How I got sacked from the Cambridge Tab…
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A humorous tale of social media and sharp practice in student journalism.
On Monday I was unceremoniously fired from my position as a columnist at the Cambridge Tab, and it was quite possibly the funniest thing that has ever happened to me. But to understand why, I first have to tell you a story:
Back in the halcyon days of a week ago, I was the apple of the editor’s eye. I’d been writing satirical columns for four weeks and they’d been amongst the most read and commented articles on the site; the national Tab even re-posted one because they felt I had ‘captured the zeitgeist’. The idea of sacking someone producing all some of their best output for free must have seemed absurd back in those days.
But then, on the other side of the world in Hong Kong, a previously unknown man called Rurik Jutting was arrested on the suspicion of the murder of two women. It transpired that Jutting had attended Cambridge and, in fact, the same college as me: Peterhouse. Being a comedian, and not at all interested in tabloid news journalism, this development held no interest for me beyond an initial five minutes of revulsion and curiosity. Unfortunately for me, it was at this point that Cambridge student journalism lost its collective shit.
On Sunday, Peterhouse was on physical lockdown against the hordes of professional and student journalists battering down the gates in hope of an inane quote about how someone thought Jutting ‘always seemed a bit weird’. Then someone at the Cambridge Tab, whom we’ll call ‘Deputy Gimp’ for the sake of anonymity, had the brain wave that I was at Peterhouse and hence could get them access to the treasure trove of uninformative quotes that their story so desperately needed.
That evening, Deputy Gimp asked me for information and I dutifully asked a few alumni from the era whether they wanted to talk to the Tab about it. By Monday morning they had informed me that they very much did not want to talk to the Tab about it, since they knew next to nothing about Rurik Jutting and had little interest in sensationalist gossip about a serious on-going murder investigation. I politely informed Deputy Gimp that this was the case at around 10am.
In a side plot to this, I had gotten very drunk on Sunday night with my friend Rob and we were by this stage incredibly hungover. At around 10.30am he called me and asked me to come over to see if I could help him find his pillow case, which he had somehow lost when he arrived home at 3am. So I went round there and we laid on his bed feeling unwell and attempting to reconstruct what he had done the previous evening.
I then began receiving messages from Deputy Gimp, initially pleading for info and then trying to push me to ‘persuade’ said alumni to give quotes on the basis that it was ‘important’. After several minutes of this, I reassured Deputy Gimp that it was in fact not important and that, however important it may seem to her, that certainly would not persuade these people to give any quotes, nor would it persuade me to harangue them. On receiving further messages and concluding that we could not reason our way out of this, we decided to engage in some good natured winding-up and said we would help if she brought us some Big Macs in bed and found Rob’s pillow case. We received no reply to our offer.
Around five minutes after this conversation ended, someone from the National Tab, whom we’ll call National Gimp, rang me up. National Gimp wanted some quotes, and he wanted them now. We put him on speaker-phone.
His voice dripping with all the false-charm of a lizard in a nappy, National Gimp, mistaking me for someone with an interest in cheap journalistic point-scoring, assured me that it was of the utmost importance that he got his quotes because I was ‘sitting on the most important story in ages’. We then informed him that we were not sitting on an important story, but in fact a sum total of zero inane quotes about a story which had already been broken by just about every paper from London to the Amazon rainforest.
National Gimp didn’t like that one bit. He then began pressuring me to ring round these people I knew and ‘persuade’ them to give me quotes (the word ‘persuade’ was being bandied around a lot by people who were very bad at doing it themselves). Around this time, we, in our hungover state, began to tire of National Gimp’s badgering tone, and realised that he could only have been given my number by Deputy Gimp. We decided that a sensible course of action would be some light mockery.
Hence, we informed National Gimp that we had already told Deputy Gimp that we would be doing no such thing unless our stated demands were met. Here is an approximation of the conversation which followed:
NG: “What demands?”
Me: “Two Big Macs delivered here within half an hour and the safe return of Rob’s missing pillow case.”
NG: “What pillow case?”
Me: “He lost it last night, he’s quite upset about the whole thing.”
NG: “Stop being stupid. When can you have me these quotes?”
Me: “Around the same time we get two Big Macs and the pillow case.”
NG: “…”
Rob: “Don’t just go out and buy a pillow case either, I want my pillow case and I’ll know if you try and give me a different one.”
*NG hangs up*
Having successfully beaten National Gimp at his own game in just over ten minutes, we went to college lunch and had a laugh about it all — assuming that both National Gimp and Deputy Gimp would come to see the funny side of it all by the evening.
After lunch, I went to sleep off the remainder of my hangover, but first shared this amusing story about the Big Macs and the pillow case on facebook and Twitter. By the time I got up forty-five minutes later the ‘let’s all just laugh this off as a harmless joke’ horse had kicked down the stable door, bolted and shat on any prospect of a sensible outcome.
I first checked Twitter, and discovered that, far from seeing the funny side of it, National Gimp had decided to fire me from my unpaid position over social media, despite not actually being someone I reported to.
It seemed that, whilst National Gimp was happy to find out my phone number and then harass me for quotes which I’d stated I couldn’t give, he felt that Rob and I teasing him during said phone call was firmly over the line.
I then checked facebook and it became apparent that rather a lot of people had seen the funny side of this, but that none of these people were on the Tab editorial team.
Aside from many amused and outraged comments from my facebook friends, I happened across this comment from Deputy Gimp.
As we can see, Deputy Gimp was not only outraged, but was in fact, on the basis that around fifty people had already found it very funny, attempting to deny that the incident was at all funny. In order to complement this unusual gambit, she decided to remind me that I had been sacked from my position as a columnist and would no longer be allowed to do work for Deputy Gimp for free. Naturally I was extremely upset.
With various people requesting more information about whether I had actually been sacked and why, I then posted another comment clarifying that National Gimp (a grown-ass man whom the Tab pay actual money) had sacked me via Twitter, ostensibly because it had hurt his feelings when I had teased him on the phone while he tried to push me into getting him quotes.
At this juncture, the editor of the Cambridge Tab, whom we’ll call ‘Gimp-in-Chief’, felt the need to to assert his own authority by claiming that, much like Deputy Gimp and National Gimp, he also did not find this funny.
Gimp-in-Chief’s key points seemed to be as follows:
1. It had been Gimp-in-Chief who had sacked me, not National Gimp.
2. My behaviour had been ‘needlessly rude and uncooperative’.
3. He is a student volunteer and therefore beyond reproach.
Unfortunately for Gimp-in-Chief, three things were already apparent to more or less everyone apart from himself:
Firstly, that since National Gimp was not only Gimp-in-Chief’s boss, but also the one who had taken offence to being mocked and complained to Gimp-in-Chief, and the one who had gloatingly informed me of my sacking via Twitter, it was, de facto, National Gimp who had sacked me, even if he had cleared it with Gimp-in-Chief.
Secondly, that my behaviour had initially been both polite and cooperative, as I’d tried to get their quotes as a favour to Deputy Gimp, despite this not being at all my remit, and then politely informed her that nobody I knew wanted to talk to the Tab about it. My behaviour had become ‘uncooperative’ when Deputy Gimp attempted to force the issue once I’d stated that I couldn’t help any further, and then ‘rude’ when she set National Gimp on me like some sort of enforcer for low-rent student journalism. We weren’t even actually rude to National Gimp, we just made some unusual requests which he refused to meet. I also resent the implication that it is somehow the responsibility of a satirical weekly columnist to help the news department with their dodgy-tabloid dirt-digging.
Thirdly, that Gimp-in-Chief does not volunteer to edit the Tab out of anything other than self-interest and career advancement. He’s presiding over the producing of tittle-tattle gossip articles about Cambridge University for the most part, not pulling burning orphans out of quicksand for ten hours a day.
From there on in, Gimp-in-Chief and Deputy Gimp gave up on attempting to disagree with the now close to a hundred people who found this funny and fell as silent as National Gimp had after his first tweet. At this point, with the arguing apparently over, the comments started to become more facetious.
However, whilst I primarily view this as a very amusing incident, I think there is also a point to be made here about student journalism disappearing up its own arse.
One friend of mine posted this comment, which I feel sums up the issue here: that jumped-up student journos are chasing their tails trying to report a student side to a story that simply doesn’t exist.
Deputy Gimp kept trying to impress upon me the importance of the ‘Cambridge angle’ that the Tab had on this story. By which she meant, the ‘Cambrige angle’ that she wanted me to get for her, on a story about the vile murders of two women in Hong Kong, by a man who had coincidentally attended Cambridge almost ten years previously.
The whole thing stinks of needless sensationalism and self-obsessed small-mindedness which, if anything, detracts from the horror of the crime visited upon two innocent women on the other side of the world and the important discussions surrounding violence against women which we should be having.
Forgive me if my analysis seems overly pedestrian, but I suspect that Jutting’s studying History at Peterhouse and his alleged murdering of two women almost a decade later, are unrelated. Anyone who knew Jutting at Peterhouse, even if they wanted to talk about it, could not possibly truthfully claim to have any insight into his crime on the basis of having known him as a student years before. Would there be any such interest if he had attended Nottingham or Leeds instead of Oxbridge?
So what exactly have the Tab achieved this week?
Well, the Cambridge Tab, with the aid of the National Tab, have needlessly antagonised and then fired their most popular columnist of the term, and the editorial teams of both papers have also managed to look fairly stupid in the process.
The Cambridge Tab now have four weekly columns to produce from nowhere, meanwhile being sacked from a job I was doing unpaid just for the exposure has, er, gained me a lot of exposure. To quote a friend of mine who rang me as this all unfolded: “I’ve never seen anyone lose so much face so quickly as the Tab did in one hour this afternoon.”
Rob’s pillow case remains at large, as does the Tab’s dignity.
Thanks for reading.
Any queries can be directed to me at:
Twitter: @Milo_Edwards
Email: milo.edwards@cantab.net
