Bloggasm

Several media outlets have reported on Chez Pazienza, a former CNN producer who was fired because he had a blog. In a long post recently, Pazienza gave us some of the details of what led to his firing. The CNN people who terminated him drilled home a single line in the employee handbook that “any writing done for a ‘non-CNN outlet’ must be run through the network’s standards and practices department,” an ambiguous rule to be sure and one that is very outdated. It eventually becomes very easy to read between the lines in this firing — Pazienza wasn’t fired because he had a blog, but rather because of what he had written in it.

The first high-profile case of a blogger being fired for something written in a blog was Amanda Armstrong, the blogger behind dooce (this is why when someone gets fired for blogging it’s called “being dooced”). And since then there have been a number of other high-profile cases — it usually makes news when it’s someone from a company like Google or a major news outlet. But I think it happens more often than you might think. A girl I went to college with got a job teaching at a Catholic school and then was later fired after she criticized the Catholic faith on her blog. I think it’s a natural tendency for people to use blogging as a way to vent about problems at work, and then they don’t realize their mistake until it’s too late and they’ve been given their walking papers.

Some blogging purists might automatically come to the defense of anyone who is fired because of a blog. I’m not one of those knee-jerk people. After all, a company has a right to protect itself, and if it legitimately feels that it’s being damaged by an employee’s blog, then it has a right to take action.

It’s because of this that a little less than a year ago I developed a set of rules for myself to always follow when I blog. I realize that Bloggasm is the first thing that shows up when you Google my name, meaning it doesn’t take much sleuthing to monitor what I write here. I realized that if I wasn’t careful, I could get into a world of trouble, and so I implemented many of the rules you see below. I think other bloggers could use these rules as a guidebook when deciding what to write and what not to write, and if you follow them I don’t think an employer would have a conceivably good reason to fire you:

1. Don’t blog about work. Don’t blog about your day at work, any clients you have, or any business decisions at the job. If possible, don’t even mention *where* you work, or at least mention it as little as possible. This includes even saying positive things about your job. I remember reading about one intern at a network being fired even though every single post was gushing about how great her job was. Employers tend to think you’re stepping over a boundary if you write about them.

2. Don’t blog at work. If you blog during the workday then you are using company time and computers, and this can quickly anger an employer. This is especially true if you’re getting paid by the hour. Wait until you get home to log in. If you’re surfing the net at work and come across a link you want to write about, save it using a social bookmark and come back to it later.

3. Use a blog platform that allows locked entries. Livejournal, for instance, has a “friends only” feature. This way, if you absolutely have to blog about work, then you can do so without having to worry much about the wrong people seeing it.

4. If you’re an employer, try to lay out some rules in your policy guidebook. And don’t just ban all blogging. Be realistic. So many things fall under the category of blogging that banning it outright allows too much ambiguity. And plus it’s just simply not fair to force your workers to not be able to engage in a writing hobby when they go home at the end of the night.

5. If you’re a journalist, try to avoid writing about beats you cover. Not only does it muddy the waters on where your blog coverage leaves off and your news coverage picks up, it can make your employer a prime target for being accused of having a bias. So if you write about technology for the Washington Post, don’t start your own highly-opinionated tech blog.

6. On the other hand, #5 can be a little harsh, and depends on the situation. For instance — if you’re a newspaper journalist, should you avoid talking about the entire newspaper industry on your blog? I don’t think you should have to.

7. Don’t go overboard in what you post — though you should feel free to express yourself, don’t post extremely inappropriate pictures or lace your writing with profane or vulgar sentences. This is a call-it-as-you-see-it type thing, but I wouldn’t blame an employer for firing an employee for posting sex bondage pictures of himself all over his blog.

8. If you feel comfortable doing so, let your employer know about your blog. If you’re straightforward with them, then it makes it more difficult for them to come at you three months down the road with some retroactive “no blogging” rule.

Ok, I’m not going to be lame and think of two more things just so I can have 10 items. Did I miss anything?