The Punch

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

~ the last words ~

In 2009 I was in Turkey on a ttnet line, reading Turkish forums and English tech press, and Australian domestic opinion writing was not within a thousand miles of any of it. So The Punch arrives here as a document rather than a memory, and what makes it worth a grave is the shape of the thing rather than any argument it ever hosted.

News Limited, the Australian arm of Murdoch's News Corporation, launched it in 2009 and put David Penberthy in the editor's chair, freshly out of running Sydney's Daily Telegraph. The reference point everyone reached for was the Huffington Post, and the self-description was "for every Australian with a passion for debate", with "Australia's best conversation" printed on top of it. Tory Maguire edited it later. The staff writers were a small group and the bylines that mattered were mostly not staff.

That was the trick. Politicians wrote for it directly, from every party, under their own names, with no press gallery reporter standing between the argument and the reader. Academics and columnists filled the rest. In 2009 that arrangement was still novel enough to be a product, because a minister who wanted to say something unfiltered otherwise had to wait for someone to interview them.

~ the record ~

~ the comment thread as the product ~

An opinion site owned by a tabloid publisher is not really selling opinions, since opinions were already free everywhere. What The Punch was selling was the argument underneath, moderated enough to stay open and loose enough to sting, with the author sometimes still in the thread. A politician filing a piece there knew perfectly well what was waiting below it.

Some of the writing was syndicated back out to the News Limited tabloids, so the site functioned as a feeder as much as a destination. That is a comfortable position while somebody upstairs believes in it and a very weak one when they stop, because a feeder can always be replaced by the thing it feeds.

~ the merge into the mothership ~

On 15 March 2013 News Limited announced the close. The staff went into the News Limited Network and the news.com.au newsroom, opinion was to be distributed across the group's sites through a national desk instead of living at one address, and thepunch.com.au was pointed at news.com.au. The reasoning was not that the site had failed. It was that a separate masthead for opinion had stopped making sense to a company reorganizing everything it owned into one pipeline.

The domain does not resolve now. What the site was actually good at, getting people who make decisions to write in public and then stand in the replies, drifted onto Twitter over the following few years, where it required no masthead and no moderation budget and where nobody has to answer for anything they published in 2013.

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