Apple Daily

» see appledaily.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The last Apple Daily was printed in a run of one million. Ordinary circulation by 2021 was somewhere around eighty thousand, so the presses did roughly twelve times a normal night, and people stood in line before dawn on 24 June 2021 to buy a newspaper they knew was already finished. Copies went on resale the same day. The front page carried a photo of a staff member waving from the office window.

Jimmy Lai founded it on 20 June 1995 with money made selling clothes. He had built the Giordano chain, watched Tiananmen in 1989, and moved into publishing afterward, first with Next Magazine and then with a daily. The timing was deliberate. Apple Daily launched two years before the handover of Hong Kong to China, into a market where the established Chinese-language papers were cautious about Beijing and Lai was not.

What it actually was, day to day, was a tabloid. Full color when rivals were gray, huge photographs, paparazzi work, crime coverage in detail that other papers would not print, gossip about people who had not asked to be in the paper. Serious Hong Kong readers complained about it for twenty-six years. That is worth stating rather than sanding off, because the paper that got shut down for its politics was the same paper that ran a celebrity's medical records on page three, and it was the tabloid instincts that gave the politics an audience of hundreds of thousands.

The pressure arrived in a documented sequence. On 10 August 2020, over two hundred national security officers went through the newsroom for about nine hours and left with twenty-five boxes of material, and Lai was arrested. On 14 May 2021 the government froze more than five hundred million Hong Kong dollars in company and personal assets. On 17 June around five hundred officers came back and arrested five executives, including the editor-in-chief and the chief executive.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the freeze ~

The mechanism that finished it was financial rather than editorial. Nobody banned Apple Daily as a publication. The accounts of Next Digital were frozen, which meant the company could not pay printers, could not pay wages, and could not operate as a business no matter what it wanted to publish. The board asked for permission to release funds for salaries and did not get it in time.

So the paper announced on 23 June that it would stop, gave itself one more day, and put the last edition out. The website went dark at 23:59 Hong Kong time on 23 June, ahead of the print run, which is the reverse of how the digital era was supposed to work. The archive went with it. Twenty-six years of Hong Kong reporting stopped resolving, and what survives is in third-party archives and in the memories of people who had already saved specific pages.

~ the part you already saw ~

Most people outside Hong Kong met this company without knowing it. Next Media Animation, the group's studio, produced CGI news reenactments with wobbly avatars acting out stories the cameras had missed, and around 2009 and 2010 they escaped into the global internet as a running joke. The Tiger Woods car crash one traveled everywhere. So did the reenactments of American political scandals, forwarded on by people who had no idea they were watching a product of a Hong Kong newspaper group.

That was the extent of the contact for most of the world, including here. Reading a Chinese-language Hong Kong daily was never on the table from Turkey, and the paper's twenty-six years were mostly a thing I learned about from the coverage of its ending rather than from anything I read at the time. The animations were the accidental export, and they carried the house style pretty accurately: unserious surface, aggressive underneath.

~ what came after ~

The Taiwan edition, launched in 2003, briefly looked like the survivor. Its print run had already ended in May 2021 after eighteen years, and the online operation carried on until 31 August 2022, when it was sold and relaunched the next morning as Next Apple News under a Singaporean owner, with most of the staff moving across.

In Hong Kong the cases ran for years. Lai was convicted in December 2025 on collusion and sedition charges in an 855-page verdict, and in February 2026 he was sentenced to twenty years, the longest term handed down under the national security law. He was seventy-eight. Six former Apple Daily staff and two others received terms between six years three months and ten years. Stand News had already closed in December 2021 and Citizen News in January 2022, each within seven months of the paper on this page.

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