What we cover, how we cover it, and why we chose this name
catchpenny.asia is a satire and humor publication covering politics, business, and culture across Asia, from Kazakhstan to the Philippines and everywhere in between. We write mock news, absurdist commentary, and the occasional genuinely useful explainer, on the theory that a region this large deserves more than one kind of coverage — and considerably more jokes than it’s currently getting.
Why ‘Catchpenny’
A catchpenny is, traditionally, something cheaply made and sold purely to catch a buyer’s attention — a catchpenny headline, a catchpenny gimmick. We liked the word because it’s an old-fashioned insult that describes roughly half the news industry with unusual precision, and because it made a genuinely fun domain name once we found a version that wasn’t already taken. If nothing else, it’s a more honest name than most outlets are willing to give themselves.
What We Cover
Our coverage runs country by country across Asia, pairing real background on each nation’s satirical and comedic tradition with original satirical writing in the same spirit. That means a page on Hong Kong will tell you about Zunzi’s decades of editorial cartoons and 100Most’s spoof-awards ceremonies before handing you our own take on whatever the city’s officials are currently doing. We think the context makes the jokes land better, and the jokes make the context easier to sit through.
How We Write Satire
Every satirical piece on this site is written in character, meaning it’s delivered with the same straight-faced tone as the real news format it’s imitating. We don’t announce the joke inside the joke — that’s how satire has worked since Swift proposed eating Irish babies as a solution to poverty, and we’re not about to improve on a few centuries of established craft. What we do instead is make sure this page exists, clearly and permanently, stating plainly that catchpenny.asia is a satire and humor publication, not a news wire service. If you found your way here from an article and are wondering whether something you read is real: it isn’t, and that’s the point.
Why Region-by-Region Coverage
Most English-language satire sites treat Asia as an afterthought, if they cover it at all — a handful of jokes about one country’s most famous politician, then nothing. We built catchpenny.asia the other way around: a dedicated page for every country in the region, from the ones with decades of established satirical media to the ones where almost nobody is publishing anything at all. We think the gaps are as interesting as the well-covered ground, and we’ve tried to write both honestly. Readers who want a sense of how often a specific country page gets refreshed with new satirical content can check the ‘latest’ block at the bottom of that page directly, rather than guessing from the homepage.
Our Relationship With the Region’s Existing Satire Scene
We’re not trying to replace outlets like The Fauxy in India or the cartoonists still working in Hong Kong — we’re trying to sit alongside them, point readers toward the real thing where it exists, and fill in where an English-language satirical voice on a given country is otherwise hard to find. Several of our country pages exist specifically because we noticed nobody else had written one.
A Note on Tone
We try to punch up, not down, and we try to be genuinely funny rather than just aggressively cynical, which is a much easier trap to fall into than most satire writers admit. If a piece on this site ever reads like it’s just being mean, that’s a miss on our part, not the house style working as intended.
Who’s Behind It
catchpenny.asia is run by a small editorial team with backgrounds across satirical publishing, regional journalism, and, in at least one case, a genuinely alarming amount of time spent reading government press releases for fun. Bylines rotate across a roster of contributing writers, each with their own beat and their own voice, in the same tradition as the region’s other satirical outlets and personas.
How Often We Publish
New country pages, background updates, and satirical pieces go up on a rolling schedule rather than a fixed daily quota, since we’d rather publish a genuinely good piece on Uzbekistan once a month than a mediocre one every day just to hit a number. Our most active coverage tends to follow the news cycle in the countries with the most going on politically, which shifts constantly, as you’d expect.
Corrections and Standards
Because our articles are satire, we don’t run corrections on the jokes themselves — a fictional minister doesn’t get a right of reply. But the factual background sections on our country and region pages are held to normal editorial standards: if you spot an actual error in a factual claim, we want to know about it and will fix it. See our contact page for how to reach us.
What We’re Not
We are not a news outlet, a wire service, or a source for anything you should cite in a serious argument, a school assignment, or a legal filing, however tempting that headline might be. We are also not affiliated with any of the real outlets, officials, or institutions our satire occasionally references, beyond the fact that we find them fascinating enough to write about.