NYT moves some staff out of HK

HONG KONG: The New York Times

said yesterday that it was moving its digital news hub from Hong Kong to South Korea as a result of a national security law Beijing imposed on the city last month and trouble obtaining visas.

It is the first major relocation by an international news organisation since authoritarian China enacted its sweeping security law late last month, ramping up its control over the semiautonomous city.

In an e-mail to staff, Times executives said the new law “has created a lot of uncertainty about what the new rules will mean to our operation and our journalism”.

“We feel it is prudent to make contingency plans and begin to diversify our editing staff around the region.”

The newspaper has had a regional headquarters in Hong Kong for decades, overseeing Asia coverage and more recently helping to run the newspaper’s 24-hour digital news operation alongside its two others hubs in London and New York.

In its own news report on the move, the Times said it would move its digital team — roughly one-third of its Hong Kong employees — to Seoul over the next year.

The Times report said it had recently “faced challenges securing work permits” for its staff in Hong Kong, something it said was “commonplace in China but were rarely an issue in the former colony”.

Earlier this year China expelled several journalists working for US news organisations — including the Times

— in a tit-for-tat spat with Washington.

Some of the expelled Times journalists have already relocated to Seoul.

Hong Kong has been a major regional hub for international media for decades thanks to its easy business environment and key civil liberties that Beijing pledged to protect until 2047 under the handover deal with Britain.

Alongside The New York Times,

media organisations that have major regional hubs in Hong Kong include AFP, CNN, The Wall Street Journal,

Bloomberg News and the Financial Times.