Confessions of a serial mower
I have pasted below the article in the Press Gazette for you all to look at.
By Colin CrummyWednesday, 25 April 2007
The usually tranquil world of Country Living magazine has been hit by an online furore over its handling of a competition to find a new columnist.
When it was launched, the competition asked fellow website users to vote for their favourite blogger, who would then become the Natmags magazine's newest recruit.
But midway through the competition, editor Susy Smith changed the rules so that the final decision was down to the Country Living editorial team – a move which has prompted outrage on the site's forums.
Forum posters have accused the magazine of lying, misleading and changing the rules of the competition and claim that the three finalists chosen by the magazine were not prolific bloggers, nor had they blogged for a long time on the site.
A typical response to the rule change, from forum poster "Countrymousie", said: "I have never come across anything so unprofessional – many people took the competition very seriously, and they are very hurt."
A number of posters have threatened to leave the forums and boycott the magazine.
Many bloggers were surprised that the magazine announced its rule change in a forum post by Smith, midway through a thread. In an announcement on the forums after posters expressed their outrage, Smith defended her decision to intervene, saying that she was only doing so in response to posters complaining that they did not have the time to read all the blogs and then vote.
Smith told Press Gazette: "We asked the online community to vote for their favourite blog. However a discussion in the chatroom made it clear our readers felt uncomfortable with the vote. We responded directly to their concerns and agreed the editorial team would select the winner."
Forum posters argued there should have been a formal statement as to the rules, and accused the magazine of "unprofessionalism".
In her response on the website, Smith said: "We are very much on a learning curve with the website and hopefully will get better at it as we go along."
She defended the choice of finalists, who despite only posting a small number of times demonstrated "quality over quantity" and "showed real potential".
She added: "As editor, I am ultimately responsible for the content of the magazine. My job is to select content that as much as possible meets the wider expectations of all of our readers.
Occasionally this disappoints a few, but predominantly this pleases the majority of our very loyal readership."
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Copyright © 2007 Wilmington Media Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
4 comments:
Matron has just popped in to tell you not to worry, the chat room has gone down temporarily owing to an error on Google which is preventing us cleaning out the fosses to make room for new posts!
You can still blog away merrily here on your own page, and to leave comments on all the others.
I emailed him the following reply.
Dear Colin,
I was very interested to read your comments on the above competition, there were some fantastic blogs put forward some from professionals and some from talented amateurs. For the record the Chatroom did have a concern about the 'Bloggers" voting, however this amounted to only a few entrants and it was only posted by the very fair mind exmoorjane as she was way ahead in comments at the time and I think probably felt a little embarrassed.
The reasons put forward by Suzy Smith the editor were quite frankly very poor, whatever the reasons for the ultimate upset, the fact remains, the so called competition was badly organised and so was the website, very few people remain on what was a hive of activity.
I myself have written to both them managing Director of the National Magazine Company and The Editor of Country Living along with the Telegraph Editor and Andrew O'Hagan who wrote an interesting piece on 'the rip off "competitions that have hit the headline recently, without yet a reply and I don't really expect a=one of any merit.
I sadly was not one of the people who had enough talent to be published but I have bought this magazine for years and I can tell you from experience the blogs put forward by some (not any of the finalists I might add) we far above any article I have read in Country Living in recent month.
Good response Blossom, the fact that we got lead to believe that such was the quality of the blogs appearing on their website they had decided to run a columnist competition, so they even stated they were impressed by the early blogs.
Hello dear Countrymousie,
Re your comments on CL page. an interesting thought there. I did not blog for the competition, although maybe at one point I may have liked to, but did not think I had enough artistic aptitude which would be suitable for the magazine.
Heck, though I know now that the shortlists winners, have wrote about either hens or moles. I did actually have you as one of my favourites, along with many others.On a different matter Countrymousie, not sure if I want to yet, but you have had your old blogs on the "other side" erased, which is what you requested CL to do, if I choose to do this, how does one paste to this site? Sorry to be a complete "dumb-wit". Warm Wishes. Camilla.xxx
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