PenToy

» see pentoy.hk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

PenToy did not write anything itself. That was not a shortcoming, it was the entire business model, and the Chinese description of it was that the site ran in the manner of a cooperative or a franchise. It carried no reporters and no staff columnists. What it did was solicit commentary from outside writers and pay them a fee, which is the step almost every Hong Kong content site of the 2010s skipped.

The owner was Media Chinese International, the listed group that also publishes Ming Pao, so this was a corporate product wearing independent clothes. It launched in 2012 and published in traditional Chinese for a Hong Kong readership, with sections for politics, socioeconomics, parenting and education, cross-strait and international affairs, and local culture. The English name came from 以筆玩文, playing with words using the pen. The mission statement was more serious than the name: to organize some thinking on Hong Kong's behalf by staging collisions between opposing views, and to leave behind a base of public reasoning afterward.

That ambition was written down in 2012, which is worth holding onto as a date. The six years PenToy ran cover the Umbrella Movement and everything downstream of it, and a site whose stated purpose was staging arguments between people who disagreed was operating in a city where the room for that was shrinking. It closed in September 2018, twenty-two months before the national security law.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The copyright policy is the most interesting document PenToy produced, and I have not seen another site handle it this way. Ordinary readers reposting an individual article would not be pursued. Commercial reuse or reposting at scale needed permission from the author or from the site first, and authors could choose through the site's cooperation schemes whether they granted exclusive or non-exclusive reprint rights. Then the concession: any media outlet or website could reprint the opening of any article, capped at 250 words, provided it linked to the original.

That rule was written by somebody who had thought about how Chinese-language commentary actually travels, which is through forwarding and excerpting rather than through syndication deals. It gave aggregators a legal way to quote at length while keeping the traffic pointed home.

~ the notice ~

On 31 July 2018 a notice appeared on the front page saying that because of resource integration, the site would cease operating from 1 September 2018. Hong Kong 01 covered it the same day, filed under local news, under a headline identifying PenToy as a Ming Pao sister publication. The notice gave no detail beyond the phrase itself, and no successor was named.

The domain is still registered and still points at an address, 104.247.81.99. Connecting to it produces no HTTP response at all, not a parking page and not an error code, just a socket that closes. Of all the ways a dead site can answer, that is the least informative one.

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