Let journalists blog!

The Hartford Courtant’s decision to force a newsroom employee to halt his independent personal weblog has stirred up a hornet’s nest both in the blogging community and online news circles.

Jonathan Dube, MSNBC.com technology editor and publisher of CyberJournalist.net, asked me to compile my critique of the Courant’s decision into an essay, which just went up on CyberJournalist. Accompanying it is a counterpoint by Eric Meyer, a professor at the University of Illinois who defended the Courant’s action.

I’ll publish my thoughts here as well …

The decision by the editor of the Hartford Courant to order the closing of a newsroom staffer’s independent weblog was an abuse of power, a move that was not only misguided but one that sends a chilling effect through the journalistic blogging community.

Let’s summarize events to date:

Denis Horgan, the travel editor of the Hartford Courant, decided to begin writing an independent weblog. He did so on his own time. He used not a scintilla of the Courant’s resources to do so. He did not discuss the Courant or his job at the newspaper in his weblog. He did not leverage his association with the Courant in his blog (the fact that he disclosed his relationship with the Courant in passing on an inside page should be applauded). He was not freelancing for a competing publication, did not make a penny from his weblog, and in no way competed online with the Courant.

Despite all of the above, Courant editor Brian Toolan decided to order the weblog killed because a weblog by a newsroom staffer created “a parallel journalistic universe” (read: our monopoly power to publish is under assault) “without any editing oversight by the Courant” (the time-honored control freak rationale). Added 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!

Who owns journalists’ mindshare?

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? Here is your answer. Toolan and his merry band of control-niks believe that newsroom employees are chattel. We can’t have journalists expressing views online because then someone somewhere might accuse them of not being wholly chaste, objective, devoid of opinions. Such a view flies in the face of human nature. Reporters and editors are talented, creative people who hold opinions on a variety of subjects. 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 minefield, one strewn with certain risks for an established media company. Several commentators have written about the issues associated with allowing newsroom staffers to maintain officially sanctioned weblogs under the news organization’s umbrella. 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 merely having a blog.

Blog — but tread carefully

How far should the Toolan proposition extend? Or, as my friend and colleague 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 does not apply here. Writing a personal weblog and freelancing for a competing alternative publication in town are vastly different things ethically, journalistically and legally. Freelancing for a rival publication falls squarely within the legitimate purview of a news organization. But under Eric’s definition, any personal writing in cyberspace would constitute “freelancing.” Publishing a weblog is no different than publishing a personal website; blogging software merely makes the update process easier. I’ll wager that no court would find any legal distinction between what I post at jdlasica.com and what I post at jdlasica.com/blog/. To suggest, then, that a newspaper has the right to force a newsroom staffer to kill his weblog is tantamount to saying the newspaper has the right to prevent newsroom staffers from publishing any personal website, or perhaps even from posting comments to an online-news mailing list. Woe to ye who enters a newsroom — you must remove yourself from all quarters of cyberspace. No pictures of the kids. No photos of your cat. No online family tree, no archive of writings. A fairly sad state of affairs — and patently absurd.

Horgan was not leveraging his status as an employee into some outside venture, so that offense does not 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 was, however, clearly injecting himself into public debate, on subjects as diverse as the Iraq war, same-sex unions and the Boston Red Sox. So here is where his offense lies.

The virgin theory of journalism

Under such a curious formulation of newsroom etiquette, journalists must be virgins, unsoiled by even the appearance of participating in tawdry public debate. So 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? (Some are — such is the sad state of affairs in the control-driven world of newspapers.) Should keeping a diary or journal be verboten if one shows it to one’s friends?

Journalists who blog 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. And not submitting to the fiction that the news organization owns its employees’ opinions.

Take a look at CyberJournalist.net’s list of the dozens of journalists who publish independent personal weblogs, and then consider the idea that the majority of them could be killed off at the whim of their employer. What arrogance. Most outsiders would be shocked to learn that newspapers believe they can control the personal outside activities of their employees. No other employer — a university or tech corporation — would cling to such hubris.

Bring the blogging in house

One solution to this sorry affair would have been to bring Horgan’s weblog under the paper’s wing. I’m not sure that would have worked in this case, but newspapers in general 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.

During the Iraq war, I was among those who crit
icized CNN and Time magazine for forcing their correspondents in the Middle East to abandon their personal weblogs. As CNN told a writer for the Online Journalism Review, “CNN.com prefers to take a more structured approach to presenting the news. We do not blog.” While I disagree with CNN’s decision to silence the blog of its producer — all parties would have won by bringing Kevin Sites’ blog under CNN’s domain — the decision could be defended because Sites was in the Middle East only by virtue of his association with CNN.

The same can’t be said for the Courant’s decision, which overreaches on every level.

Several posters on Horgan’s site suggested that he begin writing a weblog under a pen name; there are even some services that provide anonymous weblogging. I think that’s a bad idea, unless it’s done with the consent of the news publication’s management. Such subterfuge, while understandable, can easily lead to misunderstandings of intent, and result in a suspension or firing — as already happened once to a newspaper blogger in Texas. At the same time, decisions such as the Courant’s will inevitably lead newsroom staffers to consider such a course.

Fortunately, it appears that Horgan may be considering pursuing his legal options. Connecticut is the rare state in that its general statutes (31-51q) prevent any employer from disciplining an employee for the exercise of First Amendment rights. We’ll see how this plays out, but it just may be that a newsroom employee enjoys the same freedom of speech as a waitress, custodian or business executive, at least in Connecticut.

An opportunity, not a threat

Why do some mainstream media outlets fear blogs by journalists? Blogging empowers individuals at the expense of the carefully constructed newsroom hierarchy. It busts down the bureaucracy into a level playing field — a democratic playing field where your ideas count more than your pecking order in the organization’s flow chart. I’ve seen newsroom interns who have more thoughtful things to say than senior managers. But the solution is not to silence the intern, it’s to widen and elevate the level of discourse.

Those of us who love newspapers wonder why fewer people trust the news media these days. We express puzzlement at why more and more talented journalists are leaving the profession. Some of the answers can be gleaned from this single episode of big media hypocrisy.

JD Lasica
Senior Editor, Online Journalism Review (ojr.org)
Personal weblog: http://www.newmediamusings.com/

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.