Posted 27 July 2014 21:09 GMT
Screen Capture of the House News’ Facebook Page. The site had more than 230 thousand Facebook followers before it shut down.
The House News, a popular pro-democracy news site in Hong Kong modeled after the Huffington Post, was shut down without warning on July 26.
Tony Tsoi, a House News co-founder and key investor, announced the closure in a note posted to the site at 5 p.m. He explained that political pressure against critical voices and a lack of advertisers drove his decision to shutter the site.
Launched in July 2012 as a news curation and blog site, The House News grew to become one of the most popular online media outlets in Hong Kong, ranking 57 in traffic from Hong Kong on Alexa with 300,000 unique visitors per day. Yet over the past two years, the news platform failed to attract enough advertisers to keep afloat.
Tsoi, who supports protest movement Occupy Central’s plans to peacefully take over central Hong Kong and demand the right to choose candidates for the city’s next chief executive election, said in the shutdown announcement that he is “terrified” by the political atmosphere: