Sorry you?re cross about this Twig ? we do understand where you (and others) are coming from. It was the Times ideas to do boxes on some active members and to be honest Caitlin knows Mumsnet pretty well so had a quite a clear idea of who she wanted to feautre. We agreed though that it would be quite a nice way of illustrating what sort of women used MN. I did imagine it would be a bit like MP is a mother-of-two 2 and trainee vicar from Somerset than MP is responsible for tone of mn if I?m honest, but there you go.
With regard to using posters for editorial/ other bits and bobs, Mumsnet is essentially built on user generated content ? the newsletter just packages up a few bits of it to hopefully make a useful weekly product. As MP said, surely better to use our own talent/content than hire an outside writer to do it. We?ve always used people from the boards to help out. (Spacemonkey, Abby, JJ all came from MN). Given that we have a pool of hundreds of thousands of talents, who ?get? Mumsnet, it would be a bit silly not to we think.
What we try very hard to do though is to be consistent and fair across all posters so if MP calls someone a silly twat, she?s going to get deleted, talk round up or not. There are no special favours ? that?s what I was trying to get at in Caitlin?s piece. In fact I think I can recall getting cross mails from pretty much all the posters picked out in the Times piece at some point because we?ve deleted something they?ve written (in Cod?s case quite often ).
The nature of Talkboards is that some posters will be more visible than others ? you can argue of course about whether the Times selection was representative ? we did suggest a few more/alternative names but in truth I doubt it?s possible to pick only 5 and be properly representative whichever 5 you pick. It was more about giving a flavour to people who don?t know Mumsnet. And on that note can all of you who are keeping it a secret stop. Please!
FWIW though, I thought Caitlin did a fab job though in capturing the spirit of the place and what makes it tick and I haven?t even watched Cranford.