Over the past century, the Hong Kong press has provided an alternative to the opinions of the mainland, but recent developments are muffling its voice, a journalism professor says.
"Hong Kong's newspapers have always been a microcosm of Chinese politics, voicing different political ideologies," Chinese University journalism professor Clement So York-kee said.
But today, some media owners see newspapers as a way to influence public opinion and network on the mainland.
Newspapers in the early colonial years helped disseminate knowledge at a time when the mainland was struggling through modernisation. The first newspaper, the Hong Kong Gazette, an English bi-weekly published in 1842, focused more on business and government news. Eleven years later, the first paper in Chinese, Chinese Serial, came into print. Covering a wide range of issues from astronomy to medicine and current affairs, the monthly served as an important platform for mainlanders to learn about the modern Western world. Over the next 50 years until China's 1911 revolution, the colony saw the growth of newspapers founded by literati and revolutionaries. Hsun Huan Jih Pao, launched in 1874, and the South China Morning Post, in 1903, were among the more important ones.
The Hong Kong press continued to be a debating ground for different ideologies in the first half of the 20th century when the Communist Party rose to power on the mainland.
From the 1960s, media bosses started to focus on local issues as the colonial government introduced social reforms to pacify the city in the aftermath of the 1967 leftist riots between communists and the establishment.