John Toner.The journalist becomes the story

Yesterday evening 16 July, I was sickened to read a tweet from John Toner, journalist with the Haringey Independent, who tweeted his letter of resignation. Please read it for yourself here.

Briefly, John left the job after his boss at Newsquest - who publish the Independent - objected to him taking time off to accompany his terminally ill grandmother to hospital.

Like several hundred others I was shocked by this. And I began retweeting (forwarding) his letter to my contacts, asking them to consider sending it on.  Many other people had the same thought and by midnight when I went to bed over a thousand people had retweeted his letter and hundreds had favourited the original tweet, sending messages of support and including John's boss in the circulation.

This morning, the favourites had topped 800 and the retweets were approaching 1500. The tweeted messages of support included one from the journalist Mira Bar-Hillel who commented: "worked all over Fleet Sreet for 35 yrs but this takes the biscuit".

So far I've seen one comment which thought John should not be "trashing"  his ex-employer on social media.

Several people pointed out that at round the same time, John's boss had been tweeting about his vacuum cleaner. And seemed more worried about cleaning his carpets than losing a good journalist.