Thursday, August 16th, 2012

STFU Parents vs. The New York Times

[info]tiye
STFU Parents is a blog about parents who overshare or otherwise wank it up on social media, especially Facebook. It's a snarky but relatively gentle sort of blog, for the most part.

The trouble starts when the NYT posts an article about Unbaby.me, a Chrome app designed to replace pictures of babies on Facebook feeds with pictures of . . . other stuff. The Times article mentions various "anti-baby" sites and blogs. It also quotes the STFU Parents tagline ("You used to be fun. Now you have a baby.") with no citation of any kind. No link to the blog, no mention of the blog's name.

B., the owner of STFU Parents, is not pleased. After posting about it on Twitter and Facebook and writing to The Times (which results in a hilariously wanky exchange of emails between B. and The Times' "Senior Editor for Standards"), she makes a lengthy post summing up the whole debacle on the STFU Parents blog.

The Times' excuse? They couldn't possibly publish or even link to an acronym that includes the word "fuck" in The Times, which is a CLASSY newspaper.

Salon and The Atlantic Wire have weighed in on the issue.

The comments on the STFU Parents post are pretty sane for the most part, but there is some entertaining Internet Lawyering (including a lengthy debate about whether B. needed permission to post the emails from the NYT editor -- kind of a moot issue, since she had his permission) and trolling. My favorite in the latter category: "I personally also think you should just get over it. Who cares, he just said the tagline. Do you own the tagline?" Followed, of course, by a small dogpile of "Yes, yes she does."
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