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Blogging in the gray zone
Can blogging get you fired? How to balance personal privacy and a wired workplace

by patrick emanuel

For those who kept them, diaries used to be a black-and-white issue. They were private, kept only for the writer’s use. They had no impact on life beyond the pages of the often-locked journal, especially no effect on the author’s work life. But as a shamed magazine editor and an untenured university professor can now attest, a digital transformation in journaling has forced writers into the gray area, a murky mess blurring the distinction between private and professional. These writers craft weblogs (blogs), a new blend of public and private issues – a blend that challenges employers whose workplaces can now be examined publicly.

Many of today’s professionals are quickly discovering the boundary between their private and professional lives is like fishing line––thin, hard to negotiate and increasingly transparent. Considered the poster girl of the “blogger generation,” Nadine Haobsh became one of the first to bring attention to this problem. Haobsh tried to have the best of both worlds. By day she was the associate beauty editor of Ladies’ Home Journal while at night she anonymously shared her exploits in the fashion publishing world on her blog Jolie in NYC. On July 22, 2005, Haobsh wrote on her increasingly popular blog about possibly resigning from her position at Ladies’ Home Journal to take a job at Seventeen magazine. In doing so, Haobsh revealed herself to her employers as the author of the blog.

When her identity was published in the New York Post, her job offer at Seventeen was rescinded––“Jolie in NYC” was officially blacklisted. Coping with these unforeseen consequences, Haobsh warned all potential bloggers, “Even if you truly are ‘just being funny’ or ‘don’t really mean it,’ think before you write. And definitely don’t write about your industry––things will absolutely be taken out of context or interpreted incorrectly, and that’s just not fun for anybody.”

Haobsh’s experience showed blogging in the workplace is cause for concern among employers, employees, bloggers and non-bloggers alike. With minimal precedence, companies, institutions and professionals enter this gray area at their own risk. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel enforces Internet access and email policies, but does not have personal blogging guidelines for its employees. According Greg Rank of the Journal Sentinel Human Resources Department, the publication “hasn’t identified the risks of employee blogging because it is a relatively new concept.”

While many professionals are active bloggers, the potential effects on privacy and professional issues have not been fully recognized and bloggers are unaware of their hobby’s potential consequences.

“It was not really my intention that my blog be an extension of my professional activity,” says Jeremy Freese, a UW-Madison sociology professor who started blogging on a whim more than two years ago. “But since I do think about my professional activity quite a bit, sometimes I do talk about things.”

In his blog, Freese references his career but refrains from talking about confidential issues. Nonetheless, he did not mention his blog in his tenure review and worried it would hurt his tenure prospects.

Freese is not the only university professor whose job security is tied to a personal blog. After being denied tenure in October 2005, Daniel Drezner, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, was left wondering what role, if any, his blog had in the surprising decision. Ironically, Drezner seemed to predict his own fate when he wrote in his blog’s inaugural entry, “I shouldn’t be doing this. I’ll be going up for tenure soon.”

Unlike Drezner, Freese did earn tenure. Still, Freese expresses frustrations about the lack of guidelines when it comes to his personal blogging and his professional career.

“If a senior colleague at Wisconsin expressed disapproval about my blog, I would have stopped it then and there,” he says. “It's ultimately not important enough to me for me to have kept doing it and feeling like I was actually risking my job.”

Yet both Drezner and Haobsh, who lost their jobs, did not have the luxury of hindsight. 

“Some individuals are now taking measures to avoid consequences in their professional lives when they publicly air their workplace disputes in blogs,” says Robert Glenn Howard, a UW-Madison assistant professor of communication arts. And in these situations, employers have the innate advantage of implementing employment decisions, often without precedent.

Although companies like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel do not have blogging policies, employers can and do read their employees’ blogs. Without explicit policies, employees may unknowingly cross the invisible boundary between professional and private spheres.

Employers’ main goal is to protect themselves against defamatory speech and privacy invasions. However, many bloggers contend their intentions are not malicious and should not be perceived as a threat.  “I love my job and adore my colleagues,” Freese says. “But, even if I didn't, I wouldn't be voicing those opinions on my weblog.” Nadine Haobsh’s publicist Jessie Fuller says the content on Jolie in NYC was in no way meant to vilify the magazine or her employers. This overlap of employee’s thoughts and employers’ confidentiality creates an expansive gray area where rights and privacy issues can collide.

Some bloggers and employees refuse to be strong-armed into self-regulating their blogs in fear of termination. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties organization, defends bloggers’ rights. According to the EFF website, “Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Internet bullies shouldn't use the law to stifle legitimate free expression.”

According to the EFF, some states provide legal protection for activity outside the workplace and prohibit employers from terminating for doing so. Madison is one of the only cities in the nation to prohibit discrimination based on political or expressive activity, giving bloggers legal mandate to express views relating to both their personal and professional lives with the same conviction. Today, if asked by his employer to abandon his blog, Freese would resist. “I think merely their expressing disapproval would not be enough,” he says. “They would either have to press the issue or give me a good reason.”

©curb magazine - winter 2005
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