satellite reception or pay-television services. Commercial Radio Hong Kong and Metro Radio Hong Kong, together with RTHK, also offer 13 analogue radio channels.
Additionally, there is an abundance of online news media available in Hong Kong, featuring different political orientations. For example, Speak Out HK is on the pro-establishment side and Passion Times takes a pro-localist stance (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2019). The English-language HKFP was founded in 2015 and is funded by public donations; despite its success in fundraising, it only reaches 3 per cent of the total Hong Kong population. This indicates that there is only a small market for English-language news in Hong Kong, and that the market remains dominated by international media, such as the BBC and CNN (Chan et al., 2019).
