Facebook Firings !!

Beware of Facebook!

That’s the message from a string of cases in North America and Europe, where people have been sacked for posting derogatory comments about colleagues or their employers on blogs or social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo. There’s even a new word to describe this phenomenon: getting dooced. This was coined by blogger Heather B. Armstrong, after she was fired from her Web design job for writing about work and colleagues on her blog, Dooce.com.

A good example comes from Britain, where an employee was fired from his supermarket job at Waitrose after writing “F*** the Partnership,” referring to the John Lewis Partnership which owns the supermarket chain, on Facebook. He thought his views were only visible to his online friends, but a colleague printed off the remark and showed it to his boss, who fired him on the spot.

“At the end of the day what I wrote was private,” he said. “You would never get sacked for saying something like that in the pub. I was sacked from Waitrose for something I said on Facebook in my own time. The bosses only saw it because one of my colleagues grassed me up. They printed out a copy of the Facebook page to use as evidence against me. It is an infringement of my privacy.”

It seems strange that he would complain about privacy having just posted on a site that hundreds of millions of people use every day. This demonstrates one of the issues thrown up by social networking sites: people think they are using them for non-work related purposes, but they are so popular that negative comments do come to employers’ attention.

The courts overseas have upheld sackings for derogatory postings. In a recent example from Canada , an administrative employee in the Alberta Public Service was dismissed when the employer discovered that her blog contained unflattering comments about a number of her co-workers and management, referring to them as “imbeciles”, “idiot savants” and “lunatic-in-charge”. After an investigation, she was interviewed about her blog. Perceiving her as largely unrepentant, the employer terminated her employment. The arbitration board deciding the case said that while she had a right to create personal blogs and hold opinions about colleagues, publicly displaying those can have consequences for the employment relationship, and decided that the dismissal was justified.

Is anyone aware of an employee in New Zealand being sacked for derogatory postings? So far the issue doesn’t seem to have got to the Employment Relations Authority, but it’s only a matter of time.

Greg Cain

Greg Cain is an employment lawyer at Minter Ellison Rudd Watts.

Scott Rosenberg Traces the Blogosphere’s Origins

Media Shift

Scott Rosenberg

But Scott Rosenberg wasn’t convinced. A co-founder of Salon.com and former technology editor for that site, Rosenberg knew that several online destinations that preceded Barger’s site still met the technical definition of a blog — a website that publishes updates in reverse chronological order — including Dave Winer’s Scripting News and Ric Ford’s Macintouch. By the time that Journal article was published, Rosenberg had already been kicking around the idea of writing a book on the history of blogs for some time.

“I was on tour for my first book, Dreaming In Code, in 2007,” he told me recently. “I was out in Portland and I was with Matt Haughey, the guy who started Metafilter and an early blogger himself…He’s a smart guy full of interesting ideas and he just offhandedly said that nobody has really written the history of blogging. Having just written one ambitious and difficult book, I said, ‘Yeah, nobody has, and nobody will.’”

Famous last words. And the Wall Street Journal article only stoked the flames; Rosenberg soon became even more convinced that such an historical account was necessary, both for the tech-savvy community and the laymen who only stumble across oblique references to blogs in more mainstream news outlets. He finally approached his agent with the idea in late 2007, half expecting it to be shot down.

“When I started blogging at Salon in 2002, I thought, ‘We’re too late for this blogging thing, we missed the boat.’ I thought that blogging had happened already,” he explained. “For this book, one of my concerns was that it might be difficult to sell because blogging history is ancient history in [Silicon] Valley. And here in the Bay Area, blogging is certainly an important thing, but it has been partially eclipsed by social media. So I was a little worried how this would fly.”

But his agent went for it, and he spent the next several months writing a proposal for the book, fleshing out the direction he wanted to take and how he would conduct research. His agent approached Crown, the publisher of his first book, and a few days before Christmas 2007 the company officially made an offer on the project.

The Evolution of Blogging

Speaking with Rosenberg about his book, I felt like we were discussing evolutionary biology. Rosenberg’s research goes beyond highlighting the earliest blogs, and slowly pieces its way through the primordial ooze of the Internet, tracing a line of websites in the early 1990s that first began taking on blog-like characteristics.

“Most of the people I’ve talked to, I’ve asked who had inspired them,” he said. “Who were you reading when you decided to start blogging? To a certain point that becomes a harder and harder thing the further back you go. For instance, Justin Hall started his site in January 1994, before most of us had heard of the web. I asked him, ‘Well, you’re one of the first bloggers, was there anyone out there who you were getting inspiration from?’ And he pointed me to this other guy named Ranjit Bhatnagar who was keeping a site at moonmilk.com in 1993. And, sure enough, it was a reverse chronological list of stuff he found on the web.”

A view of moonmilk.com from the early ’90s

As with most web innovations, the blogosphere moved forward in fits and starts before exploding across the Net, creating a quick succession of firsts — the first person to get fired because of something written on a blog; the first first blog to receive a major journalism award, etc. Rosenberg sees it as his job to examine the myriad turning points in the medium, exploring how they affected the practice of blogging and led to further innovations in the field.

To do this, he interviewed over 100 bloggers, traveling to blog conferences and other online media meet-ups. Rosenberg uses these first-person accounts to detail how the bloggers pioneered new methodologies of online journalism and how they handled the unforeseen hurdles that often sprouted up like weeds. As blogging became more widespread, practitioners often faced the same ethical and practical scenarios that have plagued mainstream journalists for years.

H2.Recognition as a Legit News Source

While discussing pivotal breakthrough moments in blogging history, our conversation eventually turned to Joshua Marshall, founder of liberal political website TalkingPointsMemo. Marshall recently won a George Polk Award for his reporting on the firing of several U.S. attorneys — he is the first blogger to have won the award. Marshall first reached prominence several years ago after exposing controversial statements made by then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott praising Strom Thurmond’s racial segregation platform. Before speaking to Rosenberg, I had assumed — incorrectly — that TalkingPointsMemo first broke that story.

“I should say to begin with that this is one of the valuable things for me to do,” Rosenberg told me. “You go dig into these stories like the Trent Lott story, which I go into great detail in the book. It turns out to be really complicated. Josh is credited, and deservedly so, for playing a very important part in that story. But he didn’t break the story.

“It was more like ABC News had actually reported on the story, but then it just disappeared and dropped off the media map. And then Josh Marshall, with the help of some other bloggers, started beating the drum on it and said, ‘Wait a minute, this really is a story.’ He started digging up tidbits to show that what Lott had said was actually something that he had been saying over and over through the years; it wasn’t this bizarre slip. He put that together, and then five or six days later, the Big Media picks it up again, and it becomes a story.”

This incident highlights the often-contentious relationship that has bubbled up between the mainstream media and the blogosphere, one in which words like “curmudgeons” and “amateurs” are bandied about in haphazard jabs as bloggers clamor for legitimacy in the 24-hour news cycle. Several traditional journalists had mocked Marshall, for instance, when he first began reporting on the U.S. attorney firings, only to later apologize when the controversy ended up being newsworthy.

The Original Pioneers

When it comes to the history of blogging, few are more knowledgeable than Rebecca Blood, the first person to attempt to write a comprehensive article on the subject. Her essay, “Weblogs: a history and perspective,” approaches the issue from the point of view of an insider who has been immersed in the blogosphere since almost the beginning.

Rebecca Blood

Written and published in 2000, the essay begins by listing a number of bloggers who emerged in the late 1990s. This was before the advent of Web 2.0. and the ready availability of free blogging software, meaning that most of these early web writers had to create their sites from scratch.

“I was one of the original bandwagon jumpers,” Blood told me. “People at this point consider me to be one of the original bloggers, but from my perspective I came late to the party. The original blogs started in 1997 and that’s when I became an avid reader. At that time, you could read all of them every day; there were just a handful.”

She described this first group as a close-knit band of web enthusiasts, a herd of filters whose sole focus was to find interesting pages online and then post links to them. It was in this Wild West of the web — when the tech bubble was quickly approaching the popping point — that three main factions emerged, each scrambling to gain legitimacy.

Besides bloggers, “There were two other groups of people at the time who were producing online work,” Blood said. “There were the journalers and the zinesters; both preceded the weblogs, really.”

I pointed out that online journalers were usually considered bloggers, to which she refuted, “They weren’t blogs; they were a completely separate community. They had a different form where they would put one entry on a page and then you’d have to click on a link to go to the next entry. It was as if they had transferred a print journal to the web.”

She explained that it was often the zinesters, who wrote for and published online magazines, called ezines, who looked down upon the early bloggers. Their argument — that they spent hours crafting publishable prose while the bloggers merely linked to the content of others — is still repeated today by mainstream media critics.

“But the bloggers, those who were doing it, really did think what we were doing was important,” Blood said. “We were filtering the web for people. We were pointing to things we thought were interesting. It’s kind of ironic, given that there are so many weblogs now. When we started, we were creating signal to noise — we were trying to pull out the good stuff on the web. But now, of course, there are so many weblogs that they just contribute to the noise. It’s impossible to even read all the good ones in a day much less read all of them.”

Most early bloggers, including Blood, hadn’t expected how widespread this noise would become — or rather, how many millions of blogs would sprout up after free software became widely available. Though Blood predicted that the medium would gain in legitimacy and popularity, she thought these gains would only be reflected in growing readership.

“I stopped making these predictions years ago when all my predictions were wrong,” she told me. “When we were doing it back then, I honestly never envisioned the expanse of the blog universe. I thought that those of us who were blogging would gain larger and larger audiences over time, until we had sort of a mainstream-sized readership. It never occurred to me that everybody would want to blog, that instead of 150 blogs with 10,000-people sized audiences, there would be millions of blogs. That’s completely backwards of what I expected. So as much as I was a pioneer, I was still thinking in old media terms.”

Bloggers Ignorant of Their Past

I asked Rosenberg to compare his book project to Blood’s essay; in what ways would his work expand on hers? He explained that her piece was written from the perspective of someone immersed in the field, what he called “primary source material.”

“On one level, I think her account is very much of its time and place and shaped by her experience up to that point,” he said. “In fact, I interviewed her a few months ago. I sat down and talked to her about all the changes between then and now. A big difference is that my book is an attempt to write for a wide readership, just as ‘Dreaming in Code’ is an attempt to write about software development for people outside the software world…It’s a little bit of a different approach than Rebecca’s post because a lot of it centers around profiles of people whose stories represented some particular aspect of blogging, or some problem that blogging brings up.”

But though the book — tentatively titled “Say Everything” and scheduled to come out next summer — will be written to engage a non-tech savvy audience, Rosenberg hopes that it will have a certain appeal to already-converted web evangelists. These very online media enthusiasts, he has found, are often clueless as to their medium’s origins.

“Because I think that the technology industry and the web community are often a little bit ignorant of their own past,” he said. “I found this writing about software development in ‘Dreaming in Code.’ A lot of programmers are really smart people, but then a lot of them know shockingly little about their own field. It’s a cliche but a line of great merit, the one about ‘if you don’t know the mistakes of the past, you’re doomed to repeat them.’”

Given the almost daily news stories spurring heated debate over blogger ethics — Gawker’s reprinting of Sarah Palin’s hacked emails, for example — such a book could help people put today’s ecosystem of bloggers and journalists (and blogger/journalists) into a better historical context.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate blogger for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com.

Photo of Rebecca Blood by Sebastian DeLaOsa

Filed under Citizen Journalism, Weblogs

Work Blogs Take Off, and So Do the Suits

By Tresa Baldas
The National Law Journal
September 18, 2008

They’re wildly popular, yet loaded with liability.

Attorneys are cautioning employers about getting swept up in the blog craze, stressing that bloggers are creating a range of legal problems for employers.

Disgruntled workers are trashing their employers and co-workers on blogs, which is slang for Web-based personal logs. Others are posting confidential corporate information on blogs. Some are landing employers themselves in court, being sued for comments someone posted on company-sponsored blogs.

“It’s the modern-day version of the suggestion box,” management-side attorney Zachary Hummel, a partner in the New York office of Bryan Cave, said of employee blogging. “It’s growing exponentially and so more and more employers are facing the issue of how far do we let employees go before we take action.”

In many cases, Hummel said, employers are letting employees rant and rave on corporate blogs so they can monitor the workplace.

“They let it go on because it’s another means of keeping tabs on the temperature,” he said. “Some companies would be afraid of it, and others are [saying], ‘We’d rather hear the concerns and problems.’ ”

VENTING AND PROMOTION

Venting aside, blogs are also being used as company marketing tools, said Glenn Patton, partner in Atlanta-based Alston & Bird’s labor and employment practice group. Patton, who is currently working with a Fortune 50 company on a corporate blogging project, said many employers, such as Southwest Airlines and International Business Machines, are embracing employee blogging, ignoring fears of negative repercussions.

“When blogs first started, employers were implementing blanket prohibitions against employee blogging activity,” Patton said. “Today, many employers are not only permitting employee blogging, but they are actually setting up official corporate blogs and establishing guidelines to help their employees get positive messages and images about the company out on the Web.”

Even law firms are getting into the act. Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, for example, is letting several younger associates blog about their experiences as a marketing tool to reach potential recruits.

The blogs were launched during the summer, just in time for recruiting season, to give potential associates a flavor of what it’s like to work at WilmerHale.

But many blogs are causing legal problems. In the past five years, a number of lawsuits, involving defamation, retaliation and discrimination claims, have been filed against employers over comments posted on blogs.

Earlier this year, Cisco Systems and one of its lawyers, Richard Frenkel, were sued for defamation over an anonymous blog in which Frenkel allegedly accused two Texas attorneys of engaging in criminal conduct in a case against Cisco. Ward v. Cisco, No. 2007-2502 (Gregg Co., Texas, Dist. Ct.); Albritton v. Cisco, No. 2008-481-CCL2 (E.D. Texas).

In Georgia, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant who claims she was fired after she posted photos of herself in uniform on her blog sued the airline for sexual discrimination. The case was stayed last year while the airline is in bankruptcy. Simonetti v. Delta Airlines Inc., No. 5-cv-2321 (N.D. Ga. 2005).

In Colorado, a group of Quiznos Master franchisees last year sued the company for wrongful termination, claiming they were retaliated against for posting on their blog the suicide letter of a former franchisee, who attributed his suicide to troubles at work. The case settled in December. Bray v. QFA Royalties, No. 06-cv-02528-JLK-CBS (D. Del.).

Meanwhile, all this litigation hasn’t scared employers away from employee blogging, said Evans Anyanwu, a principal and Internet law attorney at Evans Anyanwu & Associates in Newark, N.J. Instead, he said, it’s pushed them to enact more robust Internet usage policies.

“Employers are indeed facing great liability risks by allowing employees to blog on the company’s behalf,” Anyanwu said. “But I think many employers are aware of the liability risks and, as such, constantly remind employees to be aware of their policies.”

Take the Cisco case, Anyanwu said. Within six months of the anonymous blogger revealing himself, and triggering a lawsuit, the company revised its Internet posting policy, mandating that all employees state that their opinions are their own, not the company’s.

“Blogging should not be prohibited,” Anyanwu said. “But only curtailed with disclaimers to safeguard employers.”

Say Cheese: 12 Photos That Should Never Have Been Posted Online

What were they thinking? These 12 folks lost jobs, reputations, or their freedom after dumb photos they put up on the Web came to light.

Dan Tynan, PC World

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Artwork: Chip Taylor

You know the old cliche, a picture is worth a thousand words? Turns out that pictures have been deeply undervalued: A single photo can cost you your reputation, your job, even your freedom–if you post it online.

Teachers, principals, firefighters, mayors, university presidents, and everyday people have all discovered the dark side of putting the wrong photos and videos on social networking sites. Sometimes they paid the price in embarrassment. An unlucky handful lost their jobs or landed in jail.

The results aren’t pretty, but they are sometimes hilarious. Here’s our dirty dozen–12 pictures their owners probably wish they could take back.

1. Hey Kevin, Tinker Bell Wants Her Outfit Back

It’s bad enough to dress up like you’re about to slip a dollar under some toothless child’s pillow. But former intern Kevin Colvin made it much worse by asking his boss at Anglo Irish Bank if he could take time off for a “family emergency in New York,” then flitting off to a Halloween party dressed like a refugee from Peter Pan. Putting the faerie pix on his Facebook profile was the finishing touch. After his boss found the pictures, he responded by attaching the photo in question and blind-copied the entire office. Colvin lost his internship and what was left of his reputation when the e-mail messages went flying across the Internet; at least he got to keep the wand.

2. Quick, Call 911–My Pants Are on Fire

Now that an ex-beauty queen is running for the VP slot, life may be easier for hot mommas who also happen to be office holders. It will be too late to help Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, though. The former mayor of Arlington, Oregon, got in hot water with her constituents after a family member posted photos to her MySpace profile showing off her, umm, political assets in the town firehouse (where she worked as an executive secretary). Amazingly, the town of 500 voted to recall her from office shortly after the photos went public. Maybe they were afraid people would start setting fires, just to see what she was wearing when she showed up.

3. Muscle Bound or Muscle Brained?

What is it about firehouses that makes people want to take off their clothes? In this case, Boston fireman Alberto Arroyo got in trouble for stripping down to take part in a body-building competition last May. (He finished eighth in the 2008 Pro Natural American Championships, by the way.) There’s nothing wrong with fire fighters showing off their muscles, but Arroyo made the mistake of competing two weeks after he’d filed for permanent disability status due to back injuries. Apparently his injuries enabled him to lift barbells but prevented him from inspecting buildings for code violations. After his bosses saw video of Arroyo competing on YouTube, they decided to give him plenty of spare time to work on his pecs.

4. Vending Machine Leads Tennis Teen, 40-Love

British tennis phenoms Naomi Broady and David Rice are no longer feeling the love from the UK’s Lawn Tennis Association. The LTA nixed its sponsorship of the teens in October 2007 after discovering photos of Broady and Rice on social networking site Bebo showing them drunk, getting intimate with condom dispensers in public restrooms, and otherwise displaying “a lack of discipline.” According to the Yorkshire Evening Post, “Naomi’s Bebo profile showed her out on the town, with her legs wrapped round a toilet vending machine.” No doubt trying to coax it to return the correct change.

5. Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

What do you do with a drunken pirate? Throw her in the brig–or, if you’re Millersville University, deny her a teaching degree. That’s what happened to Stacey Snyder, a then-27-year-old student teacher who posted a self portrait to her MySpace page under the caption “drunk pirate,” even though it was not clear from the photo exactly what liquid was in her plastic cup. The Pennsylvania-based university decided the picture was “unprofessional” enough to rescind Snyder’s degree, just days before it was to be awarded in May 2006. Snyder sued the university in federal court, claiming it violated her First Amendment rights (not to mention, of course, her Right to Paaaaar-tay). As of publication date of this story, that suit is still active.

6. Moronic at Any Speed

Quick, what’s more stupid–driving 140 mph or filming yourself while driving 140 mph? How about filming yourself driving 140 mph and then posting the evidence on YouTube? That was only the tip of the dunce-berg for 23-year-old Andrew Kellett of Leeds, England. He posted more than 80 videos of himself driving recklessly, stealing gasoline, using drugs, and engaging in sundry other illegal activities under the name “Mrchimp2007.” Last July, a city magistrate who’d had enough of this monkey business gave Kellett two years probation and ordered him to stop posting videos of his dirty deeds (though some are still available online). “Kellett must be in the running to be Britain’s Dumbest Criminal,” said Leeds City Councilor Les Carter. “If more criminals were as obliging, the city would be even safer.”

You Blog, You’re Out

By Michael Hemmingson | Published Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2008

Solana Beach, summer 2002. A job interview. “So you like to post on the Internet a lot,” said the human resources person. “Yeah,” I said. “How do you know?”

“Did some online investigating.” The term “to google” was not yet widely used. “I came across your two blogs and some posts you made on news groups, and there was a listserv. And something about you posting under a pseudonym at UCSD.”

“Do you always do this?” I asked.

“We do now. A lot of companies are running Net checks during prescreen.”

“I see,” I said, wondering if anything embarrassing, scandalous, or plain stupid had been uncovered from my early years as a keyboard cowboy.

“Tell me, would you ever blog about your work environment, if you were to be hired here?”

“Not at all,” I replied.

“Even in code?”

“I’m sure I would have better things to blog about,” I said, waving my hand as though it were nothing. I quickly added, “You know, life, concerts, politics, the weather…”

“Have you ever blogged about previous jobs?”

“You tell me,” I said jokingly. “You read my blogs.”

My interviewer’s face was stone-cold straight.

I had, but that blog no longer existed. “No,” I responded. I knew the interview wasn’t going any further. I was told they would call me within 48 hours. The call never came.

Was I pre-dooced?

Urbandictionary.com defines “dooce” as “1. To be fired from your job because of the contents of your weblog. 2. To get fired from your job because you post about your job on your weblog.”

In 2002, Heather B. Armstrong, now a wife and mother in Salt Lake City, contributed a new word to the global lexicon when her blog, dooce.com, was the reason for her job termination. (“Dooce” was a common typo she made for “dude” when chatting online.) At the time she was living in Los Angeles, exploring a new life free of the restrictions of the Mormon faith she’d left behind, dating actors, and working as a Web designer. In her blog, she chronicled her life, which included talking about her job and coworkers. Her firing sparked an online debate about blogging subjects, First Amendment issues, privacy concerns, Internet tyranny and control, and systematic censorship. The debate jumped from her blog to newsgroups and finally the media. This occurred at a time when the political sector was discussing whether bloggers were journalists, with the same protective rights as reporters.

* * *

Another word for blogger is “escribitionist,” “a person who keeps a diary or journal via electronic means, and in particular, publishes their entries on the world wide web,” according to Wikipedia. “Escribionist” was conceived in June 1999 by Erin Venema, an “online diarist,” in an email to a list of “web journalers.”

Local escribitionist Chris Morrow, a former spokesperson for livejournal.com, once one of the largest blogging sites, says she was dooced before the word existed and has faced stigma because of her online presence. Her website, gigglecam.com, has been visually recording her married life with her husband Marty since 1998. They were pioneers of online reality programming. The website once attracted hundreds of thousands of voyeuristic visitors, fans, enemies; there were write-ups in magazines and guest spots on radio and television talk shows. The webcams followed them from Dallas to the Gaslamp Quarter to their loft in Little Italy, shut down only when moving; otherwise, the cams run 24/7, available online to anyone who wishes to view the couple watching TV, playing with their dogs, or entertaining guests.

“We’re not so unique anymore,” Morrow says. “Everyone has a cam up. But when we started, no one else was doing this sort of thing.” She concedes that catering to people’s fascination with peeking into the private lives of strangers has its downside. There was the stalker.

He started off as an Internet friend that she never met in real life. “He got weird, wanting my attention more and more,” she says. “I clipped him and then started to receive letters from the Calvin and Hobbes attorney. I published the comic in my chronicles. The cease and desist letter said to take it down. I also got a letter from Discovery Channel. I had an agreement to display their cams in my chat room. This guy sent them a letter saying I was a porn site and how appalled he was that the Discovery Channel was associated with porn.”

The individual contacted her employer next. “I was working for a dot-com start-up, CU Shopper. This was in 2000. The stalker sent them letters and said I was writing about work in my Web journal. I wasn’t. I was writing about me. They called me on it, and I was let go.”

She wasn’t going to stop blogging. It was a way of life for her. Not wanting to be fired again, she told potential employers up front what she did online. “I went to temp agencies,” she said, “and told them I had an online journal. They didn’t react well. They said, ‘We feel uncomfortable you do that.’ ”

Cushopper.com, “a California-based provider of direct and online shopping to credit union members,” according to a 2000 press release, no longer seems to exist. The website now lists references to mystery shopping providers.

* * *

“The Internet has changed in many social ways,” Chris Morrow says.

Today, a person can be dooced for any activity on the Web, from posting content, written or visual, on YouTube, MySpace, or Facebook, to podcasting, BBS posting, digital surfing, cyber-villaging, broadband pontificating, Web whistle-blowing, hypergossiping, or speechifying in the data slipstream.

Ellen Simonetti, a former employee of Delta Airlines, maintained a blog entitled “Queen of Sky: Diary of a Dysfunctional Flight Attendant.” She claims she kept the blog as a form of therapy after the death of her mother to cancer. Although she never revealed her name, her identity became apparent when she posted mildly risqué photos of herself in a plane, wearing her uniform. She was suspended, then fired. The BBC, USA Today, CNN, and other news outlets carried her story, discussing what right to free speech employees have on their blogs and what guidelines employers can impose. On The Montel Williams Show in 2007, Simonetti advocated for bloggers’ rights, saying that “(1) employers should have clear, unambiguous blogging policies so that employees can foresee the potential for disciplinary action, and (2) the penalty for a first offense should be a formal warning rather than dismissal.” She is currently in court, having sued Delta Airlines for sexual discrimination and retaliation. “Diary of a Dysfunctional Flight Attendant” has been published as a book.

Another dooced blogger who has both a book and a show in development at HBO is Jessica Cutler, who shook up Washington, D.C., with revelations in her short-lived blog, “The Washingtonienne.” In 2004, she was working as a congressional staff assistant (“staff ass” is what she says they’re called on the Hill) for then–Ohio senator Michael DeWine. Her blog used initials for people she talked about; she chronicled the half dozen men she was sleeping with, some high-ranking government officials who paid her money for sex. Wonkette.com, a political muckraking blog, discovered her identity and outed her. She was fired for “unacceptable use of Senate computers” and stirred a minor political scandal. The Washington Post headlines read, “The Hill’s Sex Diarist Reveals All” and “Blog Interrupted.” In an editorial in the U.K. Guardian, “Senator Sacked Me Over Tales of Congress,” Cutler wrote: “Imagine dropping your diary on the street somewhere, and the next day, it’s world news.… I posted my diary on a blog…so my friends could read it for fun.” One of her paramours sued Cutler for her blog and book as well as HBO over the show in development.

Global issues have led to doocing. In October 2006, Dutch diplomat Jan Pronk, working for the United Nations in Sudan, blogged about the Sudanese army suffering massive casualties while fighting rebels in northern Darfur. He was declared “persona non grata” by the Sudanese government, according to Doug Merrill at fistfulofeuros.net, and given 72 hours to leave the country.

Doocing in San Diego has not seen such notoriety, yet. One man in Pacific Beach, who asked not to be named, claims he was fired from the Automobile Association of America for blogging, and, in fact, “They fired a number of people a few years ago for the same thing.

“I was stupid. It was obvious who and where I was blogging about, and I used first names,” he says. “I lost friends, was threatened to be sued. Either way, I’ll never make that mistake again. I didn’t think anyone would ever read it.”

The San Diego branch of the Automobile Association of America declined to return a call for comment on the incident or their blogging policy.

Ellen B., who lives in Hillcrest, says she has been dooced “three times for my writing.” The most recent was from a downtown architectural firm; she is limited to what she can reveal because she signed an agreement upon her termination. She asked that her full name not be used. “I was blogging about work, about some of the people there who I couldn’t stand. No one knew about it until my blog was mentioned in a newspaper article. Immediately, the next day, I was told to go on a two-week leave of absence. While I was gone, there were meetings about what to do about me.”

When she returned, she was called into a meeting. “They had printed out my entire blog. There were three boxes full of sheets. They had highlighted parts where I talked about coworkers and the office.”

Although she used nicknames, they were known by her colleagues, and some were not happy about what she had to say.

“I signed a separation agreement that I would no longer blog about the company or anyone there,” Ellen says, “and they also picked selected entries and asked me to delete them. I did. At the time I was worried — would they give me good recommendations, would I ever be able to get another job in the architecture business?

“When you are being dooced, you feel guilty — did I do something wrong? Did I really hurt someone’s feelings?”

She adds, “I believe I was fired out of fear I might stir up controversy.”

Her first doocing experience was in 2000 when she worked at one of San Diego’s AppleOne temp agency offices. The company was monitoring and recording keystrokes on employee computers. “I wasn’t blogging then. I had an email list. I would tell my friends about my weekend, share jokes. The thing was, every woman in the office was doing the same thing, even the woman who got me fired, my manager. It was when I criticized the way she did things that I was told I was being let go for misusing a company computer on company time.”

Her second dooce was also at a temp agency, “the next job, at Volt,” she says. “A friend told me not to use the computers and email, so I switched to a blog. I wrote about the IT guy. He said he was allergic to something, I forget, so I wrote he was allergic to sex. One of the employees, a former friend, was reading my blog. She showed it to the IT guy.”

Word made its way around the office about the online diary. Ellen was laid off from her job; she was told it was due to a financial crunch and “nationwide layoffs, but I knew it was about my blog.”

* * *

Anonymous blogrings are popular places for like-minded people around the world to write about their jobs. A compilation of blogs can be found at anonworkblogs.blogspot.com. It lists Web journals from police officers, nurses, firefighters, waitresses, and educators on every continent. “The Report Card” is written by a teacher who chronicles the administrative mishaps at his school, assigning code names such as Blonde Bloke, Pompous Ponce, and Talkie, whose mouth gets her fired. “CAD Monkey in the Cubicle Jungle,” the blog of an architect who “sold out” to become a corporate lackey, left the blog July 26, 2006, saying, “I’m done, guys.” The next post is dated May 25, 2008, titled, “The Bitch Is Back.”

“The bad news is that in many cases, there is no legal means of redress if you’ve been fired for blogging,” states the Electronic Frontier Foundation on its page, “How to Blog Safely.” “While your right to free speech is protected by the First Amendment, this protection does not shield you from the consequences of what you say. The First Amendment protects speech from being censored by the government; it does not regulate what private parties (such as most employers) do. In states with ‘at will’ employment laws like California, employers can fire you at any time, for any reason. And no state has laws that specifically protect bloggers from discrimination, on the job or otherwise.”

The foundation suggests using services such as NearlyFreeSpeech.net and Tor software (torproject.org) that will help with anonymity by masking IP addresses and keeping a blog off Google and other search engines. Some sites, like livejournal.com, offer users blogs that can be locked from public view, readable only to permitted friends.

Michelle, a hiring manager at Kearny Mesa’s AppleOne, said the company had no written policy about the do’s and don’ts of employee blogging. “There was nothing in our training seminars that covered that,” she said, “and we’ve never been told to ask potential hires if they blog or not.” At Volt Services, a manager named David said, “That is left to individual companies and their policies.”

Chris Morrow still tells employers that she blogs; she says she will not write about the workplace. Ellen B. now knows not to blog about people at a job or use identifying nicknames or code words, but she feels that as long as she does not blog on company time, she has the right to free expression.

“I can stand on a street corner and shout about how much I think my boss is stupid or how my manager does things wrong, and that’s okay,” she says. “I have the right to do this. So if I write about it online, what’s the difference? I still have the same right. If you are posting private business information, I would think you’re crossing a line, but if you’re posting about your life, it’s your life, not theirs.”

Robert Cox, founder and president of Media Bloggers Association, told USA Today in 2006 that he encourages all bloggers, whether at home, work, or the political arena, to fight back and protect the right of free speech against any action that is taken to “merely silence critics.”

When asked what she feels about her legacy, Heather Armstrong emails the patent answer she has told everyone since 2002: “Never write about work on the Internet unless your boss knows and sanctions the fact.”

The Issue: A Blog, a Flight Attendant, and a Firing

Business Week

When a Delta employee had a little fun on her personal Web diary, her career was forced to make an emergency landing

The day Ellen Simonetti came home to her Austin (Tex.) condominium in September 2004 and checked her answering machine messages, she had no idea they’d change her life dramatically. Simonetti, a Delta (DAL) flight attendant for nearly eight years, was getting ready for one of her regularly assigned trips to Italy.

“They said: ‘Please call. It’s about your trip tomorrow,’” she recalls. Simonetti then phoned a Delta international in-flight supervisor to find out what the problem was. “She said, ‘You can’t fly to Rome tomorrow.’ When I asked why, she said, ‘You don’t know? It’s about pictures on the Web,’ And I felt like someone kicked me in the stomach.”

The photographs, which launched a chain of events including Simonetti’s dismissal, subsequent appearances on The Today Show and Montel Williams, and a lawsuit against Delta, appeared on the Journalspace.com blog she created in January 2004.

“I had just lost my mother in September of 2003,” Simonetti explains. “It really hit me hard, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. So I heard about blogging and started to write about being a flight attendant and the pain I was feeling. It was like therapy to me.”

In the blog, first titled “Diary of a Flight Attendant” and later “Diary of a Dysfunctional Flight Attendant” (and ultimately “Diary of a Grounded Flight Attendant” and “Diary of a Human Being”), Simonetti referred to herself as “Queen of Sky” (and a few times just as “Ellen”) and mostly in the third person. The journal captured mundane events from her day-to-day life such as:

Well, Queen of Sky is just having a BAD morning. The flight from Lima went O.K., but there was a ground delay in Lima because the captain decided to change his routing at the last minute. So they took off over half an hour late, around 1 a.m.

and

Well, Queen of Sky is going to relax now and maybe have a foot massage and then have lunch before napping before the all-night flight back to Bustling Base City. Some of the crew were going to the tailor today. Queen of Sky once again forgot to bring the things she needs altered.

Although Simonetti never gave her last name or mentioned her employer’s name (she referred to it as Anonymous International Airline) in the blog, she was wearing a Delta uniform in the photographs, which show her relaxing on a jet on the ground in between flights. Except for one slightly racy shot that depicts her leaning over her seat with a patch of her brassiere showing, the pictures are pretty much G-rated.

Simonetti says she and another Delta flight attendant took the pictures just for fun. One of them showed her friend posing inside an overhead cabinet. “We were on the ground when the pictures were taken,” she says. “We don’t get paid until the door shuts and the plane pushes back. So I wasn’t on the clock when this happened. There was no policy against taking pictures in uniform on a plane, and I still don’t know of any policies against posting pictures on the Web.”

Nonetheless, her superiors were not amused, and even though Simonetti removed the pictures from her blog right after the initial phone call, the airline sent her supervisor and a human resources representative to speak to her, and suspended her without pay a week after the meeting.

“I brought a friend with me to the meeting, but they said, ‘No, he can’t come with you. This is between Delta people.’ They asked, ‘Do you have a Web site?’ and ‘Do you post pictures of yourself on the Web site?’ and what the name of my Web site was,” Simonetti says. She was also told the photographs were inappropriate. “They basically interrogated me and forced me to write up statements. They made me feel like a criminal. I asked what they meant by ‘inappropriate’ pictures. They said they’d get back to me.”

Terminated for Inappropriate Behavior

During a phone call three weeks after the meeting, a Delta representative told her the carrier was terminating her employment “based on inappropriate photographs in the Delta uniform on the Web site.” According to Simonetti, Delta never explained what made the photos unacceptable or where in the employee manual it said that posting pictures in a Delta uniform was forbidden.

Simonetti never learned how Delta stumbled upon her blog in the first place. “By the time I was suspended, I was only getting 150 to 200 visitors a day,” she says. “I felt very comfortable with the blog, because ‘nobody read it.’ But when people would Google ‘flight attendant,’ I guess it would come up.”

In between the suspension and dismissal, Simonetti filed a sex discrimination claim with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, which provided a “right to sue letter” she could use in a lawsuit later. “I found pictures of male Delta flight attendants and pilots on Match.com in their uniforms with their ‘turn-ons and turn offs’ listed. And some of them even mentioned they worked for Delta,” she says. Yet the airline apparently took no action against them. Because Delta flight attendants don’t have a union, she hired a private lawyer in an attempt to get her job back.

Simonetti’s suit against Delta is pending, and she was never able to get another job in the airline industry, despite the media attention she received after the firing. (Her appearances on TV and mentions of her in articles were usually sympathetic to her predicament.) She now works selling real estate and is back in school, studying radio, TV, and film at the University of Texas at Austin. However, she says she still misses her flight attendant job and her old co-workers and is upset about the blog episode.

The question remains: Did Delta take gratuitously drastic measures over a bunch of silly pictures on the Web or was Simonetti guilty of irresponsible behavior that could have harmed the carrier?

Rebecca Reisner is an editor at BusinessWeek.com

Teachers’ Virtual Lives Conflict With Classroom

Teacher in Training Says She Was Denied Credential for Online Photos

By SCOTT MICHELS

May 6, 2008—

Stacy Snyder was weeks away from getting her teaching degree when she said her career was derailed by an activity common among many young teachers: posting personal photos on a MySpace page.

Snyder, then 27, claimed in a federal lawsuit scheduled to go to trial Tuesday that Millersville University refused to give her a teaching credential after school administrators learned of a photo on her MySpace page labeled “drunken pirate.” She said school officials accused her of promoting underage drinking after seeing the photo, which showed Snyder wearing a pirate hat and drinking out of a yellow cup.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” Snyder’s father said. “She could have been a great teacher.”

Snyder’s lawyer, Mark Voigt, said he and Snyder would not comment until after the trial.

Millersville University claimed it would have refused to give Snyder a teaching degree even without the Web page, alleging unsatisfactory performance and unprofessional behavior.

But for a generation that came of age comfortable with the freewheeling, tell-all online culture, Snyder’s case presents a cautionary tale that raises questions about the standards to which teachers — and other young people in positions of responsibility — should be held.

There are countless teachers with online profiles, many of them available to anyone with a Facebook or MySpace account. Some of those pages are, at times, racy, filled with jokes, photos and behavior some parents and administrators might view as unprofessional.

A random review of these sites by ABC News turned up many examples. One first-grade teacher listed among her favorite activities “dancing like an a**hole.” A Teach for America teacher in New York showed pictures of several friends drinking beer on the subway. A high school teacher in Los Angeles prominently displayed photos of her lying on the beach in a bikini.

Those pages, similar to those of thousands of 20-somethings who grew up with their lives displayed online for all to see, can carry consequences. Teachers in several states have been suspended or fired for their online profiles, leading some school districts to begin crafting policies to regulate the virtual lives of their employees.

“What seems like fun when you’re in college can be a real issue for teachers,” said Nora Carr, a spokeswoman for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina, which is writing a policy for online behavior. “Especially for young teachers, the technology is second nature to them, but teachers are also considered role models.”

In Snyder’s case, she argued that Millersville violated her First Amendment rights. In court papers, Snyder, who graduated with an English degree, claimed that she was given good marks as part of a student teaching program at a local high school until school officials discovered her MySpace page.

School officials claim in court papers that Snyder was unprofessional throughout the semester, with Snyder’s supervisor calling the photo the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” They allege that she lacked knowledge of the subjects she was teaching, was unable to manage her students and that parents complained about her teaching.

Snyder allegedly didn’t intervene when students discussed drugs and drinking, administrators said. She had already been admonished to avoid corresponding with students on MySpace and conceded that a student had seen her Web site and that the cup in the picture contained alcohol, the school said.

“Millersville University is committed to serving our students and the children they will teach, and we are confident that the university will be vindicated in this case,” the university said in a statement.

Most school districts are only beginning to consider official policies that specifically deal with sites like Facebook and MySpace, said Tom Hutton, a senior attorney with the National School Board Association.

“As a society, we’re trying to deal with this on the fly,” said John Green, head of school for the Peddie School, a New Jersey boarding school.

“Boundaries are important for teachers to maintain,” he said. “The virtual world makes those boundaries more blurry. Sometimes people are less careful in maintaining boundaries over the computer than they are in their own classroom.”

Teachers associations and some school district lawyers are warning new teachers to be careful what they put online.

Todd Fuller, of the Missouri State Teachers Association, said a school superintendent recently told him he asked aspiring teachers about their MySpace pages during job interviews.

“He had a teacher come in and asked her if she had a Facebook or MySpace page and she said yes, and he said would you be willing to have a look right now?” Fuller said. “If that would be an issue for you, you should take pause and consider what’s on your page.”

Credentialed teachers can generally be reprimanded for activity that disrupts the classroom in some way, said David Alexander, chairman of the Department of Educational Leadership at Virginia Tech.

Several teachers told ABC News that they restrict access to their Facebook and MySpace pages and would never allow their students to become their online friends.

“I worry about kids’ ability to contextualize what they’re seeing,” said Alison Hogarth, who teaches ninth through 11th grade in New Jersey.

But other teachers have apparently not considered the consequences of their online behavior or aren’t willing to change them.

Stephen Murmer was famously fired from his teaching job in Virginia after videos of him painting with his buttocks surfaced online. He settled a lawsuit against the school district last year.

Abby, a 23-year-old elementary school teacher in New York, described “excessive drinking” as a favorite activity on her Facebook page and had a “bumper sticker” that said “let’s drink so much we hate ourselves in the morning.”

As for Snyder, according to court papers, she wrote on her MySpace page that she was told “one of my students was on here looking at my page, which is fine. I have nothing to hide. I am over 21, and I don’t say anything that will hurt me (in the long run). Plus, I don’t think that they would stoop that low as to mess with my future. So, bring on the love!”

Eight days later, she was told she would be ineligible for a teaching certificate.

The Blogger Mom in Your Face

The Blogger Mom in Your Face

Lots of businesses get hate mail, but few owners react the way Heather Armstrong does. She prints out nasty emails, puts them in her driveway and drives over them with her car. “That’s the attitude I have,” she says, “and it’s made my life a thousand percent better.”

Heather Armstrong, the blogger-breadwinner.

Steeling herself against vitriol is one of the challenges of being, by many measures, the nation’s top parenting blogger. The 32-year-old at-home mother’s irreverent, occasionally profane and often hilarious musings on prosaic topics from potty-training to postpartum depression have propelled her blog, Dooce.com, to No. 59 among the Web’s top 100 blogs, according to Technorati, a blog search engine. The Salt Lake City resident enjoys enviable influence and enough ad revenue that her husband Jon quit his job in 2005 to manage advertising for Dooce (rhymes with moose).

Among the Web’s 200,000-plus bloggers on parenting and family, few have succeeded to the extent of Ms. Armstrong; countless at-home parents would love to be in her position. But less obvious is the behind-the-scenes price an at-home mom pays to shoulder her way to prominence in the blogosphere — giving up her privacy, sustained time off and any remnants of work-family boundaries at all.

Do you read parenting, mommy or daddy blogs? If so, what are your favorites? And what draws you to them? Discuss

Most powerful individual bloggers, such as Arianna Huffington of HuffingtonPost.com on politics, or Mario Lavandeira of PerezHilton.com on celebrities, keep a measure of personal distance by blogging on public topics. In contrast, Ms. Armstrong writes about herself, her husband, her 4-year-old daughter Leta, clashes with her parents and the escapades of her dog Chuck. She has the ability “to make the mundane seem interesting,” says Pete Blackshaw, an executive vice president at Nielsen Online. In a measure of fans’ devotion, a recent post on removing a raccoon from her chimney drew 530 comments.

Mommy blogs in general tend to be everyday diaries of details one might share over coffee — baby’s first step or the perils of finding a preschool. Most are blander than Dooce, less humorous and significantly less profane.

Most Web diarists, for example, are too reserved to report, as Ms. Armstrong does, that she’s “married to a charming geek,” had “lived life as an unemployed drunk” for a while, or landed briefly in a mental hospital for postpartum depression. Some mommy-bloggers find her cursing and vulgarity offensive. But it’s that outrageousness, humility and raw honesty that also feed her bond with readers, making her dominant in an emerging Web sector Mr. Blackshaw calls “The Power Mom.”

Ms. Armstrong’s fan base is a powerful lure for advertisers. Neither she nor her husband will discuss ad revenue, but they and the Internet rating service Quantcast say that Dooce draws about four million page views per month. In a “quick back-of-the-envelope guesstimate,” Shani Higgins, Technorati’s vice president, business development, estimates the site could yield $40,000 a month in revenue from companies coveting her traffic, such as BMW and Verizon.

Ms. Armstrong’s product endorsements — bestowed only on items she’s purchased, she says — wield impressive clout. Yukiko Kamioka in Colchester, England, says she was struggling with only 10 visitors a day to her Web site, seabreezestudio.co.uk, until Dooce endorsed her handmade bags; 3,000 visitors immediately swamped her site, and she soon sold out of her merchandise.

Chuck, the dog

The life of a blogger, though, inflicts significant strain. A scathing parody on ViolentAcres.com, set up as a letter to her daughter Leta, said, “Since your father and I started exploiting you for cash, neither one of us has had to work a real job for a few months now. Score!” Last week, another popular blogger on parenting, Boston writer Steve Almond, quit his BabyDaddy blog on Babble.com, citing “angry and aggrieved” responses to his writings.

Behind her hip façade, Ms. Armstrong feels similar pain. She says she has sought therapy to cope with vitriolic posts. “The hate mail will invariably happen, and when it does your entire world will crumble around your ears,” she says. In one example, she says a person she thought was a friend posted a comment saying she “wanted to punch me in the face because she hated me so much.” She adds she can understand why “famous people turn to drugs or commit suicide.”

Of course, Ms. Armstrong can dish it, too. A former Web designer, she was fired from her job in 2001 for writing negative posts about her bosses. Her site’s name soon became synonymous with being axed over the contents of your blog, according to UrbanDictionary.com — as in, “I’ve been dooced.”

She’s had to learn to draw boundaries on what she writes, to avoid hurting loved ones. An “aching and bleeding diatribe” she posted a few years ago against her parents’ faith, Mormonism, alienated them so badly that “it was like a bomb had gone off in my family,” she says. “My dad didn’t speak to me for several months, and my mom was devastated.” She took down the posts, thinking, “OK, this is a little bit more powerful than I’d thought it would be,” she says.

She and her parents have since reconciled, but now, “I have strict boundaries in my head,” she says. “I’m not going to write anything about my family that I wouldn’t say to them in real life, in front of other people.” Also, “a lot goes on in our marriage that I will never write about,” including her and her husband’s sex life, she adds.

The time demands of sustaining what has become a brand name are incessant. Experts say keeping a blog fresh and topical is essential. But after posting most days for seven years, Ms. Armstrong has periods of writer’s block so intense that they’re “physically painful,” she says. She carries a notebook almost everywhere, recording thoughts and ideas. To take a vacation she has to pile up extra material. “Many nights I’ve gone to sleep crying because I want my life back,” she says.

“The pressure on her to come up with something unique to say all the time would be enormous,” says Susan Carraretto, co-founder of 5minutesformom.com, another popular site. Mr. Blackshaw adds, “It’s kind of like ‘Mom meets ‘The Truman Show’…Everybody is watching” constantly.

Ms. Armstrong and her husband face marital strain from working so closely. “He and I have had our marital problems for sure, and we go to therapy all the time. We’re together 24/7. I’m not sure every couple could do that, but he and I are best friends.”

Neither expected to make a living this way. Ms. Armstrong intended to quit blogging after her daughter was born in 2004 and be a stay-at-home mom for a while. But as she fell into a severe postpartum depression, she found blogging a valuable outlet and an antidote to the isolation she felt. “Immediately I realized that writing things down and sharing it with people was getting me through the day,” she says. A warm response from “this community of mothers” reading her posts “lifted me up and gave me the courage” to check into a hospital for four days and get treatment, she says. It was at the urging of her husband, a former Web creative director, that she made the transition from blogger to breadwinner in 2005.

These days, her posts are more sanguine, on topics ranging from tiffs with her mother over global warming to a freak fish found in a Utah pond. And her old plan — of going back to work as a Web designer — is history. Hassles notwithstanding , she says, “Now I think, ‘Wow, I’m so glad I stuck with this.’ “

Write to Sue Shellenbarger at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com

CNN Producer Says He Was Fired for Blogging

February 14, 2008, 2:02 pm

By Sewell Chan
BloggerChez Pazienza

Should journalists be permitted to maintain personal — and highly opinionated — blogs on their own time? Chez Pazienza, a senior producer for CNN’s “American Morning,” says the network fired him on Tuesday on the grounds that he violated its standards for journalists through his blog, Deus Ex Malcontent.

Mr. Pazienza announced that he had been fired through — what else? — a blog post on Wednesday. “What was the reason for my abrupt and untimely dismissal?” he wrote. “You’re reading it. More to come soon.”

In a phone interview this morning, Mr. Pazienza, 38, said he joined CNN as a senior producer in January 2004 and has consistently received positive performance evaluations. He spent his first year at CNN at the network’s headquarters in Atlanta, then moved to New York to work on “CNN Daybreak,” which has since been canceled, then “American Morning,” which is shown Monday through Friday from 6 to 9 a.m.

Mr. Pazienza said he started his blog in May 2006 as a way to keep his mind occupied while he was on a medical leave of several months after an operation to remove a brain tumor. He got noticed by blogs like Drew Curtis’s FARK, a popular news-aggregation site, and Pajiba, a left-wing blog of movie and book reviews.

“Slowly but surely people started reading me a little bit, and it was nice,” he said. “It was still relatively small, but for a personal blog, I was doing very well. I had a few thousand hits a day.”

Then, a few months ago, Mr. Pazienza was invited to start blogging on The Huffington Post, the group blog founded by Arianna Huffington.

Mr. Pazienza said he has never identified himself in his writing as a CNN producer or as a representative of CNN and has never written about what goes on at work. “I will write about the media in general and, at times, the very sorry state of it, including the TV news media,” he said. “I think I have the right to.”

Mr. Pazienza described Deus Ex Malcontent as a personal journal, where he has mused about everything from his recovery from surgery to his thoughts on the mass media and popular culture. He has linked to music videos from bands he likes and written about past relationships.

“It’s basically me,” he said. “It’s whatever happens to strike my fancy that day. I don’t have any advertisers, so I’m not exactly beholden to anyone. I don’t wake up worrying about how many people are reading me.”

Deus Ex Malcontent makes no effort to hide its author’s strong views. “I wake up every morning baffled as to why America hasn’t thrown George Bush and Dick Cheney in prison, Hollywood hasn’t stopped trying to convince me that Sarah Jessica Parker is attractive, gullible soccer moms haven’t realized that they share absolutely no kinship with Oprah, and Fox canceled ‘Firefly,’” Mr. Pazienza wrote on the biographical section of his blog.

Barbara Levin, a spokeswoman for CNN, said she could not discuss specifics because the network does not comment on personnel matters, but she said in a statement, “CNN has a policy that says employees must first get permission to write for a non-CNN outlet.”

Mr. Pazienza acknowledges that he did not ask permission from CNN to blog, either on his own Web site or on The Huffington Post. He contends that the policy had not been made clear to employees and was overly vague. “It’s purposely set up so they can be subjective,” he said. “Does that mean I can’t post on a MySpace blog that my friends read? Does that mean I can’t post something online to my wife?” He added that he believed he had been dismissed because of his views.

When he was fired on Tuesday, Mr. Pazienza said, only his personal blog was mentioned, not his work for The Huffington Post. Mr. Pazienza also said his supervisors had told him that they did not know of other CNN employers who blogged, an assertion Mr. Pazienza said he knows to be untrue. Mr. Pazienza lives on the Upper East Side with his wife; the couple are expecting a baby in August. He said he is not going to fight to get his job back, but when asked whether he planned to hire a lawyer, he said he had not yet decided on any plans.

(For those who wonder, The New York Times’s policy on ethics in journalism does have a section on blogs. While it states that blogs “present imaginative opportunities for personal expression and exciting new journalism,” it adds that blogs “also require cautions, magnified by the Web’s unlimited reach.” It elaborates that personal blog content should be “purely that: personal,” and that staff members should avoid blogging about topics they cover as journalists and avoid taking stands on divisive public issues, among other guidelines.)