'PaidPost' and 'FirstFart'? Dear readers, we love you too

Our first year has been marked by lots of love from our readers out there. Love, of course, is a many splendoured thing and some of our fond followers showered us with what we’d like to fondly call “tough love”. We have been called FirstFart and Paidpost. If we got Rs 100 for every time we were called “paid journalists” we could have all retired to the Bahamas by now. Anyway everyone knows our content is ghost written by all kinds of luminaries from Digvijay Singh to Saif Ali Khan to even some staffer of Dharma Productions. Shah Rukh Khan might be at loggerheads with Aamir Khan, Rahul Gandhi might be head butting Narendra Modi but Firstpost, going by our commenters, manages to be on all their pay rolls at some point or the other. Someone should give just us an award for fostering National Unity. [caption id=“attachment_302783” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“We have been the recipients of what we fondly call tough love. Reuters”] [/caption] Over the year we have found that some of our readers know more about the inner workings of the Firstpost newsroom than we do. They have happily changed the gender of our writers for us. They have discovered hidden agendas and devious subplots and more insidious traffic getting schemes than we could ever dream up. Other writers just have double standards. Thanks to our eagle-eyed readers we probably have octuple standards by now. But we do appreciate the time everyone takes to talk to us. People have generously spent gobs of time composing long missives to tell us why they just wasted three minutes reading a story. We’ve gotten history lessons, conspiracy lessons and choice gaali lessons as well. At times our readers have channeled their inner two year olds and threatened to leave us. But here we all are one year later. Everyone likes praise but we have been most impressed is how creative and colourful our readers can get while panning us. Put aside the bouquets. Here’s a collection of the best of the brickbats that Firstpost got in its first year: * Bye Bye First Post. A rare breath of fresh air just turned into a loud smelly fart! * you are an ignoramus. * We readers know, if Kiran Bedi cheats, the headline will read “Kiran Bedi cheats” – and there’s nothing you can do about it and RahulG caught at Boston airport will be consigned to the sub-editor’s dustbin !!!! We know why!!! * Journalists trying hard to fool the English speaking audience is utter stupid behavior!!! * Et tu FirstPost! Thought, this was a site with a difference, thanks for clarifying! * just when i made firstpost my homepage..they had to publish this fancy article..changing back my homepage to my old newspaper site..alas all good things do not last forever * Appalled (and saddened) to see firstpost going down the TOI / NDTV / CNN IBN way. * Is this Firstpost or PaidPost?