On Thursday the Advisory Board of Park Slope Parents (PSP) announced that a PSP member was removed from the group. An email went out to all members explaining why.
A PSP member named Allison, who writes for the blog Fucked in Park Slope and Babble, a popular parenting website, began a thread last week with the subject “Politically-Incorrect Parenting.”
According to the Advisory Board, all contributions to the thread were approved but one — and that was a response from Allison. The PSP moderators deemed her response “too mean-spirited to post.” Specifically, they objected to the fact that she referred to another member, in jest, as a “borderline child abuser” because she gave her child an unusual name.
PSP moderators asked Allison to revise her post and she did though she was, according to the moderators, reluctant to remove the borderline child abuser line.
She also informed them that she was working on an article about bad parenting for Babble. In keeping with PSP policy and guidelines, they asked her to re-submit her post through the Journalist Request Process, which is clearly outlined on the PSP website.
“Journalists are welcome to post to PSP to get material or interviews, but they need to go through our Journalist Request Process if they are posting for an article, so that our members know the purpose of the posting. We feel that it is important that our members are informed when their message may be used for journalistic endeavors and this was a case that warranted a “journalist” heading.”
The following is PSP’s reason for requesting that Allison pitch the article as a Journalist Request and an explanation of why she is being removed from the PSP list serve:
Begin Message ================================
“I’m sorry we were unable to get back to you as quickly as you would have liked. We have been discussing your response to R’s rejection of your last post. In that response you indicated that your reason for posting was to pitch a story for ____ about `bad parenting’ and that your idea has now been accepted and you will be writing that story.
This disclosure caused some consternation among our Advisory Board. As you know, when journalists want to use PSP to get material for a story, we require that they go through the Journalist Request Process, so that our members can choose whether to participate or not. When you posted as if you were just interested in people’s ideas on what constitutes bad parenting, without mentioning that you were doing so to “finesse a pitch,” some members participated who might have chosen otherwise had they known what your intentions were. Now that you are indeed writing a story on the topic, it’s even more important that you be frank with our membership about the reason you’re posting.
So at this point we cannot accept more posts from you without disclosing your plans to the list. I’ll append the journalist request procedure after my signature, in case you don’t have it handy. If you wish to continue using PSP for research for this story, please follow this procedure. We’ll try to respond to your request in a timely manner.
Also, please remember that when you joined Park Slope Parents you agreed to abide by our posting standards. This includes not forwarding or copying PSP posts without the permission of the people who wrote them. If you want to use any of the messages that have been posted so far in this thread, or any that you get in response to a journalist request, make sure you get the explicit permission of the posters before quoting them.”
End Message ================================
As of today the poster has not chosen to repost her revised message through our journalist request policy. Instead, the poster chose to reproduce messages from PSP members to a blog . As such she has violated the agreement she signed onto when joining PSP – to respect the privacy of the list and not forward or post messages (even private messages) to blogs without the permission of the people who wrote the message.
Park Slope Parents attempts in all ways possible to provide a safe space to talk about parenting issues and feels strongly that our members’ posts are not to be fodder for blogs. She is therefore no longer a member of our list.
For your information we are including links to both our
Joining Agreement <http://tinyurl.com/yhn7ryv>
and
Journalist Request Policy <http://tinyurl.com/yjhyttb>