Digital Citizens

In this guest post, Tim Burrowes, editor of Mumbrella, responds to Laurel Papworth’s recent post on cyberbullying.*

The story of my experience begins last Saturday morning at 8.30am when my mobile started ringing. It was the first of several calls, emails and DMs from friends to warn me there was something on Laurel Papworth’s blog that I needed to see.

What I read with increasing alarm and (I confess) hurt was a 5000+ word diatribe. I admit I started to shake a little as I read it, which I did my best to hide from my girlfriend. It’s certainly the most personal attack about myself I’ve experienced.

(By the way, do not see any of this as a complaint about the treatment I received – journalists give it out and it’s never very edifying for them to complain when they take it. This is simply about putting the record straight.)

But the words chosen were calculated to inflict maximum damage to my reputation. I was, she alleged, a cyberbully because over the previous year on Mumbrella I had regularly criticised her dance-on-the-grave views on “heritage media” and mocked some of her more extreme moments.

She listed every single post written on Mumbrella that had even peripherally mentioned her, as evidence that not only were we cyberbullying her, but that I was a cyberstalker too.  She claimed that she had never attacked me,

The attack came in waves. She tweeted and retweeted her post to her 20,000+ Twitter followers. She @messaged bloggers with bigger followings than her own, presumably in the hope that they would reply and take it to a wider audience. Others told me that she had privately messaged them and asked them to retweet it. She’d emailed the link to a selection of industry people. She urged advertisers to not support our site.

The post concluded with a message urging anyone reading it to retweet it.

As a keyword stuffed piece of SEO, it was exquisitely written. It was clearly designed as a Googlebomb designed to connect the words Mumbrella and bully. Looking at Google she’s had some success with that.

All while I was still in bed. It was certainly a well planned and executed campaign designed to ruin my name. It is of course a deeply unpleasant thing to be labelled a bully. And much like being accused of being a racist, it’s very hard to respond to in a convincing way.

For the record though, let me try. When your adversary has just as much influence and audience as you it’s a debate. It can be vigorous, it can be grumpy, it can be downright bloody rude. But it’s not bullying to honestly disagree with someone’s publicly expressed ideas – even to poke fun at those ideas if they’re the ones who put them out there for debate.

More on that later, but for now, let’s go back to the beginning of the feud.

The first thing I need to be clear about it is that I started it. I was the first to openly criticise her.

I found her blog entertaining but used to find the regular attacks on technology journalists grating.  Journalists she disagreed with were labelled as “linkbaiters”. It was a tactic she would later apply to me.

The first time I wrote about Laurel Papworth was when she attacked the media for failing to write about her teaching trip to the Middle East. It seemed spectacularly ill-informed on what actually consists of news.

I gradually noticed she was starting to refer to me on Twitter as “Mumbles”. Most of the Twitter archive of those has gone now but a couple I can find:

“ Mumbles always misses the main story & goes for the “if it bleeds it leads”. Antagonize a human being, get a quote, lead with it.”

“*curious* do you really think Mumbles has the depth to write a post like that? I mean, not a press release with gossip?”

And so on throughout the year.

Which was okay – she was entitled to her view and to comment on my professionalism.

There were a couple of odd incidents too. At one point I was in the audience at an event. Without my knowledge, she took a photograph of me and posted it online with the message: “it’s Tim “Mumbles” Burrowes of Mumbrella. Heh.”

Stalking behaviour? Of course not. I found it a bit odd, but it didn’t make me think I was being stalked.

I, meanwhile, was regularly writing, both seriously and playfully, about some of her (in my view) more foolish pronouncements. Obviously I was seriously antagonising her.

Where she really started to put the boot in was in a comment on a news.com.au blog posting in which she effectively suggested I had some sort of corrupt PR relationship I was hiding from my readers.

She suggested I’d “sold” the conference idea to my “agency mates” and the venue.

I’d moderated an event about Twitter as a favour to the agency involved – there’d been no fee. For a journalist though, that’s a pretty direct attack on their integrity.

In a comment on the A Digital Perspective blog she wrote:

“Mumbles is establishing a “snark” blog – a negative groundswell or anti-PR site. By that I mean, he copy and pastes press releases and tacks on a negative comment or puts a negative spin. If he’s really pissy, he takes a tweet to 30 people, out of context and spins it into ‘anti -news’. This can be amusing, outraging, provoking, engaging, and I’m not suggesting that there is no place for such a blog, but that we need to recognise it for what it is – no surprises, there is a long history of linkbaiting in media.”

By that time it had become a team effort. Papworth’s partner Gary Hayes, an occasional poster, began to comment more regularly suggesting Mumbrella was an invader or that I did not understand social media.

Papworth uploaded to YouTube a video of her giving, in my view, a particularly misleading presentation at Media140 in which she appeared to be arguing that unlike bloggers, editors positively encourage errors. I took the piss.

In language that was to become familiar, Hayes posted: “I am seriously beginning to pity Tim that, like a school ground bully, he has to pick on Laurel this way. I suspect it’s because she has come to represent the social media ‘camp’ and is an easy target for him. His fascination also borders on stalking.”

Meanwhile, the fights Papworth was beginning to pick with others on Twitter began, it seemed to me, to take place more regularly. In short succession, there were rows with @stilgherrian, @shepherd, @scottrhodie and @warlach.

When I wrote about one of those incidents, Papworth claimed on Twitter, it was because of misogyny:

“Why does @Mumbrella always post negative inane things about me? *puzzled* Is that cyberbullying? He does it to women in general, no?”

(To answer that point – I suspect I’ve annoyed many, many people – but of both sexes in roughly equal proportion.)

Others were also beginning to notice the fights with those who questioned her.

Jonathan Crossfield posted a comment piece suggesting Papworth might be hurting her brand with the feuds.

One of the commenters agreed, suggesting that Papworth’s own behaviour “verges on bullying”

When Papworth responded, she turned back to Mumbrella, claiming: “Mumbrella has been blocked for about 6 months for consistently bullying me online and Mumbles now blocks my comments on his blog AS IS HIS RIGHT.”

Which isn’t true, by the way. I’ve never blocked her comments.

There have, of course, been other exchanges.

The reason I’ve gone into the level of detail I have is to make the point that this has been a two-way street

Through her Twitter following and blog readership, Laurel Papworth has the power to give as good as she gets. Indeed, she’s escalated all of this from a robust (very robust) debate on the rights and wrongs of social media into something much more deeply (and painfully) personal.

The comment stream in her posting about me went mostly in my favour. Some posters pointed out that we were both at fault (which is a fair enough view). But few who looked properly at her claims would accept that it was bullying. A few suggested that her own behaviour amounted to bullying, to which she replied:

“Call me a bitch – but not a bully.”

More than one pointed out that by attaching herself to the issue she was doing a disservice to those who are genuinely bullied.

I’ve so far held back from writing anything myself. Most of the advice I’ve been given has been one of two things – to either say nothing, or to sue for libel. Personally I’m not much of a fan of journalists taking that latter course unless they’ve no other choice.

But on Friday came the final straw.

She posted: “I (sic) just been asked to speak at a Government conf on cyber bullying and cyber rascism (sic) to address these issues. It’s in a couple of weeks. Will keep you posted.”

Funnily enough, it’s a threat she once used on another journalist who’d annoyed her: “Oh and someone tell him I am presenting at PANPA on Wednesday – you know, the conference for media proprietors and CEOs of newspapers, opened by Kevin Rudd? Sheesh. Noice case study for my preso ”

That promise to speak at the conference is to me a signal that she’s not taken on board any of the many comments pointing out that that’s not what she has experienced. And she’s not going to let it go. Which is why I’m responding.

To avoid any suggestion that I’m rigging the debate by putting it in front of my larger audience, I’ve sought a neutral space and offered this as a guest posting to the Digital Citizens blog.

So let me spell it out.

Laurel Papworth has built herself up as a social media expert, and as a Twitter persona called SilkCharm. When you constantly publish your thoughts, you put them up for debate and criticism.

Mumbrella writes more about this subject area than any other outlet, so of course, Laurel Papworth crosses our radar regularly.

She’s highly polarising.

Laurel Papworth and her partner Gary Hayes can and do criticise Mumbrella. They’re entitled to do that.

And when I criticise her ideas, even when I’m scathing in the way I do it, it’s not cyberbullying and it’s certainly not cyberstalking. And the same is true when they attack me.

This feels like an attempt to swat an annoying critic through a character assassination.

It was a tough week. At Tuesday’s Digital Citizens event, everyone I chatted to was sympathetic, but they all wanted to talk about it and I didn’t really enjoy being defined by her words. As I say, it’s a deeply unpleasant thing to say about someone. I hope my family never sees it.

So here’s what I suggest. Let’s all stop calling each other names and stick to debating the issues. Let’s do it thoughtfully, angrily, amusingly, cleverly or even rudely. Let’s be vigorous, or even scathing when we talk about these ideas. But let’s not get personal.

Tim Burrowes

*N.B. A member of the Digital Citizens organising committee, Scott Rhodie, is mentioned in the article. Scott had no part in the creation and submission of this article.