July 27, 2014 5:55 PM
Posted By: josh rudolph
Hong Kong pro-democracy website, blog, and news aggregator House News (主場新聞) has shut down due to a combination of political pressure and low advertising revenue. The South China Morning Post reports:
In a letter posted on the website’s front page, Tony Tsoi Tung-ho, said he and his family had been increasingly influenced by the spreading “white terror” in society, as a number of democracy advocates had been followed, had their past investigated and been smeared.
“As a businessman who frequently travels to and from the mainland, I have to admit that I felt very scared every time I crossed the border,” Tsoi said in the letter.
He is one of 10 professionals to have publicly vowed to take part in the civil-disobedience movement Occupy Central.
[…] House News was founded in 2012 by Tsoi, former adviser to the Central Policy Unit Lau Sai-leung, writer and cultural critic Leung Man-tao and columnist Gregory Sung Hon-sang.
Leung said Tsoi had been paying almost HK$600,000 a month to keep the website running but they could never balance the books. “Despite our popularity, many big companies don’t place advertisements on our website because of our critical stance towards the government and Beijing,” he said. [Source]
At Global Voices, Oiwan Lam translates selections from Tsoi’s shutdown note, as well as commentary from media experts and House contributors: