Times Cheltnam Twitter Competition

Update! Those wonderful, delightful, considerate, and fragrant smelling people at The Times have corrected their mistake. All is well with the world. This blog post is staying merely for #NaBloPoMo.

Times Books

@timescheltenham

Replying to @edent@edent @nsmale Huge apologies - we misattributed one of our runners-up. The brilliant Disney story is by @edent. Completely our fault! #TCTC

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Rupert Murdoch and John Humphrys ⁠owe me £20! In protest, I'm going to quit listening to the Today programme until they pay up and apologise.

The Times has been running a literary competition:

Times Books

@timescheltenham

Calling all miniatuarists! Write a short and sweet one-tweet story to enter the Times Cheltenham Twitter Competition. Must end with #TCTC.

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Well, I like books, I like twitter, so I thought I'd enter with this little effort.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Once upon a time there was a beautiful Princess. Something morally relevant happened. Then Disney fucked it up to sell toys. The End #TCTC

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Pretty good, huh? Ten minutes later, Nathan Smale re-posted (not retweeted) my story.

Nathan Smale 🇦🇺🇵🇭🇦🇺🇵🇭 🐉 $MON

@nsmale

Once upon a time there was a beautiful Princess. Something morally relevant happened. Then Disney fucked it up to sell toys. The End #TCTC

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To his credit, my story was a full 140 characters and he quickly followed it up with

Nathan Smale 🇦🇺🇵🇭🇦🇺🇵🇭 🐉 $MON

@nsmale

Last post was a RT of @edent

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No big deal, right? The Times published my story as one of their "Best Entries So Far".

I was pretty happy and quietly confident that the £140 was mine. Well, my tweet won a runner-up prize! But The Times credited it to @nsmale - despite earlier crediting it to me!

Nathan Smale is, of course, blameless in all this. To his good credit he hasn't tried to snaffle my prize and has alerted The Times to their egregious mistake.

I guess it goes to show that the new Retweet Functionality is much needed.

I've tweeted and called The Times and I'll post any follow-up here.