Seat at the Table

If you blog, are you automatically a part of the media?

Another case of a blogger, Catherine Sanderson, being fired for blogging about her company, Dixon Wilson, was reported by CNN. The article quoted another blogger which raised an interesting point:

On Wednesday Daily Telegraph Paris correspondent Colin Randall, who first wrote about the plight of “La Petite Anglaise,” used his own blog to ask whether print journalism is about to be smothered by the online age and “the march of the New Media.”

One blogger responded: “I find it interesting that bloggers claim to be `the New Media’ and then complain about being terminated from their positions at companies for being bloggers: would you expect to be terminated if you `moonlighted’ for the traditional media?

“Say you worked for a large corporation, and in your spare time you wrote an anonymous ‘insider’s view’ column for the Financial Times. Would you expect anything less than termination upon discovery?”

The debate goes back and forth in the article but the bottom line point remains the same – when you blog, you are publishing public content. Employees or anyone else should treat their public blog as no different than publishing their thoughts in a newspaper or speaking on a soap box in a park. If you would expect that shouting out your thoughts in a public park might get you into trouble (as they might any employee publicly berating a boss), don’t expect different treatment when you do it through a blog.