Type of site Music website Website www.punknews.org Registration Yes | Available in English Commercial Yes Launched 1999 | |
Punknews.org is a New York City-based website founded by Aubin Paul in 1999. The website publishes music news and album reviews relating to punk rock, hardcore punk, ska, alternative, indie rock, heavy metal and hip hop. It features user-submitted and editor-evaluated articles, through a publishing format much like popular technology-related news website Slashdot.
Contents
News coverage
Punknews.org generally posts between 15 and 20 news articles a day, covering such topics as tour dates, label signings, album releases, new media, band break-ups and member changes.
While Punknews.org does often spotlight relatively obscure bands, the editors cite fan interest as deciding how much coverage an artist warrants, rather than deferring to genre politics (major label/indie label preference or how close a band reflects the traditional punk subculture).
According to Epitaph Records, label head and Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz has been known to scan Punknews.org to find new punk artists. Specifically, Gurewitz signed The Getaway after researching the band's music and growing popularity.
The site has also won the Alternative Press Reader's Poll and has been mentioned in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Billboard Magazine, East Bay Express, and many other publications. Other online music news resources and blogs make frequent reference to coverage on Punknews.org. For example, Canadian online radio station CBC Radio 3 regularly links the site in its "Music Notes" news summaries. Record labels have also picked up on the Punknews.org RSS news feed to augment their own websites, such as the Union Label Group in Montreal.
CBC Radio 3 featured Punknews.org in its 2011 Searchlight poll to determine the "Best Music Website In Canada." Public voting saw the site make it into the top 20 (from a field of 60).
Punknews Records
On January 1, 2006, Aubin Paul, Adam White and Scott Heisel, who comprised the website's primary editorial staff in the early part of the 2000s, launched Punknews Records, an imprint under Epitaph Records. When it was active the label released albums from Somerset and Ryan's Hope.
The label is currently inactive (Somerset broke up in early 2008 and Ryan's Hope is no longer a part of the label). On Punknews.org's formspring.me site, Adam White responded to the question of what happened to the label with the following:
Ultimately PNR was the result of a distro deal Aubin, Adam and Scott struck with Epitaph. Epitaph was fantastic about the whole thing, but in the end we didn't feel it was right to keep sinking our and their money into a venture that we weren't able to make sustainable.
During their years of activity, they released two albums: Somerset's Pandora and Ryan's Hope's Apocalypse in Increments.