I picked up the final edition of Apple Daily on June 24, 2021. I was not in Hong Kong. I found a photograph of it online — the red masthead, the one-million-copy print run, the staff crying in the newsroom — and I understood, for the first time in my life, what it means when a newspaper dies.
Not a newspaper going out of business. A newspaper being killed.
There is a difference.
Hong Kong had a press. A real one. Apple Daily (appledaily.uk) sold half a million copies a day in a city of six million. The Hong Kong Economic Journal (hkej.com) employed serious financial journalists. Ming Pao (mingpao.com) was founded by a man who wrote kung fu novels and somehow produced one of Asia's most credible newspapers, as if those two facts are entirely compatible, which in Hong Kong they were.
The South China Morning Post (scmp.com) was the paper of record — stiff, establishment, but real. Journalists worked there who cared.
The Hong Kong Free Press (hongkongfp.com) launched in 2015, crowdfunded, scrappy, genuinely independent — a bet that people would pay for real journalism. That bet is still running. I hope it keeps running.
And then there are the papers in exile. Apple Daily UK, publishing from Britain, carrying the masthead and the mission across twelve time zones. The journalists who left still filing. Still angry. Still going.
A newspaper, at its best, is a city talking to itself about what matters. Hong Kong is still talking. You just have to know where to listen.