To think the Daily Mail are taking the piss?

[DailyFailAreABunchOfCunts]

As you may infer from my NN I am not a fan. However I saw this on today's Mail online:

DM Link

For those who don't want to click it, the DM have mined the recent thread from a poster who lost her DS at a young age, and was asking if she WBU to still buy clothes for him and join clubs. I remember the thread as it was really moving and so clear that the poster was struggling with her grief.

The Mail has lifted the story - and the child's name - lock, stock and barrel. I'd be interested in MNHQ's view on this. I realise that posts are in the public domain but this feels so horribly invasive.

You need to tell more...

TooLazy what is hard as nails about this?:

vulnerable people shouldn't be encouraged to post distressing details on a public site whether that is by the site owners or members hungry for details

That's my advice to a vulnerable person and always will be. People who are hurting shouldn't be encouraged to spill for any audience and should be encouraged to speak in a private place - don't you agree?

Sorry have not RTFT but just wanted to say that The Sun also ran the same story today.

I noticed it as went on their fb page today following the news on the Hillsborough trial and I wanted to see what response The Sun has made fuck all.

Trashy, gutter rags the both of them. But as others have said, this is a public forum viewable by anyone so whilst morally it's awful, legally they aren't doing anything wrong

Ok maybe we can agree on this:
People should be very wary about what they post on the Internet
AND
Journalists shouldn't be cunts.

It all seems a bit like victim blaming to me. Like advising women not to get drunk to avoid rapists when the fundamental problem is the rapists not the victims. This poor woman is not the problem. Since arses exist we do need to be more careful, but it's not our actions that are to blame it's the arses' actions.

In that case, MN should not have bereavement, mental health, relationships sections. Those issues are too personal and too fucking 'juicy' for the blood-suckers.

And legally, I still maintain that they are in fact doing something wrong.

It may not be illegal,. it may not be against the code of practice, but is tacky and its not good journalism.

If things are still as bad in the business as one poster maintains, then there is a problem with the culture in that workplace.

Shocked and saddened by this turn of events. I hope the young mother on that thread is alright and has support. I can't even begin to speak of legalities of an article like this but I can say it reeks of emotional vampirism.

It's perfectly legal to use what we post in the papers, but, as I often tell the DC, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Only if they contacted the op beforehand its ok if not which i am guessing it is very wrong specially as they are being paid off someone elses greif/story.

And legally, I still maintain that they are in fact doing something wrong.

Can you in that case point exactly which case law has been broken?

What has been done is no doubt morally wrong it isn't however, illegal. Just because you want it to be it doesn't make it so.

Sometimes people forget that this isn't a 'safe private' space, it is a very open public forum that you can Google in seconds and don't even need to be a member to see all posts.

It strikes me that some here are looking for someone to blame for the fact they have been incredibly naive and possibly even misguided in thinking that MN was a safe private, anonymous place when that has never been the case.

At the end of the day it is not down to anyone else to police what you do and don't post on here or anywhere else. Many websites have a lower age limit to e.g. Protect children, however if someone is considered too vulnerable to be in control of what they post then it could be argued that they shouldn't be posting at all. Somehow I can't imagine that people would agree that was ok.

I don't think that re-producing the post in question for a newspaper article is very good journalism, however to suggest that the bereaved or mentally ill are suddenly less safe here than they were before is ridiculous. nothing has changed. I too was here in 2009, and as posted above, Justine was very specific then and I'm sure the same stands now. Suggestion that there should be some kind of warning on threads that what you're posting is public would suggest that posters are too stupid to realise that they're posting on the Internet which is, in fact, a public platform, and that if you're posting to a site with abilities to share to Facebook, Twitter etc you are somehow in a safe space? Get real.

CandP do you know why the journalist asks for permission to use someone's tweets then (as I saw her doing on twitter). Why would she need it? Things like that make people imagine they too would be asked by the paper if going to be in it (I would not have thought that, but I would have thought they needed to ask mumsnethq, who would hopefully say no. That's wrong too obviously).
Mumsnets comment on owning copyright is actually unhelpful really as it makes you think decisions are up to them about what is used, when the reality is anything can be used.

It's to do with the tweet being attributed to the individual and the organisation not being able to claim ownership of it.

I was actually having a conversation with a producer at Sky recently and she was telling me that she'd recently been to Paris after the shootings and when they were doing the rades and a number of people came up to them with video's they had made and wanted to sell to them. The organisation will only buy the video if they haven't already been shared, and the individual has to sign a disclaimer that they personally won't share the video, will remove it from their devices and won't sell to anyone else in order that Sky would use it. Because once it's out there it's public property.

I haven't read all this thread but wanted to voice my disgust too. They also ran a MN story a couple of days earlier. I know that their highly trained team of spotty faced monkeys normally trawl Reddit, Buzzfeed, KardashiansRus and YouTube videos for groundbreaking ( a'hem) stories but this one was disgusting as it was used for titilation.

DM should get back to the sad face pics, the queen in a hat, and that Shona Sidbury bleating on in her awful green patterned wrap dress, like they used to.

And I wish someone would buy the 'journalists' a fucking dictionary.

I just rejoined having missed mumsnet and needing some support, however reading how this was lifted and misused by the daily mail, I don't think I'd be comfortable posting again now.
How are people going to post openly when the newspapers are trawling for stories.
I do hope the poster in question is ok, that was terribly intrusive and insensitive, my heart goes out to her.

limited I don't understand why you need specific details about our careers. Perhaps you should share first? What do you specialise in?

I really couldn't care less about the poor little reporter and how hard her job is. Even if, as you've suggested, she chose this story because she was under pressure to meet a deadline- I and millions of other people deal with deadlines, competitive industries and demanding managers every day. It's not an excuse. This might not be illegal but it is certainly immoral.

So glad that the DM reporter has taken my feedback on board and added a link to a bereavement charity video. It's still lazy (God forbid they should research something), but it's a little better. Do I get a credit in your article or do you save that for the recently bereaved?

MNHQ has just posted on the other thread:

RowanMumsnet (MNHQ) Wed 27-Apr-16 08:59:53
Hello

Sorry not to have posted more fully sooner. A few people were away yesterday and we wanted to have a good burrow into what happened.

As some of you have pointed out, we do try to remind folk on threads like these that, like the rest of the internet, MN is not private. Posts are visible to anyone, which is why we regularly remind people to avoid posting any identifying details.

We would never encourage papers to write about sensitive threads on topics such as bereavement, and if they asked us for permission we would not give it.

But they don't need to ask for our permission, and rarely if ever do. (They did not in this case.)

They sometimes ask us to pass on posters' contact details, which again we would never do. (In some circumstances we might try contact the poster ourselves to see if they wanted to talk to the press, particularly if they'd posted something like a proposal for a campaign, or a complaint - but on a thread like this we wouldn't even have done that.)

We do understand why many of you are upset about this one but the sad fact is there is very little we can do to stop it happening, beyond encouraging you all to obscure identifying details and make good use of our namechange facility.

Thanks
MNHQ

sad fact is there is very little we can do to stop it happening, beyond encouraging you all to obscure identifying details and make good use of our namechange facility

Well they could stop allowing DM "Journalists" to use the media requests board. That would be a start.

its called churnalism- lots of low quality "news" sites do it. they use low paid scrubs to trawl social media and public website like reddit or mn and simply copy it and pretend it is news

most of the the mails sidebar of shame is just them reproducing said celebrity's instagram post.

they dont have the cash to actually employ real journalists to actually research and write articles because a picture of z list celebrity on a beach in a bikini gets far more hits and costs zero to make

I could be a DM journalist. It seems that all that's required is an internet connection - to trawl for stories that you can C&P. Plus the ability to write headlines using shouty caps -

Z lister sleb goes on a VERY long journey

Oh and looking at the sidebar of shame they seem to be obsessed with 'side boob', and people 'flaunting' some part of their body. Which is odd because the photos of the 'flaunting' actually seem to be people doing very ordinary things like wearing a swimming costume to the beach. Or a pair of shorts in hot weather.