Jordan Braz | June 30th, 2015

There's rarely a dull moment in the news industry, and recent developments have been both worrying and inspiring. Bad news first -- the rapid demise of Circa News (http://bit.ly/1Ie92Rr), once seen as a leading light of mobile media, has underlined once again just how difficult it can be to combine an old business with a new medium and achieve any sort of financial success. Circa's app broke down news stories from various sources into bite-sized summaries that could be easily digested by users on the go.

However this approach requires a healthy amount of talented human editing, which makes it relatively expensive to maintain and scale. As Julia Greenberg's excellent post-mortem in Wired (http://wrd.cm/1di5lgs) points out, that and the increasingly fierce fight for audiences and advertisers -- still, after all these years, the industry's only real sources of revenue -- ultimately did Circa in. To this list we're inclined to add Circa's focus on text; many consumers of news on the run prefer it in multimedia format, hence why more venerable organisations (the BBC, Reuters) and upstarts (Buzzfeed, Snapchat) alike have been experimenting with short-form video news. Which, of course, is also hideously expensive to produce, especially on anything approaching a 24-hour cycle.

On a more upbeat note, our hometown of Hong Kong got its first new independent English-language news outlet of note in quite some time this week with the launch of Hong Kong Free Press (http://www.hongkongfp.com/). The experience of outfits like Circa shows it won't be easy, but HKFP is pursuing a non-profit model and will seek to recoup its minimal costs through a combination of membership, advertising and donations (full disclosure: n/n was an early sponsor). At a time when Hong Kong (and the world, really) is in dire need of independent voices, we salute HKFP for its commitment, and hope it gets the support it deserves. Hard news might be a tough, and increasingly fragmented, business, but it's more vital than ever.

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