THE story of Ming Pao Daily News is the story of its founder Louis Cha, who stamped his views on the paper for more than 30 years, and the surprising result of his 10-year quest to find a suitable heir.
To some commentators, the date of the paper's decline coincides fairly closely with the date Mr Cha began to hand control to Yu Pun-hoi, an executive with plenty of cash and ideas and very little in the way of history.
Shanghai-born Mr Cha founded the paper with partner Shen Pao-sing after working for the pro-China Ta Kung Pao, a job he held while spending his spare time writing very successful kung fu novels under the pseudonym Kam Yung. One of the paper's early selling points was the serialisation of Mr Cha's novels, many starring the character Wai Siu-po, a court confidant with a quick wit and an eye for a good deal who many believe was modelled on Mr Cha himself.
In the 1970s, the kung fu serialisations were replaced by a literary but no-nonsense journalistic style with a strong streak of anti-communism which won many readers. The paper launched an intellectual monthly magazine and a film stars and fun weekly, both of which remain among the most popular of their genre.
Ironically, the June 4 massacre in Tiananmen Square, while reducing Mr Cha to tears on television, boosted the paper's circulation to record levels.
The publication's exemplary use of Chinese has led to generations of schoolchildren being instructed to read Ming Pao to improve their language skills. When Ming Pao was floated on the stock market in 1991, it was the fourth-largest selling paper in the territory and valued at $870 million. At the age of 67, Mr Cha was looking to spend less time with his newspaper, but unlike many Hong Kong tycoons there were no sons waiting outside the boardroom to sit at their father's desk. Mr Cha said finding a successor was 'the most difficult challenge of my life' and admitted he'd been searching for a decade.
In 1993, he announced he was retiring. His seat as chairman of Ming Pao Enterprise Corporation was to be taken by Mr Yu, then just 33, whose budding media group CIM Holdings had become Ming Pao's largest shareholder in 1991.