Wow, Did Mumsnet just close a newspaper?

[LemonDifficult]

Impressive.

(But what will I read with a hangover on a Sunday?)

And here is the editor of the Times explaining why the closure of the NOTW is our fault, although why we should take the opinion of someone who wears a shirt in such a self-regarding manner seriously is beyond me.

Whhhhooooooooooaaaa - Did this OP (er, my OP) make it onto Newsnight?!

Dammit. Can't find a clip on the website. But if there using this I guess they must have been running very low on filler for the story.

article the comments underneath are priceless!

gah, sorry, behind the paywall - and Tante realises she's just outed herself as still paying for the Times

feel free to copy & paste, Tante (we won't hold it against you )

Fucking hell, some people really do lack a sense of humour...

next thing you know primeministers will have to garner Justines approval as they walk in number 10

Under title 'Victory for Mother of All Internet Campaigns'

Justine Roberts, the co-founder of Mumsnet.com, has described the ?power? of websites such as hers that triggered an online campaign against the News of the World, contributing to its downfall.

Users of the influential parenting website published the names of the paper?s advertisers, gave out e-mail addresses for people to contact with complaints, and drove traffic on Twitter.

?The power of Mumsnet and social media groups is that they allow people to collect and organise easily,? Ms Roberts said. ?People who care about something can start a thread on Mumsnet, say who the right people to contact are, put up a pro-forma letter template or say ?re-tweet this? ? and people do it from the comfort of their own homes. They don?t have to attend rallies, they don?t have to go anywhere.?

She said that Mumsnet users ?will not lament the loss of the News of the World as a newspaper?. But Ms Roberts, who is married to Ian Katz, deputy editor of The Guardian, the newspaper that has been leading the charge on the issue, added: ?They think the wrong people are paying the price. The workers are paying the price for the bosses.?

She said that the ?outrage? about the scandal, in which the mobile phone of Milly Dowler was allegedly hacked, was the strongest she had ever witnessed on Mumsnet. By yesterday more than 1,200 people had added comments to a thread entitled: ?God, those NoW journos were utter scum, weren?t they??

At Netmums.com, another website for mothers that attracts millions of visitors a month, many were also angry about phone hacking. But a thread about sports days was twice as popular as the News of the World discussion. Those who run the website said that their ?demographic? differed from Mumsnet, being less cosmopolitan.

Driven by complaints on the site, Mumsnet ended a commercial partnership with Sky, in which users had had the chance to try new products. ?Users suggested we should not be working with them and accepting advertising revenue from the Murdoch empire,? Ms Roberts said.

thanks, Lemon!

one of the comments -

"Mumsnet are a bunch of self-serving, uppermiddle class, North London Guardian reading, champagne socialists. They swoop like Pterodactyls, bullying any holder of an opinion that diverges from their own, even on their own forums. Thanks to these rich Islington housewives hundreds of innocent people are now out of work.

Mumsnet revolt me."

Hundreds of innocent people might be out of job... because the people in charge screwed up very badly?

hahahaha bless you.

If I could give you a Blue Peter badge I would.

D'you know what...

Having brought The times for ages.....

I'm off back to The Guardian.

DP has just said it's made him think twice about The times too.

Mners.....a lot of soppy fair trade tea drinking yummie mummies eh?

He wants to get round to usuals drunk thread on a Friday

That has made me quite cross..

I think i shall email the Times just to let them know that they're chucked.

I wonder if they're selling more copies as a result of scandal at NOTW?

It's bollocks and it's inaccurate bollocks.

Ford announced that they were pulling their advertising first.

Before mumsnet or anyone else got involved.

And it's fucking rude and demeaning to MNers to be described like that.

Champagne socialists!

I, personally think MN is pretty representative of the population as a whole.

Left wingers and right wingers and don't knows/don't cares.

People struggling on benefits and people with no financial worries.

AARRGG...yes,The Times is chucked from this household.

And not because it's Murdoch owned but because of Mr Roger Altons statements.

This thread should be in chat were it would get more traffic.

And people could see just how MN is viewed by the media.

Female, rich, Islington, champagne socialist, fairtrade tea, middleclass, organic short bread.

No ticks. Must try harder Mr Alton. Being sober will help a lot in that regard.

He must have been a bit pissed, or something. Way off message but also, I'd have thought, if we drew a Venn Diagram of Times readers and Mumsnet users there'd probably be quite a cross-over, big enough not to warrant offending.

Little do they know, that bringing down the News of the World, well it is just the first step in our plan for world domination.

No I don't think for one minute it "Was MN wot one it" but The Times seems to be hellbent on portraying all this as a MN-led campaign:

From Friday paper:
This was after a list of the News of the World?s advertising clients had been published online, encouraging people to send Twitter messages to the companies to express concern at the activities of the paper?s journalists.
The list, which appears to have been published first by the influential women?s website Mumsnet, provided links to prepared messages for people to send on to companies asking if they would reconsider advertising on the News of the World?s pages.
A typical message read: ?Dear @TheCooperative, will you be reconsidering your advertising spend with #notw given that we now know they hacked Milly Dowler?s phone??
The tweets were quickly republished by thousands of people, sending the hashtag #notw soaring up the microblogging site?s list of ?trending topics? in Britain.

I told a Times reporter who rang me the next day that the Twitter campaign on NOTW wasn't started by MN at all - Mumsnetters joined in but they are very keen on the line that it's all the fault of middle class yummy-mummies and the wider public don't mind at all about NOTW's "wrong-doing". They subsequently ran a piece Titled Victory for Mother of All Internet Campaigns with a pic of me.

All this is possibly an attempt to characterise the consumer backlash against the NOTW as a leftish conspiracy because of my connection with the Guardian-dh works there - or possibly because they actually believe it all a leftish conspiracy. Not sure which is more risible tbh.

I do think that lots of individuals - on Twitter, Facebook and indeed MN - were justifiably angry after the Milly Dowler phone hack revelations and consequently self-organised and took very effective direct action. The internet is very good at facilitating that.

And incidentally I think that I've as much right as the next person (Will Self for example ) to comment on what happened, on Newsnight [so there].

(By the by, I'm told that they really struggled to get guests on Newsnight this week to talk about hacking (make of that what you will) which probably explains why they asked me .)

Can I also point out that in my opinion there are many excellent journalists at the Times and putting this hackery issue aside it is in my experience one of the papers most likely to get their facts right.

that is interesting, Justine, that they can't get people to talk about it....I bet they mean they can't get other journalists to talk about it. Still haven't seen your appearance on Newsnight - we can't get iPlayer over here, and its still not on Youtube...

Also can I point out that the comment that I c&p in my post of Sat 09-Jul-11 12:46:39 (about MNers being champagne socialist Islington pteradactyls )、was NOT an official Times comment, it was just a rant from a member of the general public in the Reader Comments section after the article itself.

No, but I'm sure Justine Mumsnet's husband is happy