We are creatures of habit. For almost a decade now, my “first thing out of bed” routine has consisted of the following steps: (1) Stumble to the computer; (2) check email; (3) scan the headlines on Washingtonpost.com; and (4) catch up at Punknews.org. You know you’ve made it to the big time when your existence has some kind of priority over brewing the first cup of the coffee of the day. In this always-connected information world, it’s easy to take a website like Punknews.org for granted, especially if you’re old enough to remember what it was like to chase down punk rock news when paper zines and word of mouth were the only option. A single week of content on Punknews.org could outpace several months of content by some of the most popular print zines in the 80s and 90s… and that doesn’t even get into the issue of timeliness. I used to be bothered by the straight-jacket of objectiveness that gripped Punknews.org tight several years ago, but in the constant fight to “control the message” by the business side of our musical world, the Org has served its readers extremely well in refusing to think of itself as the story as opposed to the content it serves (unlike another popular music site well all know too well). In celebration of Punknews.org’s 10th Anniversary, Pastepunk writer James Hepplewhite talked to the Org’s three central editors, including founder Aubin Paul, Adam White, and Brian Shultz. Read on!

Pastepunk: It’s been roughly ten years now. In terms of Punknews.org, what’s changed? What’s stayed the same? Any post-Drive Thru lawsuits?

Adam: Just to clarify, Drive Thru Records never actually sued us or anything like that. If I remember correctly, we were on the receiving end of some legal saber rattling because of something asinine that kids were posting in our comment sections. It blew up for a few reasons. Firstly, we were shocked that a company we were so friendly with wouldn’t just pick up the phone and ask us for help. It was the first time something so tangible and potentially life altering intruded on our little world, and that scared us. When we made it public (which I’m guessing we wouldn’t do these days) our readers spun the conflict into an cause, using it to rally against the type of music that Drive Thru promoted (that post-BLINK 182 pop-punk, early mall emo). It became less about the potential lawsuit and more of a community-bred backlash against their brand. We really had very little to do with it at that stage.

Brian: The layout’s certainly changed a few times, but that’s the obvious stuff. I think the somewhat-less obvious stuff is our attempts at offering readers a much more complex and enriched website with more to offer than the news and reviews standards, what with the band pages, exclusive streams and dispatches and such. Plus, building a versatile staff with a lot of different skill sets helps. All the while, I think many of us are also either transitioning further into adulthood or already there, and that’s definitely made it harder to focus on the site, which makes it all the more confounding that we’ve been able to add so much over the years.

What hasn’t changed? Well, we’re all still doing this on a volunteer basis. It’s frustrating to talk to people and see how many actually think we’re being paid for this, because we’re not. In fact, as music moves away further and further from tangible mediums, many of us (at least myself) are seeing less and less physical copies of albums from bands we like, But yeah, just to put it out there for the umpteenth time–we’re not paid for this. Granted, I doubt any of us would object if the opportunity came up. I certainly haven’t.

Adam: We’re old now. Punk (and trend driven popular music in general) is remarkably cyclical. When we started out we got a lot of flack from old guard 80s hardcore guys that we put so much emphasis on 90s punk rock (bands that revolved around Fat Wreck and Epitaph in particular). Without consciously trying, we really catered to kids who got into punk when GREEN DAY and THE OFFSPRING blew up. These days it feels like we’re the old guard, which I suppose is the way the cycle works. What’s the same? I think, that, despite the implosion of the music industry we’re still seeing hungry young bands filling our inbox with hopeful news and song postings. That goes to show you there’s more noble aspirations at play than fleeting success in the majors.

Aubin: The biggest change has been in the music industry. With each year, we see less “controversial” signings to major labels. Despite the reaction that bands like ANTI-FLAG, AGAINST ME! and RANCID earned when signing to a major, I think of it as a good way to take the pulse of the industry as a whole. The lack of challenging bands being signed to a major really suggests that the industry is playing very conservatively and sticking with easy sales only.

Can you blame them? Kids buy R&B and hip hop but they don’t buy guitar bands.

Pastepunk: How, if at all, do you see Twitter affecting Punknews and if anywhere at all, do you see a future integration of the service (or other social networking sites) into Punknews?

Aubin: Well, we’re working on integrating Facebook now and we’ll probably have a Twitter feed on the front page soon enough (Their Facebook feed is now live – Ed.). I think it’s useful as a news distribution tool, and the search is very revealing, but individual Twitter pages lack utility. I guess what’s interesting about Twitter is that the vast, vast majority of users on there are more useful in the aggregate than as individual pages.

Adam: I’m sure you’ll see Punknews show up on whatever social networks become popular, which is understandable as you need to go where the people are. As nicely as our community’s grown on its own, there’s value in working the virtual pavement and getting the word out person by person. We haven’t done that enough in recent years. Twitter in particular only became really valuable to the site once we started really using it to converse with people. Earlier it solely served to automatically tweet links and headlines. I’m finding that the readers we talk to on Twitter are often not the same who comment under stories on the site. Having a line to those people is pretty important. You’ll see tighter integration with other services as we grow as well.

Often, our planning debates have mused about things like photo hosting, but with popular services like Flickr it makes more sense for us to not reinvent the wheel and instead integrate their services.

Pastepunk: October 7th is the 10th anniversary of the first official Punknews story, but perhaps you all can give us some insight into the founding of Punknews and the story behind that?

Aubin: I started off in my early teens printing a pretty simple ‘zine and photocopying it at odd hours at my Dad’s office. I think after a few years (and four issues) of inhaling ozone, collating pages and trying to staple stuff together by hand, I got wise to the idea that it might be more effective to go online and do something there instead.

At the same time, very few bands or labels had a significant internet presence in the mid-90s, so it was difficult to find out what was going on back then. We all lived in our little local scene silos, with magazines like Maximum Rock’n'Roll and Alternative Press being among the few that actually crossed state/provincial borders.

The union of these two ideas was Punknews.org. It would have been Punknews.com, but that was already taken.

Adam: I showed up in 2001 and became an editor after Aubin posted a plea for new writers. I recall putting together some news about LESS THAN JAKE or AFI as my job application. A few years after myself and Scott Heisel came on board as news editors the three of us began seriously discussing the direction of the site, the editorial voice and style and other more professional matters that we never considered in the early days. If you look back to very early Punknews posts it was as much a proto-blog as it was a Slashdot-inspired submission driven news site. I think the major change in our style was when we stopped posting our submissions verbatim (“submitter writes…”) and rewriting everything ourselves.

Pastepunk: The comments section has seen the burst and bloom of some… gregarious… personalities. Which has irked you the least? Which has been the strangest? Most absurd meme?

Aubin: Without question, what bothers me the most is racism or sexism and in any message board environment, you get both.

The less offensive but sometimes disappointing comments are those that judge a band based on the label without hearing anything. When the UK’s GHOST OF A THOUSAND signed to Epitaph Europe, some people called them “screamo” which is decidedly untrue and unfair to a pretty solid rock-influenced hardcore band. At the same time, I’m convinced a lot of hardcore fans ignored THIS IS HELL because of their Trustkill association and missed out on one of the better hardcore albums of 2008.

Brian: I try to take solace in the fact that the majority of Punknews readers don’t comment. Some of them are sort of funny like the Mike McColgan one.

Adam: The joke accounts tended to burn themselves out rather quickly, and I doubt we’ve had many that lasted more than 6 months. I’d say that 2004 to 2006 was the height of insanity, but for every ten comedians we’d have one anonymous kid taking it too far. There was a perception at the time that our fairly unmoderated comment sections were somehow a haven for vile, angry people. I think if you compare the average Punknews story these days to any random YouTube video you’ll find that we’re pretty tame in comparison.

Removing anonymous posting was a major deal for us, and something we internally discussed on and off for years. We didn’t want to be seen as limiting our readers’ freedom, but we also didn’t have the time nor the desire to constantly be on the watch for the lone wolf bigots trolling for a reaction. There’s a big disconnect between the amount of people commenting and our overall readership, and while we love the maniacs who frequent the comment sections, we tend to see Punknews as a news site rather than a message board.

Pastepunk: Why the addition of road diaries over the past year?

Adam: We wanted more original content from bands themselves, partly to counter the volume of news from mainstream acts. It boils down to resources, as those groups on better funded labels tend to have a stronger PR machine putting out regular updates, making it easier for us to cover them. Unfortunately, a lot of the smaller bands, while great musicians, don’t have the time or ability to self-promote while on the road. Tour journals, therefore, solve a number of problems. It keeps these bands in the news regularly, it’s better content than a tiresome press release, and it takes less time and effort than a formal interview.

Aubin: Seemed like fun. Ben (Conoley) came up with it, but it seemed like an interesting way to pull back the curtain a little.

Brian: It’s just a way to have more exclusive content to force people into visiting Punknews more than they already do.

Pastepunk: What have been some of the defining stories of the website for you, if not in terms of comments?

Adam: I hate having to write obituaries, and those always stand out in my mind. To think that in a few years we lost Joe Strummer, Joey, Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone and Johnny Cash among others is just shocking. We’re of course never prepared for these sorts of articles and the pressure’s always on to get up something fitting before our inbox overflows with submissions from readers looking for us to say something. The thing about breaking news is that if we don’t jump on it, the readers will likely hijack an existing article and start discussing it there.

Obits aside, RANCID’s signing to Warner Bros. stands out for me. I think it truly left a lot of longtime fans completely befuddled and scrambling to form some sort of coherent opinion on why the band, so late in their career, would do something we usually see ambitious yet naive up and comers do. The comments section really blew up with that one and the readers themselves became a little self-aware of how much they could hype up an article with their comment numbers.

Aubin: I think covering some of the national tragedies were some very important things for me emotionally. Our coverage of 9/11 or the deaths of Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer were important to me because of the importance of the community aspects of the site. We didn’t write nearly as much those days as the community did and reading those comments was far more moving than anything I could have written.

Brian: NO TRIGGER signing to Nitro, since I’d been really trying to get their name out there for a year and change through the site and people were actually taking notice. I was really proud to get to announce that. Even though the honeymoon seemed to die pretty quickly, it was awesome to see.

I also think I freaked out when I read the TEXAS IS THE REASON reunion news. But of course, I don’t know if a story like that “defines” the website for me.

Pastepunk: How do you all feel about the designation of the “Orgcore” genre based on your website, despite the fact that your tastes are all more varied than the genre itself?

Adam: It’s wonderful so long as we, as the editorial staff, don’t buy it for a second. I’m entirely supportive of things growing organically out of the community, whether that be some silly meme, a band to champion (BOMB THE MUSIC INDUSTRY! and STREETLIGHT MANIFESTO come to mind) or, in this case, a genre.

However, if the Punknews editors start consciously focusing on what the community is defining as Orgcore, we risk becoming entirely insular and myopic. Part of what I love about Punknews is that we can take the big umbrella view of punk, and in a given day talk about everything from greaser rockabilly acts, to hip Canadian indie rock to uncool ska revivalists to crusty `77 veterans then end off discussing the latest teen sensation headlining Warped. If we let Orgcore define what we cover, that range is going to shrink rather drastically and we’ll all end up missing out on some incredible music.

Aubin: It’s shockingly inaccurate when applied to the staff, but it does reflect a vocal chunk of the audience, so I don’t mind it. I think when you consider the music that say, Adam or Scott or I like, it’s not really rooted in that scene. I love THE CLASH and HOT WATER MUSIC, but I also really love FUGAZI, SNAPCASE, RADIOHEAD, and THE JESUS & MARY CHAIN. I don’t mind the genre designation but I do dislike to see people complain when we cover music outside that genre.

Brian: I guess it makes sense, but I think that’s something that obviously happened more because of the community than us. It’s the certain set of bands most of them/us can actually agree on.

Pastepunk: The story of requiring an account to post a comment on Punknews is a long one, but looking back, how do you feel now about no longer allowing unregistered (or anonymous) comments?

Brian: I think it’s wonderful. I remember some other website made a list of the “top 5 worst zines” or something a few years ago and we earned a spot on the list just because of our community’s commenting contributions, which they compared to a 4th grade classroom.

Adam: I think time has proven that anyone who wants to be a truly act like a jackass online is going to do so whether they’re registered or not. What the registration requirement does accomplish is that it is makes it marginally more difficult to act like a maniac, and that tends to deter most of it. Laziness seems to trump antisocial forum trolling. I’m just surprised how long it took us to flip that switch. We’re sometimes over-cautious about provoking the readership. We didn’t want it to explode into a free speech debate, but since we collect so little registration info and police the boards as liberally as we can, it thankfully never became an issue.

Aubin: I wasn’t too happy to remove anonymous commenting originally, and of all the staff, I probably held out the longest because I really hoped that the value of anonymous commenting would supersede the tendency for abuse. But in retrospect, I think I was a little too worried. It’s important to remember that none of us want to prevent people from expressing themselves, but if you want to have a soapbox, you should put your own name on it.

Pastepunk: Aubin, what is your most embarrassing moment from the early days of the website?

Aubin: I think the realization that people were reading it came a little later than it should. So I might have been more emo/bloggy in the early days which I found kind of embarrassing. I’m actually a pretty private person (even my Facebook wall is turned off) so it’s a little weird to have people know me who I don’t know. I think it was more of the struggle to become more newsworthy and less of a personal soapbox and the disconnect between that and the reality of when people discovered the site that made it a little embarrassing.

Pastepunk: Brian, it seems like you’ve been around for the huge amount of reunions, surprise shows and big events (Inquisition, Thorns Of Life, Kid Dynamite, Lifetime, Texas Is the Reason etc) on the East Coast. How do you manage to do all of that while remaining sane?

Brian: Not to mention Gorilla Biscuits, Small Brown Bike, Coalesce, CIV, On the Might of Princes and Mind Over Matter. Shows are just that moment in time, I guess. It’s an awesome experience but when it’s over it’s over, I suppose, and I’m okay with that because I got to see it happen. But you’re right; it’s weird to think how many shows like this I’ve seen and it’s probably just right place / right time. Living within a reasonable proximity of New York City and following punk rock / hardcore / underground music / whatever as closely as I do probably helps, though.

Pastepunk: Adam, congratulations on getting married.

Adam: Thanks, but I’m hardly unique in that aspect. I think within a year’s window we’ll have something like five of the site editors getting married, and just as many moving to other cities and shifting their lives in major ways. It’ll be interesting to see how all these changes, both personal, in the music industry and in social technologies, shift the site’s coverage and editorial slant. When one of us starts hitting up Jordan for hand-me-down RAMONES onesies, all bets are off.