Outlet profile

Hong Kong Free Press

Hong Kong independent, pro-democracy

Owned byNot-for-profit company limited by guarantee; no shareholders. Co-founded and led by editor-in-chief Tom Grundy.

FundingReader-funded: approximately 97% of income comes from roughly 1,000+ monthly and annual donors. Supplemented by advertising and, historically, grants from the Google News Initiative/News Equity Fund.

On the administrationmostly neutral

Background

Hong Kong Free Press launched in June 2015 after a rapid crowdfunding campaign on the Fringebacker platform, becoming Hong Kong's first crowdfunded news outlet and its fastest-funded media project at the time. Founder Tom Grundy created it in response to what he saw as accelerating self-censorship and declining press freedom in Hong Kong, positioning it as an English-language alternative to the South China Morning Post, which was acquired by Alibaba in 2016. The outlet covered the 2019 pro-democracy protests extensively and continued publishing after Beijing imposed the National Security Law in June 2020—a period that saw major independent rivals, including Apple Daily and Stand News, raided and shut down. HKFP has maintained operations by relying on its reader-donation model rather than advertising or grants that might expose it to political pressure. Media Bias/Fact Check rates it Left-Center with high factual reliability, while Ad Fontes Media has rated it as politically neutral with strong reliability scores comparable to outlets such as NPR and Bloomberg. The outlet publishes a public transparency report annually disclosing its income and spending, and operates under a code of ethics backed by the Trust Project. Its editorial orientation is openly pro-press freedom and broadly sympathetic to Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement, though it presents its news reporting as factual and non-partisan.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-08-16; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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