Inkstone News

» see inkstonenews.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Type inkstonenews.com today and you get a Friday in December 2018. The site loads, fonts and all, and the edition it serves is dated 28 December 2018: six stories, led by a feature on competitive pole sport in China. Click any headline and the full article opens, images and all. The publication went on producing for another two years and three months after that Friday, and the front door has been stuck on it ever since.

Inkstone launched in March 2018 as a new English-language brand from South China Morning Post Publishers, the Hong Kong company Alibaba had bought in 2016. It described itself as a daily digest of China-focused stories and it shipped one every weekday morning on US Eastern time, which tells you where the readers were meant to be. It shipped as a website with an app beside it. A daily newsletter went out alongside, and Google Assistant would read you an audio edition. The beat was the Chinese-speaking world, from the mainland out to Taiwan.

The New York Times wrote about the launch on 31 March 2018 in a piece about the SCMP's mission to promote Chinese soft power, which is the frame that followed Inkstone for its entire run. Nieman Lab asked the more practical question two months later: whether a global audience interested enough in China to sustain an ambitious new English-language site actually existed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ built for an American reader ~

The oddest fact about Inkstone is that it was blocked in mainland China, the place it was writing about. A Hong Kong publisher owned by a Chinese technology company ran an English explainer aimed at young Americans, and the audience it explained was the audience least able to read it. That is the ordinary arithmetic of publishing in English out of Hong Kong in 2018, and it sat under the product for the whole three years.

~ the commute it was written for ~

China coverage reached me in Turkey the way most foreign coverage did, through Turkish wire copy and through whatever English-language outlet I already had open. A daily English digest timed to a US morning was built for a commute I do not have, in a news relationship between two countries I am not in. Inkstone was never for me and never pretended otherwise, which at least makes it honest about its market.

What it did have, and what an explainer format is genuinely good for, was patience with the basics. Inkstone ran a recurring index of Chinese statistics and pieces like how Chinese emperors ate, sitting alongside the BeiDou satellite system going global. That mix only works if you assume the reader knows nothing and is not embarrassed about it.

~ the last edition ~

The final Inkstone edition was published on 30 March 2021. No farewell message was recorded anywhere, and by May of that year a Wikipedia editor had noticed that the SCMP's main site no longer linked to it anywhere. The Inkstone name survived as a column inside scmp.com, under Inkstone Explains, which is where the brand's remaining value went.

The domain stayed paid up. It runs on WordPress behind Cloudflare and answers in under a second, serving a complete archive of everything Inkstone ever published to anyone who still has a link. What it will not do is admit the date. Three years of a publication are sitting there in perfect condition behind a front page that thinks it is the end of 2018.

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