Review: The Punch comes out swinging
So what to make of The Punch?
If you’ve missed it, this is News Ltd’s new uber blog which has been many months in the making.
It went live on Sunday night, ahead of an official Monday launch.
So bear in mind that these initial thoughts come before any Monday agenda-setting bombshells.
First and most important. It’s good enough. And that’s not meant as damning with faint praise. By that I mean that right from the beginning it feels like it’s going to find an audience.
As you might expect from a new site, it’s got its teething problems. On my netbook’s version of Windows XP, a low graphics, text only version loads up of each page first, and the full fat version only appears if I refresh the page. Conversely, my Apple’s ancient version of Safari goes right to the high graphics version, although no ads appear. Of my home devices, my iPod touch seems to be the only one that shows it as the designer intended. But those are early glitches. Believe me, Mumbrella’s first few weeks had far more quirks.
(Update: on my office PC running IE 7 there’s a whole new problem which I share with colleagues, with comment threads overwriting articles, making both unreadable.)
The design itself is VERY stripped down. Effectively it’s a simple blog format. It would appear that it’s going to be a straightforward approach of newest item at the top.
That’s an immediate point of difference to the recently revamped Crikey site, which is the most similar proposition in this market to The Punch.
In fact, put the two sites side by side, and the new visitor would probably spend more time on a first visit with Crikey, which is divided into its five broad topics – politics, media, business, environment and “life”. The content – mainly consisting of external links – is certainly more findeable at Crikey on one or two clicks. However, it’s been noticeable since the revamp that at times Crikey struggles to keep the sections fresh. It’s possible to come back a couple of days later and find much the same content.
Meanwhile, The Punch has got almost the opposite issue – there’s more content in there than first appears.
Some if it admittedly appears to have been repurposed from the sister News Ltd print titles (reference to things like ” on these pages” is a bit of a giveaway.) But it still takes a bit of discovering.
And, at least initially, the writers list is shorter than expected – five staffers (with admirably self-deprecating bios) and 14 contributors.
But for me if there is an issue with the layout, it will be the random nature of what the reader comes back to. Based on the mixture available at launch it’s going to be quite an unpredictable experience. Day one saw politics, group sex and coffee shop etiquette as the top three items.
There’s also an endearing fascination with the snapper’s trade – I’ve already come across one what it’s like to photograph a bikie funeral and one on what it’s like to get involved in an arrest you’re trying to photograph. Well, Penbo did say he’d be celebrating journalism.
In his guest post for Mumbrella, editor David Penberthy says that they may examine a premium subscription model down the track. That is, I suspect, something every News Corp editor is expected to say at the moment following Murdoch’s recent pronouncements on the issue. Based on this early look, I suspect there’s not a realistic prospect of that for The Punch anytime soon.
So how will it go? The design means that (as it should be) it will be the content that brings people back. Individual postings have a nice clean, readable layout, and reader comments get a decent showing too.
However, not just the quality of the opinion pieces (although that’ll be vital of course), but also the quality of the comment stream will be what decides if readers return. One of the problems that render sister site news.com.au’s comments stream unappealing is that the quantity of idiotic contributions outweighs the intelligent ones.
The Punch’s comment policy (or “community agreement“) appears designed to encourage constructive debate, and this will be important.
Early signs (and I do realise it is early) for external links are not that inspiring yet – despite Penbo’s big talk suggesting otherwise. Ten news links, seven of which go out to other parts of the News Corp family at the time of writing, plus one to the BBC, one to smh.com.au and one to the ABC. Admittedly though News has the biggest local online footprint, so it would be unfair to read too much into that yet.
But the same goes in the ten links in the “opinion from everywhere” section where there are (or should be) far more options – five of the six Australian links are to News Ltd sites, while every single link is to a major site. Early days again, but no sign yet of them linking to undiscovered gems.
Commercially, the site looks fairly standard – a leader board and a medium rectangle as the ad sites. Mind you, I am intrigued by Penbo’s promise in his guest posting: “We will take a lateral and permissive approach to advertising and are well-up for creative executions which may struggle to find acceptance on conventional news sites.” Lateral and permissive sounds interesting.
But with a site that plans to be conversationally led, there’s only so much you can do before you show it to the public. It will be far fairer to judge the site as it evolves with reader input over the next two or three months.
For now it’s not perfect, but it is a successful launch.
Tim Burrowes
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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I read @penbo’s Mumbrella post about ThePunch, sounds interesting but i cant see how it can make $ even with free articles written by pollies
As I suggested to one of my friends on Twitter, perhaps the tag line should be:
” #thepunch will celebrate journalism, especially unpaid free articles from politicians, uni students & celebrities” 😉 “
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Incredible that they feel the need to have a whole separate tab for “lightweight”. It’s a bit like the Footy Show saying “here’s the bit for morons”, or Philip Adams saying “here’s the earnest bit”.
The backroom people have done their homework and made sure there’s a population of commenters; small but noticeable, and a decent set of contributors-to-come.
Overall it’s more low-rent Huffpo than “good enough to pay for”.
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I was actually surprised by how blog-like it feels – there’s even a blogroll. My first impression was of not being able to get an instant sense of the breadth of content. I wanted to see more on a single screen rather than scroll and scroll past giant headlines and pictures. The endless linear scrolling felt very blog-like, too.
Also, its reliance on News Ltd content reminds me of the way that The Vine relied so heavily on Fairfax content when it first launched.
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Congratulations to the team @thepunch. Great to see News Ltd trying something new here. Our big media companies taking risks and investing in new ideas should be supported and applauded by all here on Mumbrella. Go for it guys.
Stephen Phillips
htttp://wearehunted.com
htttp://wotnews.com.au
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Yep. News Limited: ‘Celebrating journalism’ by not paying writers.
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Their stated intention of linking outside their own publications looks like tokenism at first blush.
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If Mike Rann’s article on bikers and the slightly fawning, apologist piece on Keelty and his retirement are indicative of the continued content it’ll be a big yawn. I’ll stick with Crikey.
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Nothing for Crikey to worry about yet.
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Don’t much like the big photo, 3 pars and a fold. Makes it very slow to navigate. Why can’t I have headlines that link off to articles? That way I know how much content there is…
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Guess there wasn’t budget for any designers.
What are they thinking. The design isn’t optimised for any purpose let along build an engaged audience.
There’s a reason crikey adopted the huffpo, daily beast et al design model and it’s still not clear whether crikey went far enough and its going to work. BusinessSpectator only gets away with their design because the content is so solid.
This will have to be redesigned in three months if not before. Feels like a big Fail unless they get on the bus and redesign.
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At least the Punch won’t be constantly bagging newspapers like Crikey does, so that will be refreshing…
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The Punch celebrates journalism by stripping all contributors of their copyright and moral rights (their right to be identified as the author of their contributions).
http://www.thepunch.com.au/community-agreement/
# Copyright rests with us. By posting material on the site, members agree that The Punch and its affiliated companies will hold copyright on the material for all electronic uses or for use in print publications and marketing provided it is used in an appropriate context
http://www.thepunch.com.au/terms-and-conditions/
17. You waive any moral rights in your contribution for the purposes of its submission to and publication on the Site.
To say I’m underwhelmed is an overstatement. It’s pure News Ltd top down central control old media.
The only new idea in there is the waffle about ‘permissive advertising’ (ie we’re desperate and will advertise anything for a $).
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having problems signing up – insert email address, hit go, get to terms and conditions, and then what, there’s nowhere to go – is there a fault or is it my end? very frustrating.
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My issue with the Punch is this idea of moderating non-“intelligent” comments. While it can be frustrating to scroll through idiotic comments, how do you stop this not leading to a form of censorship? I sent a comment yesterday to the punch which was obviously blocked, and though I am kind of glad it was not published as in hindsight it was a bit harsh and condescending towards the site and writer, I didn’t realise Hugo Chavez would have his finger hovering over the delete button!
Intelligent thought provoking commentary yes, but surely if a writer wants to be a polemicist or writes something generally inciting instead of insightful surely you should be allowed to call them out?
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It’s hard to believe that comments are being moderated when you see the Herald-Sun level comments that are getting through. As I was scrolling through the comments on the protest by Indian students in Melbourne, I had to check the URL to make sure I was still on The Punch.
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