The Punch is now one month old. We would like to thank our readers for getting us off to such a strong start. We would also like to engage you in conversation as to what more you would like out of this website - what’s working, what isn’t, what more we could do to make your reading experience more illuminating and entertaining.
The Punch had expected to get about 80,000 readers (unique browsers) in its first month. The official figures show we ended up with 206,281 readers. This compares to Crikey, which is five years older than us, and had 179,069 readers in the same period.
This funny little niche website run out of Melbourne has been obsessing about us since we launched, and it’s something we regard as proof positive of the navel-gazy bullshit which blights the media landscape, where journos both from the independent blogosphere and big media would much rather talk about each other than the readers.
It’s a fact demonstrated by the coverage of Wednesday’s Press Club address by News Limited chairman and CEO John Hartigan, which was a characteristically blunt and thought-provoking bomb-throwing exercise where Hartigan questioned the quality of Australia’s newspapers, including those owned by News Limited, challenged the work practices of his own staff in the Canberra Press Gallery, and bemoaned the fact that the readers were often the farthest thing from the media’s mind as it went about its journalism.
Funnily enough, the one part of Hartigan’s speech which received intense scrutiny was his provocative analysis of the blogosphere as a safe haven for single-issue cranks, obsessives and ideologues who come at every issue from a fixed position.
His observations about the juvenile and superficial conduct of some bloggers was borne out in the real-time twitter coverage of his speech by Crikey’s Bernard Keane, a grown man who, to borrow from Tim Blair, writes with all the giggly, exclamation-laden excitement of a teenage girl in her email account of schoolies week.
“Tell them something they didn’t know! whodathunk!”, “did someone say non sequitur? Hartigan leaps from topic to topic with no apparent connection” and “No cliche left unturned! tell us more Harto!” were just a few of his more cogent tweets covering the speech.
This self-obsession ignored the much more interesting core of the speech which was that journalism, big and small, was often its own worst enemy, because journalists and editors cannot distinguish between what they want to write about and what the readers actually want to read.
This was the point that most interested me - and it was made by Hartigan to a roomful of journalists many of whom work for News Limited:
“How many journalists in this room have written a story recently that was original, exclusive, highly relevant and genuinely useful to your audience?
I’m not saying there haven’t been stories like this. But, there have been too few.
And I reckon it’s much the same in general news, business and sport, even the lifestyle sections.
Newspapers in the US are disappearing left, right and centre.
Fewer papers are being sold and in my view it’s because many of them are largely boring and irrelevant to their readership.
Their content is ubiquitous rather than unique.”
While the speech was upbeat and positive about the future of print, it was this passage which sounded the warning, that if the media continues to entertain and amuse itself first and the readers second - as the coverage of Hartigan’s speech has proved - it will struggle to grow its audience.
In that spirit The Punch uses its first month anniversary to invite you tell us what you want.
Oh, and we’d also like to thank Crikey for this piece, where apart from some desperate technical quibbling about their superiority on page impressions, unsurprising given that they’re four years and 11 months older than us, they did at least have the decency to admit that we’ve already got more readers than they have.
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