"I Know I Left It Somewhere In The Shed About Five Years Ago..."

By Darryl Mason

The Murdoch media's The Punch is worth checking out, and it will be (to media watchers anyway) fascinating to see how it evolves in the months ahead. It seems to have gotten off to a pretty decent start.

Eventually, if it survives and thrives, The Punch will become a test site for Rupert Murdoch's hilariously ill-fated fantasy to try and get people to pay to read what he hasn't paid anyone to write.

But is there something more suspect going on over there?

A conspiracy-minded friend, now living in England, thinks yes.

"Hey, I checked out that website you sent me the link for."
"Rate My Bourbon Vomit Wall Paintings?" I asked.
"No, the other one."
"The Punch."
"Yeah, The Punch."
"Yeah? What did you reckon?"
"S'Alright. It's a Murdoch thing, isn't it?"
"Yeah," I said.
"So where's all the tits?"
"........what?"
"There's no tits. It's Murdoch, and no tits."
"This is Australia," I sad. "Rupert's mum doesn't let him run photos of some 18 year old girl's tits in his Australian media."
"Oh."
"So did you read any of it?"
"Yeah, a bit. If it's not going to have tits on it, it needs more sports and movies stuff, somewhere I can say how much fucking arse Terminator 4 sucked."
"I think The Punch is supposed to become like the Blog Discussion Of The Nation or something like that.I think they have higher aspirations than running an open thread on 'Terminator 4 : How Much Does This Movie Suck Arse?"
"Yeah? Well, good luck to them....There's something else, though. It's weird."
"What's that?" I asked.
"It made me want to go back to smoking pot."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"The Punch. That website. I looked at it, and I thought, 'Fuck me, I'm suddenly hanging to punch down some brekkie cones'."
"I don't think you can blame some website for those thoughts, can you?"
"Yeah, I can. Maybe it's subliminal or something, but just after I looked at it, I'm thinking about which geezer at my local might be good to score some hash off and if I still had my old bong kicking around in the shed somewhere."

Ridiculous you say? Perhaps. But what about these screenshots from The Punch?






I put the following question to The Punch editor David Penberthy at Twitter :



I'll update on any replies from 'Penbo'.

Journalism : It's This Close To Being Totally Gay

David Penberthy, editor of The Punch, the new Rupert Murdoch media aggregator site, describes a working day at the coalface of modern journalism :

The working day in journalism has so many pockets of variety and reflection that it’s almost too effeminate to describe - coffee runs with colleagues, flicking through magazines, clicking away on websites from here and abroad, going to the roof with a cuppa and a red pen to work on a draft.

Flicking through magazines and having cuppas in the sun is the hardcore pace of modern Murdoch tabloid journalism?

Sounds more like professional blogging.

And this even more frank admission :

Journalists have a saying which is actually more of a truism - that the job is so much fun you would do it for free.

I wouldn't say that truism too loud around Rupert, he's looking for all the free journalists he can get right now.

Rupert Murdoch thinks free journalists and free writers will save his worldwide media empire. Free writers and charging people to read them.

That's the new business model.