Hong Kong media entrepreneur creates online media “The Points”

Jimmy Lai, the founder of Next Media in Hong Kong, and a group of former journalists under his staff, were not willing to accept the Communist regime’s destruction of press freedom. They decided to regroup and connect Hong Kong journalists scattered around the world. They set up an online media outlet, The Points, in the hope that they could do their part to continue serving Hong Kong people and monitor the social situation in Hong Kong which has changed beyond recognition.

The Points, which launched in January this year, was founded by a group of former Hong Kong media personalities scattered around the world. The new online media outlet boasts staff from Taiwan, the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. It is the first of its kind to compile local news and in-depth features in 24-hour shifts around the globe, covering Hong Kong people’s stories and world events from the perspective of Hong Kong people.

The emergence of this new online media is not a new development in Hong Kong’s media ecology. In Hong Kong, Apple Daily and Stance News were forced to close in 2021, and Citizen News followed suit in January last year. Journalists, whether still in Hong Kong or abroad, have also launched many new news sites in the past year and a half. Some of them are run by individuals, some are run on a small scale, including “Chasing News”, “ReNews”, “Big City”, “Same Text Commons” and so on.

In a recent video interview with VOA, Pan Lizhen, editor-in-chief of The Points, explained why, against the above background, they still feel the need to join the war group overseas and further exert the power of online media. She explained that the media environment in Hong Kong has always been one of contention. Long before the handover of sovereignty, there were newspapers with various political positions. Even though Apple Daily dominated the market after its launch in the late 1990s, there was still competition among journalists and the space for finding news was never reduced. Although press freedom in The new era of the “Hong Kong version of the National Security Law” is not what it used to be, the inclusion of “The Points” can only help promote healthy competition in the industry.

As the name suggests, the name “edge” is to use all aspects, survey all different angles perspective news events all angles, avoid blind spots, let readers grasp the context. Pan Lizhen stressed that the vision of “zero dead corners” is very important for maintaining a truth-seeking attitude in today’s troubled times.

The journalist who used to work for Next Media Group saw that after the implementation of the National Security Law, media outlets such as Apple Daily and Position News collapsed one after another. Colleagues and experts were forced to leave their posts, or they chose to leave Hong Kong and scatter. At that time, she had an idea, whether can this diaspora media people, together again? Or can we try to create some opportunities in the midst of crisis? The idea of building The Points started with this idea.

“We had the idea at the time,” Pan says. Some of our colleagues, old colleagues, experts, have started to disperse to England, Canada and other places. Basically, we see that the media environment in Hong Kong is going to be very bad in the future, because the red line is clearly there, and it’s very easy to cross that red line. … How do we think we can maintain an ecology of freedom of the press and freedom of speech? When the media environment in Hong Kong is like this, we start to think, maybe we can do it. When many media people in Hong Kong start to leave and go to the world, can we also find an opportunity? We gather these journalists together to build a media group.

Overview of “The Points” website, is no different from the general network media, all kinds of news column classification. Pan said that despite the current manpower constraints and limited resources, she still hopes to open the platform to all in the future, so as to achieve the ultimate goal of spreading the word.

However, the revised lifeboat scheme has not followed suit by submitting no criminal record notices to exempt applicants who respond to civil society requests. The practice has been criticized as potentially preventing some Hong Kong residents who fought with police during the 2019 anti-deportation campaign from applying, or those who did not dare to apply because they risked arrest.

Pan Lizhen, editor-in-chief of “The Points”, explained that it was the magazine that had journalists from Hong Kong stationed in Canada who knew how to write news about Canada’s new policy from the perspective of Hong Kong people. After the reports were published, they could point out the problems, especially the situation of separated Hong Kong people.

In recent days, The case of 47 Hong Kong pro-democracy candidates accused of subversion of state power has attracted much attention. “The Points” was the first to report that Chan Xin, a former auxiliary police officer and former aide to a district council member of the Democratic Alliance for the Development of Hong Kong, who is suspected to have been lurking with former legal scholar Tai Yiu-ting for more than two years, was the one who secretly filmed the meeting video presented by the prosecution. Pan Lizhen explained that most of their employees have senior news reporting experience and can gain the trust of their sources, so they can break out of the competition.

Faced with the age of information explosion, some online hosts of social media platforms, known as “Kols”, who do not express their government’s position, often express their opinions on some issues, and even introduce and explain some new policies of foreign governments from their own perspective. For example, the “Lorey Flash Talk” Youtuber, which has more than 400,000 subscribers, ran a headline on February 2 under the headline “Does Britain’s new law give too much police power to British Hong Kongers? If you go to the parade, you can confiscate it!” Make a comment. In his video, the young commentator explains the new powers given to the police in the UK’s Serious Disruption Prevention Orders (SDPO) issued in October 2022, recalling the “wrong” of Hong Kong protesters in blocking roads and other demonstrations in 2019. It also pointed out that even Britain’s most junior police officers are now free to confiscate umbrellas without explaining why they suspect they are linked to protests.

Pan Lizhen, editor-in-chief of The Points, explained that Hong Kong expatriates are already burdened with difficulties in adapting to their new daily lives, finding jobs and helping their children to go to school. Now they have to deal with the massive establishment media that sneers at them for choosing to emigrate. According to Pan, in this context, it is all the more important to establish new online media that support freedom and democracy, in order to counter the proliferation of misleading information.