UPDATED: The Punch is now five days old. For those of you tucking into some long weekend reading, here’s my post from Monday introducing the site…
A pinch and a punch for the first day of the month…and the first day of what we hope will be a welcome and valuable addition to Australia’s media landscape.
The Punch is a new opinion website aimed at every Australian with a love of ideas, discussion and debate.
It’s not a fancy, la-di-dah site aimed at people with three university degrees, nor is it a site for yobbos who want to engage in mindless abuse.
It’s a place for spirited, sleeves-up, energetic, engaging commentary, written by people who enjoy writing, for people who enjoy reading.As today’s spread of topics illustrates, The Punch is just as happy covering politics as it is covering TV, crime, music, social trends, sport, business, economics, food and fashion.
Every day it will present diverse opinions from its own small team, and a rolling roster of almost 100 outside contributors, to give you real-time commentary and analysis of news and current affairs. Many of their names are published below; you will see them and others roll out over the coming fortnight.
We have designed a website which is simple and easy to use, and lets the writing speak for itself.
We will start each day with 10 exclusive pieces of original content on the left-hand side of the page, and 20 links to aggregated content down the right-hand side, 10 of them to news stories and 10 of them to opinion pieces.
We will also use twitter to direct readers in the direction of content, in the little box off to the right.
As the day unfolds, the site will change with new opinion pieces posted on news stories as they happen.
Obviously enough, the site exists for you - the reader. Unless you ask us a question, we will keep our noses out of the limitless space we’ve provided for comments, and let you have your say.
One thing we ask - we strongly encourage readers to log on as themselves. We’re more interested in hearing from Ian Smith of Box Hill than Dingbat of Box Hill, as we suspect Ian might have something more interesting to say. We not only want to encourage a civil and illuminating standard of debate, we want to give every reader the opportunity to write for the site, under their own name.
The content written by the Punch team - Tory Maguire, Paul Colgan, Leo Shanahan, and myself - will often be published in the print editions of News Limited newspapers around Australia.
We also have a relationship with Sky News through programs such as Agenda - and later this year, once we’ve got this new-fangled website under control, The Punch will also be a weekly television program of the same name on Sky.
It’s a free site - you can sign up for a morning email to receive a free alert to the morning’s content on any weekday. If we ever did decide to charge a subscription, the fee would be reasonable, and would involve offering additional premium content, rather than blocking readers from accessing the existing site.
Our political contributors include Mike Rann, Maxine McKew, Anthony Albanese, Joe Hockey, Mark Arbib, Nick Xenophon, Barnaby Joyce, Jason Clare, Scott Morrison, John Cobb, Jamie Briggs, George Brandis, Chris Pyne, Michael Costa, Bronwyn Bishop and Peter Dutton, as well as Mark Textor, Peter Lewis, David Gazard and Tim Gartrell.
Our sportswriters include Kate Ellis, Ben Buckley, Anthony Sharwood and Luke Foley, on business and economics we have Clive Mathieson, Steve Keen, Frank Zumbo and Cameron England, and a broad suite of writers including Catharine Lumby, Tracey Spicer, Fergus Linehan, Ed Charles, Clive Small, Matt Kirkegaard and Nedahl Stelio covering entertainment, technology, food, fashion, crime, movies, music and trends.
The Punch will also include exclusive original content from established and emerging News Limited journalists including Joe Hildebrand, Dennis Atkins, Di Butler, Alan Howe, Alex Dickerson, Tory Shepherd, as well as journos from other outlets including Leigh Sales from the ABC and Fiona Connolly from ACP.
Much of our content will be News Limited content. But it will also come from people at independent news sites, from people who aren’t in journalism but are great writers, from people at rival news organisations whose work on The Punch opens them, and us, up to new audiences. And every morning we will link through to content on sites which we own, but also on sites which we don’t own, to give you the most enjoyable reading experience.
Against this backdrop, our hope for the site is this: at a time when every tenured communications academic on the planet is sending tiny urls via twitter, linking you through to wrist-slashing stories about the apparent death of journalism, we want to demonstrate that journalism is alive and well.
It’s the mode of delivery, for sections of the media, which is under pressure - but journalism itself is in great shape, because it has never been more diverse, it has never faced more scrutiny, and there have never been more ways of telling a story.
We hope you are challenged, stimulated and entertained by the many stories we will be telling here on The Punch.
- David Penberthy, Editor
Recent posts
The latest and greatest
Put this summer of cricket out of its misery
Call the RSPCA. Alert PETA. Get the anti-whaling boats to steam north from Antarctica and stop this mindless… Read more
Most commented
The talk of the town
- My Southern Cross tattoo now brands me as a racist 625
- Frankston not in the hunt for Australia's top bogan suburb 354
- Climate changes sceptics a threat to national security 274
- Good Lord, Monckton is no Nobel laureate 242
- Why Australia Day is rubbish 226
- At the end of the day, the kids caned Kevin on Q&A 211
- You can't debate immigration without being called a racist 201
- Should women accept a guy who's just good enough? 153
- Young Labor plan to ban smoking within 50 years 119
- Freak show? At least Barnaby didn't blow the budget 117
Punch live
Up to the minute Twitter chatter
Time to put this summer of cricket out of its misery, writes Anthony Sharwood. Hear hear! http://bit.ly/9OLM07
Libs reckon the future of australian tennis is in doubt due to rudd's ETS. They're smoking the same stuff as screaming lord monckton #qt
Gentle jabs to the ribs
US Superbowl: now with ad breaks worth watching
Usually, when it comes to watching your favourite sport or movie on television, ads are the last thing… Read more
60 comments
Show oldest | newest first