Spam, insomnia and a falling giant.

On Monday 4th of July I heard the solicitor of the Dowler family, Mark Lewis, say that he had been told by police that while Milly was missing Glen Mulcaire listened to the voice mails of Milly’s phone. I was driving home from work at the time and while I found this sickening, I wasn’t particularly surprised. Having two children of my own I shared the outrage that many people were feeling but couldn’t begin to image how the Dowler family would have taken this horrendous news.

While I’m not a media addict I do try to keep an eye what’s happening and am curious about the truth behind the often spun headlines. I was aware of quite lot of  the previous allegations and investigations that had surrounded the News of the World and realised that this would move many people that had previously been ambivalent about the affair.

I’ve been a twitter user for a while but only really tried to keep track of things on there over the last few months. I’ve slowly built up the list of people that I follow and, though I probably have a slight left leaning bias, seem to get an interesting and wide range of views in my timeline. I didn’t really start to catch up on things properly until later that evening and by then it was obvious that most people were incandescent about the allegations. I had a look at a few on-line news reports too and all were in a similar vein.

I went to bed around 11pm but found myself restless and unable to drift off so I began reading twitter again. Andy Dawson, who goes by @profanityswan (amongst others) on twitter was asking users to copy and paste a tweet asking companies advertising with the  News of the World to reconsider {I later learned that Andy had picked up on this from another twitter user, Melissa Harrison – @the_z_factor}. I asked Andy a couple of questions about the wording of the messages but it seemed to me that if you wanted to strike home then combining this with emails to senior executives could be very effective.

A spreadsheet seemed to be the ideal way to manage this. Those interested in getting their point across could download the sheet and, if they were so inclined, mail-merge it to send many individual emails. At the time I only had around 60 followers on twitter but Andy agreed to share the sheet for me. I’d intended to do some research  but by the time I’d left my bed and reached my office pc Andy had emailed a list of the advertisers in the previous Sunday’s News of the World. He also pointed out where I could find some  email addresses for these companies’ executives.

It didn’t take long for me to get a spreadsheet together and Andy kindly arranged hosting for it. We both let people know about the sheet and I went back to bed again after I had sent my own emails. At 5am I woke up from a fretful sleep and decided that setting up my own webpage might reach more people. Following a quick search for suitable hosts I managed to set up a very rough and ready page.

There was a short introduction and some instructions on how to mail-merge plus links to an ‘auto-tweet’ site. This brilliant idea had been set up by @thegreatgonzo (Tony Kennick) during the night. Twitter users could visit the page and automatically send messages to the companies we were targeting. It was much slicker than my own work but I hoped that they would both be useful.

It seemed like a good idea to get the word out and I sent tweets to several well known twitter users asking them to share the web address. Al Murray, Rufus Hound, Armando Ianucci plus the speakers wife, Sally Bercow all let their followers know. Shortly after Armando sent his message I received a suggestion from a twitter user that it might be useful to put the spreadsheet into Google Docs, as it would be easier to work with for non Microsoft people. This seemed like an oversight on my part and only took a few minutes to get up and running.

Things picked up during the day and my phone seemed to be binging with comments, new followers and retweets constantly. I’d made arrangements to go to the cinema with a friend and by the time I arrived I’d heard that several companies were considering their position but Ford had decided to publicly state that they were withdrawing from advertising with the News of the World. At least until and enquiry had been completed. This seemed to step things up to another gear and shortly after I received a message from the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones to get in touch. As my twitter name is @eroticpuffin many of Rory’s followers seemed to be quite amused!

I gave Rory my telephone number and he called while I was in the queue for blue slush puppy. He asked me something about my motivation and what I felt about the contribution of social networking to Ford’s decision. He also asked me about what I had written on my web page. As there had been no official confirmation that the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone had taken place I was careful to advise people to stick to the facts and also asked them to be courteous. Rory remarked on this as many people had let their feelings show on their twitter messages during the day.

During my cinema visit I continued to receive emails and messages and the number of people following the @eroticpuffin twitter account had doubled in a few hours.

Before I went to bed I updated my webpage, sent more messages asking for people to spread the word and tweaked the spreadsheet. There were more messages on waking and I rose early again to catch up before heading off to work. By the time I got home more companies had withdrawn their advertising support. During the day we’d been contacted by @psbook who were very sensibly providing a running commentary of the advertisers situation. This was an incredibly useful service and they also produced a Google Doc that had more information about contacting the advertisers.

Rory had written a blog post on the BBC News site about what we were doing  and this generated more interest still. I wasn’t able to track visitors on my rather crude website but the Google Doc was slowing down and rarely had fewer than 50 visitors at any one time. Graham Linehan agreed to share the web address and kept the new visitors coming.

There was a meeting I had to attend in the early evening and as it was obvious that my spreadsheet would need updating, Melissa recruited some excellent fellows to help.

There’d been a bit of a miscommunication between helpers and as I sat to down to update my site I had new spreadsheets from @harry_slater, @The_Istanbull and @CaptainPugwalsh. I used Harry’s sheet to update the Google Doc and made the others available to download. Harry volunteered to merge them in the morning.

By early Thursday there seemed to be a palpable frenzy about the story involving the advertisers. Harry worked very hard to make the merged spreadsheet as up to date as possible. He produced a document far more comprehensive that my original and much better presented.

By the time I received  I’d finished work I’d received Harry’s new spreadsheet so I updated the site and let as many twitter users as possible know about it. The news regarding the increasing number of advertisers was coming ever faster and in my frenzy I managed to block my twitter account, which I didn’t know was possible. Hundreds of messages were sent and I apologies if you were a recipient of my spam. As I was still able to send direct messages the band of hastily thrown together campaigners continued to get the word out.

Thursdays are usually dinner at my Mum’s with the kids and as I arrived I received messages, confirmed shortly after by a radio report, that all advertising would be withdrawn from Sunday’s News of the World. There’d also been a radio commentary from Robert Peston on 5 Live where he said that the brand may be so damaged that it might have to close. This seemed incredible but I began to think of the repercussions if such a far-fetched thing occurred.

Less than an hour after hearing Peston suggest the possibility it was announced that News International had decided to close the News of the World. Watching BBC News 24 I was as agog as the presenters who were clearly not expecting such a stunning manoeuvre. We had never discussed an ultimate aim, we hadn’t really discussed strategy or even had a full group discussion. There had been several ideas that we’d all worked on. Either individually or in small groups. Closing the paper had seemed impossible, to me at least, and I had just wanted to make a statement about how deplorable their conduct had been.

I’ll write later, if anyone cares to hear, about the things I learned from this experience and what I think the longer term effects might be. In amongst our flurry of activity there’d been panicked position changing statements from politicians and further horrendous allegations about phone hacking. I’ll conclude by saying that I don’t believe that we closed a newspaper but we did help a great many people make a statement about what they would accept from publishers and journalists.

I’ve written this over a week after these events took place. I have tried hard to recollect them in the order and apologise if there are any inaccuracies. There are also many people that helped by spreading news of what what we were doing, offered encouragement and advice or were otherwise just brilliant. I’d particularly like to mention @msjenniferjames and @paolability but there were many others and I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to include everyone that contributed in the maelstrom.