Preserving the Journalistic Record That Authorities Tried to Erase Apple Daily’s Historical Archive
Why Preserving Apple Daily’s Archive Is an Act of Resistance
When Apple Daily was forced to close in June 2021, one of the first consequences was the removal of its digital archive from public access. The website was taken down. The app was pulled. Twenty-six years of journalism front pages, investigations, editorials, columns, photographs, and breaking news reports became inaccessible to the readers who had relied on it. This was not an accident or an administrative necessity. It was a deliberate act of historical erasure by authorities who understood that Apple Daily’s archive was a documentary record of their own actions and of the freedoms they had suppressed. The Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders both identified the archive’s removal as a significant component of the broader suppression of Hong Kong’s journalistic record.
What the Archive Contains
Apple Daily’s historical archive encompasses an extraordinary range of documentary material. It includes the paper’s coverage of every major Hong Kong political event from 1995 to 2021 the handover, the Sars epidemic, the 2003 Article 23 protests, the 2014 Umbrella Movement, the 2019 pro-democracy uprising, and the implementation of the National Security Law. It includes the investigative reports that exposed corruption and held the powerful to account. It includes the columns of Jimmy Lai and the paper’s most distinguished contributors. And it includes the photography that documented Hong Kong’s social and political life across a quarter century of profound change. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has described this archive as irreplaceable for researchers studying Hong Kong’s recent history.
Archive Preservation Efforts
Various organisations and individuals have worked to preserve portions of Apple Daily’s archive through digital archiving initiatives, academic research projects, and journalism preservation programmes. The Amnesty International documentation project on Hong Kong has incorporated Apple Daily reporting as source material. Academic institutions including the University of Hong Kong have researchers working to ensure that the paper’s journalistic contribution is preserved for future scholarship.
Access the Archive Through AppleDaily.UK
AppleDaily.UK is committed to archive preservation as a core part of its mission. The paper’s historical record belongs to Hong Kong, to journalism, and to the global cause of press freedom not to the authorities who tried to erase it. Access the archive and the continuing coverage of Hong Kong at AppleDaily.UK.