Revenge of the news control freaks

Lots of opinions kickin' around the blogosphere -- as well as mailing lists -- about the Hartford Courant's insistence that one of its editorial staffers pull the plug on his independent weblog.

Here's an email I just sent to the online-news list:

Let's summarize events to date, shall we?

The travel editor of the Hartford Courant decides to begin writing an independent weblog. He does so on his own time. He uses not a scintilla of the Courant's resources to do so. He does not discuss the Courant or his job at the newspaper in his weblog. He does not leverage his association with the Courant in his blog. He is not freelancing for a competing publication, does not make a penny from his weblog, and in no way competes online with the Courant.

Despite all of the above, the editor of the Courant (in a decision criticized privately by the Courant's newsroom staffers) decides to order the weblog killed because a weblog by a newsroom staffer creates "a parallel journalistic universe" (huh?) "without any editing oversight by the Courant." (Ah! the control freak rationale!) Said Courant editor Brian Toolan, "There are 325 other people here who create similar (Web sites) for themselves."

The horror! The infamy! Just think of it: journalists with opinions! Communicating online with other people like ... like regular human beings!

Dan Gillmor and I often appear at new media conferences where someone in the audience asks, Why don't more journalists have their own weblogs? Well, here's your answer. Toolan and his merry band of fellow control freaks believe that newsroom employees are chattel. Goodness, we can't have journalists expressing views online because then someone somewhere might accuse him or her of not being wholly chaste, objective, devoid of opinions. Well, guess what, friends? Reporters and editors have opinions. They'll always have opinions. Our backgrounds, our views, our intellectual baggage all color our reportage. At the end of the day, what counts is whether our reporting is fair and balanced.

I'll grant that this is a dicey area, one strewn with certain risks for an established media company. Steve Outing, among others, has written about the issues associated with allowing newsroom staffers to maintain weblogs.

I'll also grant that news organizations have a legitimate interest in preventing its news staffers from becoming actively involved in partisan politics or engaging in journalistic conflicts of interest. In that same spirit, you don't write about the subjects of your reportage in your weblog. You don't slam your employer. Those are just common-sense rules that every journalist who maintains a weblog adheres to.

But blogger Denis Horgan did not step over that line. His offense was just *having* a blog.

How far should the Toolan proposition extend? Or, as Eric Meyer put it, how should newspaper codes apply to personal weblogs? "[T]hese codes typically forbid employees to accept
unauthorized freelance assignments, to inject themselves into public debate and to leverage their status as an employee into some outside venture. Any of these three would doubtlessly block an employee from creating a Web log without authorization."

Horgan was not freelancing, so that issue is not applicable here. He was not leveraging his status as an employee into some outside venture, so that doesn't apply as well. (To argue otherwise is to suggest that people would read Horgan's blog only by virtue of his ties to the Courant, when almost none of us knew of such a relationship -- in any event, being a newspaper journalist wins you few kudos in the blogosphere. Such an assumption also presupposes that Horgan's status as a journalist flows solely from his employment with the Courant. Odd, how newspaper execs believe staffers draw their credibility from the paper rather than the reverse.)

Horgan is, however, clearly injecting himself into public debate, on subjects such as the Iraq war and same-sex unions and the Boston Red Sox. So here is where the friction lies.

Under such a curious formulation of newsroom etiquette -- call it the Virginal Journalists Theory (at all costs, newsroom employees must be unsoiled by the tawdriness of public debate) -- where does a controlling newsroom manager draw the line? Ah, things get sticky pretty quickly. Should journalists be forbidden from voting in elections or from registering with a political party (talk about injecting themselves into public debate!). Should they be banned from expressing any opinion on a public website or bulletin board? Should they be penalized for attending or speaking at a city council meeting on a subject unrelated to their beat? Should keeping a diary or journal be verboten if one shows it to one's friends?

Journalist bloggers know that their views, their opinions, the expertise they've built up over a career -- this is what carries weight in the blogosphere. Not hewing to the fiction of being a blank slate.

One solution to this sorry affair would have been to bring Horgan's weblog under the paper's wing. Newspapers continue to miss an opportunity by neglecting to embrace weblogs, which create the opportunity to build a trusting, convivial relationship with the paper's readers and often provide the side bonus of story tips and overlooked angles. Alas, the newspapers' impulse to control is much greater than the impulse to foster a genuine dialogue with readers. ...

Fortunately, it appears that Horgan may be considering pursuing his legal options. Connecticut is the rare state in that its general statutes (ß31-51q) prevent any employer from disciplining an employee for the exercise of First Amendment rights. Shocking as it may seem, a newsroom employee just may enjoy the same First Amendment rights as a waitress, custodian or business executive. At least in Connecticut.

Members of this list often wonder why fewer people trust the news media these days. They wonder why more and more talented journalists are leaving newsrooms. Some of the answers can be gleaned from this single episode of big media hypocrisy and double standards.

OJR's Mark Glaser, incidentally, holds a different view; look for his column on this subject early this week.

Eric rants

Eric Predoehl, a man sometimes called Elvis Presley, has begun a blog, EP-Rants!, about politics, technology, pop culture and the entertainment industry. Looks promising.

Online Anonymity Under Fire

Katie Dean has a story in Wired News on Verizon's courtroom loss to keep an ISP customer's identity out of the music industry's hands, a decision that will make it harder for people to stay anonymous online, privacy advocates say.

Student insult website closed

LA Times: Schoolscandals.com, a website that published crude and malicious rumors about Southern California middle and high school students, was shut down Thursday after a public outcry from parents and students.

Webbys call off live show

You know the dot-com crash has reached its abyss when the Webby Awards calls it quits. The sixth annual show will be held virtually, but the organizers have called off the live event in San Francisco on June 5, because of "the lousy economy, and now, travel fears related to war and SARS."

Borderline plagiarism at the Times

Interesting Editor's Note in the Sunday New York Times Sports section, documenting a case of borderline plagiarism:

A Sports of The Times column on Feb. 12 discussed college coaches who have spoken out against the death penalty, in particular Dean Smith, former basketball coach at the University of North Carolina.

The column should have acknowledged that a central quotation from the coach appeared three days earlier in an article by Bonnie DeSimone of The Chicago Tribune and that several other passages closely reflected her words.

In a first draft, the Times column credited Ms. DeSimone for an anecdote in which Mr. Smith told a former governor of North Carolina, "The death penalty makes us all murderers."

The columnist, Ira Berkow, was told by his editors that a quotation so harsh should rightly be verified firsthand, so he telephoned Mr. Smith, who recounted the scene to him. Editors then deleted the attribution to Ms. DeSimone's article, though Times policy ordinarily calls for crediting news that originates exclusively elsewhere. (Coach Smith's activism had been reported in North Carolina publications, but not in detail comparable to The Tribune's.) The Times column included two passages that were similar in language and concept to those in The Tribune:

The Tribune: "Sports figures, while often active in charitable causes, generally avoid taking sides in divisive, emotional national debates such as the one concerning the death penalty. Coaches for major Division I programs, as Smith was, recruit from a wide swath of the population and have an interest in not alienating people."

The Times: "Sports figures are often reluctant, at best, to go public with potentially divisive national issues, even when the issue is a matter of life and death. . . . For active coaches, coming forward on controversial issues could hamper recruiting if you take a side that may alienate, say, the family of a prospective point guard."

The Tribune: "Smith will not discuss whether he counseled his most famous protÈgÈ, Michael Jordan, during the 1996 trial of the two men who murdered Jordan's father three years before. The Jordan family never made its feelings known regarding punishment, according to Robeson County District Attorney Johnson Britt."

The Times: "Is it possible that Smith, meanwhile, had some influence over the decision of Michael Jordan and his family not to push for the death penalty for the two men who randomly murdered Jordan's father in 1996? Possibly. Smith said that he never spoke to Jordan about it."

The Times column also included this quotation from Mr. Smith about his religious views: "I do not condone any violence against any of God's children, and that is why I am opposed to the death penalty." Though Mr. Smith discussed those views in his Times interview, the exact quotation was taken from his autobiography, "A Coach's Life," and should have been attributed.

Apple's pay music service

NY Times: Apple Computer plans on Monday to introduce a digital music service, according to industry analysts. It is a move that thrusts the company into the middle of a contentious and technologically challenging area of digital commerce.