About Us

The Kissing Punk is a general news site for readers who assume the official version is incomplete. Not invented, not necessarily false. Incomplete: written by someone whose job was to protect the subject, released on the day that suited them, containing the figures that helped.

What we cover, and for whom

We cover politics, business, technology, science, sport and culture. We also run Auto, Gaming, Travel and Lifestyle as proper beats rather than as filler between the serious pages, because a recall notice, a studio quietly shutting down, an airline rewriting its compensation rules and a supplement making a medical promise are all stories that somebody would prefer stayed small.

The reader we picture is not an insider. It is someone who finished a story about a company, a ministry, a football club or a game publisher, and thought that cannot be the whole thing. That instinct is usually right, and it is usually right for boring reasons rather than sinister ones. Our job is to do the work that turns the instinct into something you can point at.

Where the name came from

Before it was a newsroom, this domain belonged to a small Spanish clothing shop. Band shirts, studded belts, tartan, the sort of stock that sells to teenagers and to men who have privately decided they are still teenagers. The registration lapsed, and we picked it up in the middle of a long argument about what to call ourselves.

Everything else on the shortlist sounded like a bank’s staff newsletter: something Dispatch, something Ledger, something with the word Chronicle in it. Names like that ask for respect before you have read a sentence, and we did not want a masthead doing work the reporting is supposed to do. This one promises nothing respectable, so whatever credibility we end up with has to be earned in the copy. For months after we launched we were still getting email in Spanish about jacket sizes and a returns label. We answered all of it and explained that the shop had gone.

The house rule, and the story that produced it

Our first serious mistake was a piece built entirely on one company statement about a security incident. It was on the record and it came from the top of the organisation, and we treated seniority as though it were verification. The company then revised its account of what had happened, and later revised it again. Our correction ran longer than the original article, which is the most useful kind of embarrassment available to a new publication.

Out of that came the rule the whole newsroom now works to. No story runs on a single official statement, however senior the source. Something else has to carry weight: a filing, a court listing, a regulator’s register, a procurement record, an archived version of a page that has since changed, a patch note, a person with direct knowledge who does not work in communications. Where we cannot get past the statement, we say so in the article, in plain words, or we hold the piece until we can. How we handle sourcing, anonymity and documents is set out at length in our editorial standards.

How a working day actually runs

The morning is the queue. Overnight statements, filings, recall databases, redundancies announced as strategic realignment, price rises buried in a terms update, transfer paperwork, court lists, products that stopped being sold without anyone saying so. Next to each item an editor writes one question: who else would have to know this is true? Items with no answer to that question stay in the queue. They do not get published because the news list looked thin.

The middle of the day is documents and phone calls, most of which go nowhere. The afternoon is writing. Before anything publishes, a second editor reads it with a single instruction, which is to find the sentence that has only one source standing behind it. That conversation is unpleasant from both sides and it is the most valuable half hour in the building. The last job of the day is the corrections log, which gets opened whether or not anyone has written in.

Who owns us, and how the money works

The site is independently owned and run by its founding editorial team. There is no parent company, no group above us, no investor with a seat, no political party, no state money and no political action committee anywhere in the funding. Nobody outside the newsroom sees a story before it publishes. The full disclosure, stream by stream, is on our ownership and funding page.

We are free to read and we mean to stay that way. No paywall, no metered limit, no registration wall in front of the journalism. Advertising pays for it, which we would rather state on the first page you land on than bury three clicks deep. What we sell, and the conditions attached, is written out on the advertise with us page, including the categories we send away.

What we will not do, including when it pays

Commercial pressure on a site like this does not arrive as a bribe. It arrives as early access offered on condition the framing is agreed first, or a hosted trip with a publication date attached, or an affiliate arrangement that would work considerably better if one particular product happened to come top. Every refusal below has cost us money and we expect them to keep doing it.

These are not ethics for display. They are the specific things we have already said no to, written down so readers can hold us to them and so the next person who asks knows the answer before they send the email.

• No sponsored article is presented as news, written by our reporters, or given a review score.
• No coverage is sold, and no advertiser gets a preview, a veto or a warning before a story about them goes up.
• No buying guide or ranking is ordered by which link earns us the most commission.
• No embargo, loan unit or review sample is accepted when the condition attached is approval over what we conclude.
• No rumour aggregation as a traffic habit, in transfer season or launch season, where the only source is another site’s unnamed source.

When we get it wrong

We will get things wrong. The measure of a newsroom is not whether that happens, it is what happens in the hour afterwards. We correct on the page, we say what the article said before, and we do not silently rewrite a paragraph and hope nobody kept a screenshot. The process, including how to make us start it, is in our corrections policy.

Checking before publication is a different discipline from correcting afterwards, and we treat it as one. How we test claims, images, numbers and documents, and what we do when something cannot be independently confirmed, is described in our fact-checking process. We work to the International Fact-Checking Network principles without claiming any badge for having done so.

Reaching the newsroom

One address reaches us and editors read it themselves: support@thekissingpunk.com. Tips, documents, complaints, corrections, commercial questions and the occasional piece of abuse all land in the same inbox and get sorted there. Anything marked sensitive stays with the editor who opened it.

If you would rather know what to include before you write, or how long a reply usually takes, the breakdown by subject is on our contact page.