Employee blogs silenced at Tampa Tribune

CyberJournalist.net reports on three more personal weblogs that have been silenced after apparent clashes with the old media mindset that continues to reign supreme in newsrooms. The latest casualties took place at the Tampa Tribune. Excerpt:

Tom Mangan reports on his Weblog that three Tampa Tribune Webloggers have ceased blogging — one after pressure from his bosses, and the other two on their own initiative afterward.

Dave Simanoff writes on his Web site, “The people who sign my paychecks have informed me that they’re not pleased with the Daily Dave. One of the complaints is that some of my posts on the Daily Dave compromise my objectivity and the newspaper’s credibility. Since it’s never been my objective to discredit myself or my employer, and because I don’t know if any of my previous posts might be used to penalize me, I have decided to take down the Daily Dave, in its present form, in its entirety… It would be a stretch to call this censorship, but it amounts to my voice being silenced nonetheless. If you’d like to blame someone for killing off the Daily Dave, you can blame me: I have made a conscious decision to take down the site because I’m not willing to sacrifice my career for my blog….I will take down all of the Daily Dave content by the end of the weekend. Please enjoy one last look around before the wrecking ball comes through.”

CyberJournalist.net also summarizes some of the articles by 18 journalists on the subject of journalism and weblogging that appear in the Fall 2003 Nieman Reports magazine. Here’s my contribution, which was informed by the earlier New Directions for News report on participatory media (Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis were the authors).

One of the most misguided entries among the 18 was the one by Brian Toolan, the editor of the Hartford Courant, who forced travel editor Denis Horgan to shut down his personal weblog. CyberJournalist reproduces portions of the Nieman chapter here. Excerpt:

In the article, Toolan says his decision was easy. “Behaving in a manner that safeguards the integrity of a news institution and avoids real or perceived conflicts of interest is central to the compact between a journalist and his employer. Journalists should operate in ways that don’t display bias or predisposition. These are ethical considerations, not legal ones, but they are central to the conduct of journalism and must be zealously maintained.”

I wrote about this sorry episode of big media arrogance back in May at CyberJournalist.net in a piece titled “Let journalists blog!”

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.