Apple Daily will at least have celebrated its 26th anniversary on Sunday, June 20.
But the popular Hong Kong daily may not hold up for very long.
The newspaper team is due to meet on Monday to find ways to survive beyond this week.
"We thought we could hold out until the end of the month at least, but in reality [survival] is a matter of days now," Mark Simon, an adviser to Jimmy Lai, the current owner of the daily, told Reuters. jail.
"Without money, no information"
Apple Daily has suffered an unprecedented offensive in recent days from the pro-Beijing government in power in Hong Kong.
Several of these journalists, including editor-in-chief Ryan Law, were arrested Thursday, and charged with collusion with foreign powers.
The police raided to seize documents and the computers of the editorial office.
A police operation which forced the teams of Apple Daily to show imagination, at the end of the week, to complete the editions, plugging keyboards to their cell phones to write their articles, tells the British daily The Guardian.
All under the watchful eyes of journalists from competing local media, who came to film and broadcast live on the Internet the descent into hell of Hong Kong's second most widely read daily.
The group's accounts were also frozen and nearly $ 3 million in assets were seized under the controversial new national security law, passed in June 2020. "The decision to block access to all group accounts is what matters most to us, because without money, we cannot produce information, "regretted Mark Simon, interviewed by The Guardian.
He estimates that their reserve will allow them to cover a few weeks of running costs, but not to pay journalists or reporting expenses on top of that.
The efforts of Carrie Lam's government to muzzle Apple Daily is the latest act in a long fight between the local authorities and this daily which, since its creation in 1995, has been the main media scratching point of the Beijing regime.
A committed tabloid
However, in its early days, Apple Daily did not make criticism of power its main selling point.
The daily first wanted to sell news items, celebrity gossip, with sensationalist headlines.
A true tabloid whose "arrival has profoundly modified the ecosystem of the press in Hong Kong, especially after the handover of the city in 1997", wrote the Hong Kong political scientist Ma Ngok in a study of the Hong Kong media landscape at the turn of the 21st century , published in 2007.
It struck a big blow in particular by being the first daily to two dollars, whereas the cartel of the Hong Kong newspapers had established a selling price of five dollars for the daily press.
This aggressive pricing policy resulted in "the end of eight local competitors in six months," recalls the site The Diplomat, in a long survey devoted to the impact of Apple Daily on Hong Kong, published in December 2020.
The founder of the daily, Jimmy Lai, was quick to give Apple Daily a much more political tone.
After all, this committed businessman had decided to get into the media "after the crackdown on student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989," said the BBC.
As early as 2003, the daily resolutely sided with the pro-democracy movement during the first demonstrations against a national security bill that Beijing had tried to have adopted by the Hong Kong parliament.
"See you in the street!", Had headlined the diary of Jimmy Lai on the day of the parliamentary debate of the text.
Same thing in 2012, during the debate around an education reform which had been qualified by the Democratic camp as an attempt of "brainwashing" orchestrated by Beijing.
"Let's defend the dignity of Hong Kong in the streets," then launched Apple Daily.
Jimmy Lai, founder of Apple Daily, was identified in the background of this Time cover of the protests in Hong Kong in 2014. © Montage Reuters Institute
Back in the days of the "Umbrella Movement" in 2014, and then during the 2019 protests against Carrie Lam's government, Apple Daily was often seen as the voice of the opposition.
Jimmy Lai even appears in the background of Time's cover photo of the 2014 protests.
Assassination attempt and explosive device
This activism has brought more than one misery to Jimmy Lai and his newspaper.
Before being jailed in August 2020, the daily's founder was the target of an assassination attempt in 2009, and his home in Hong Kong was the target of several acts of vandalism.
An explosive device was also discovered not far from the headquarters of Next, the parent company of Apple Daily, in 2015, underlines the New York Times.
The daily has always struggled to find advertisers, and its reporters are persona non grata for most major events organized by China, such as the 2008 Olympics.
The daily is therefore used to being the bête noire of pro-Beijing Hong Kong power.
But this time around, the offensive he is the victim of appears to be part of a much larger attempt to bring the entire local media landscape to heel.
Since the 2019 protests, the government has tightened the grip on the press in Hong Kong.
The territory has gone, in less than two years, from 18th to 80th place in the press freedom ranking of Reporters Without Borders.
At the beginning of June, the public television channel RTHK, known for its irreverent programs against Chinese power, decided, for the first time, not to "make a political subject" around the anniversary of the events in Tiananmen.
A decision that shocked part of the editorial staff, very attached to its independence, underlines The Guardian, which was able to discuss with several journalists from the RTHK.
One of them warned that the next target of power would be Apple Daily, "probably in September before the legislative elections in December".
In the end, the authorities will not have waited that long.
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