House News closure was no business as usual
Evan Fowler, a former House News contributor, says the sudden closure of the popular but short-lived news website seemed the result of more than having a poor business model
The Saturday before last I received a message from an editor at House News. It read, "Storm has arrived. Your writing must not stop." When I checked online, instead of a news page, there was only a written statement from Tony Tsoi Tung-ho. House News had closed.
Tony began by stating his "fear". He wrote of Hong Kong having changed; of pressure and surveillance; and of a wave or atmosphere of "white terror". He stated his need to travel to the mainland for business, and the deepening sense of fear he felt each time he crossed the border. Unusually, he also mentioned his family.
Everything he wrote was framed by fear. In just over two years, the site had grown to become Hong Kong's largest online news platform, with over 300,000 unique readers a day. And yet it was operating in an "abnormal social and market atmosphere". "Not only are Hong Kong's core values distorted, so too is the market," he wrote.
House News, as the mainstream media would report the day after, closed because it was a failed business.
Almost exactly a month ago, I was a guest at the news website's second anniversary party. It was releasing a still and video campaign that profiled four prominent contributors. I was one. There was an unmistakable optimism that night. House would soon be cited by as an example of independent news in Hong Kong. A guest that night, the Asia editor of a major European paper, spoke to me of the sense of "tension and negativity in Hong Kong, but also hope", and said that "nothing represents this more than House".
Whilst House was running at a loss, these losses, I was told, were both manageable and within expectation. The collapse early this year of a deal with did strain finances, but I was assured that new income streams had been opened and the hole was well on the way to being filled.
