癲狗日報 (Mad Dog Daily)

» see maddog.myradio.hk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The logo was a bulldog in a spiked collar, teeth out, drawn inside a circle. Wong Yuk-man has spent decades as a current affairs broadcaster in Hong Kong and served in the Legislative Council for Kowloon West, and Mad Dog Daily was the paper that carried his temperament in its name. It went on sale on 18 March 1996 at five Hong Kong dollars a copy.

The print run did not last. It dropped to weekly on 10 October 1997 and stopped altogether on 9 July 1998, which made it one of the shorter-lived tabloids of a period when Hong Kong had more papers than the advertising market could feed. That should have been the whole story.

It came back exactly twenty two years to the day. On 18 March 2018 the name reappeared as a subscription news site at maddog.myradio.hk, registered with the government information office as a media organization and filed under the Local Newspapers Registration Ordinance, charging two hundred Hong Kong dollars a month. The dog-head logo was uploaded to the server that same March.

~ the dossier ~

~ the first death ~

A paper that folds in 1998 folds for commercial reasons. Circulation, and an advertising base too thin for the number of titles chasing it. Nobody stopped Mad Dog Daily the first time. It ran out of money, which in the history of newspapers is the ordinary ending and the one nobody writes about.

~ the second one ~

The second ending was not commercial. On 29 December 2021 Hong Kong police raided the Stand News newsroom and arrested seven people over conspiracy to publish seditious publications under the Crimes Ordinance, and Stand News closed the same day after seven years. Citizen News announced on 2 January 2022 that it would stop, citing the safety of its people. Mad Dog Daily announced on 3 January.

Wong made the announcement himself, on his MyRadio program. His reasoning was plain: if commentary published by Stand News was being treated as seditious material, then a site like his was certain to be caught by the same reading. He said he wanted his Hong Kong colleagues able to keep working somewhere safe, and raised the possibility of restarting in Taiwan if the staff and the resources were ever there. The website and the social accounts came down, and the archive of what had been published came down with them.

~ what got buried with it ~

Three outlets closed inside six days and only one of them was raided. That is the part worth recording. The sedition arrests did not need to be repeated at every address, because the first one told every other newsroom in the city what the law now covered, and the rest of the shutting was done voluntarily by publishers who could read.

maddog.myradio.hk does not resolve today. Not a parked page, just no answer in DNS at all, which is what happens when someone deletes rather than abandons. The bulldog survives because a crawler saved the image file in 2019, three years before the site that used it decided to remove itself.

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