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From blog to out of job can be a posting away

Workers are being fired after putting negative comments about their employers in chatty online journals.

By JAY CRIDLIN
Published July 27, 2005

TAMPA - Cara Hurlburt is a 20-year-old junior at the University of South Florida, a fan of Green Day and the Bravery who wears horn-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses and just bought a house in Ybor City. The world knows all of this, thanks to a blog she updates several times a week.

The world also knows what she thinks of her two part-time jobs, one at the USF bookstore, the other at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center.

Saturday, July 9: "Jeez, I'm at the bookstore and it's so freaking boring. . . . I have two co-workers here and there is absolutely nothing to do. I hate being bored at work. I could be studying."

Tuesday, July 12: "We got a new guy at the coffeeshop. He seems able to make coffee and didn't cause any annoyances to me today. OH YEAH AND HE'S REALLY HOT."

Frankly, Hurlburt doesn't care whether her bosses read her online diary. "I tend to keep my entries pretty basic," she said. "Hopefully, it won't cause any problems for me or anyone else."

In today's workplace environment, you never know. It's easier than ever for employers to monitor their workers' online musings, and as a result, some controversial bloggers are losing their jobs. It's called getting "dooced," and if your blog involves your work, whether you post from your desk or write about your boss and co-workers, it could happen to you.

"Say you're writing, "My boss is a jerk, I can't stand him,' " said Lisa Esposito, an employment lawyer in Tampa. "If an employer wants to terminate you, they can."

If a blog is meant to be a personal journal, albeit one posted for the world to see, why shouldn't one write about a bad day at work? The Internet abounds with call center blogs in which anonymous tech support staffers might detail a day's worth of inane questions from computer-illiterate callers.

Blogs are exploding in popularity. About 8-million Americans had blogs at the end of 2004, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and some 32-million of them - that's 27 percent of Internet users, up from 17 percent in 2003 - are blog readers.

But as blog readership goes up, companies have more to lose from a pair of loose lips.

"Employers aren't happy that employees have this new ability to speak about the workplace and about their employers to the world," said Lauren Gelman, associate director of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. "No longer do the public relations departments have the sole avenue of communication as to what the company message is."

Employees at Starbucks and Microsoft have been dooced after "insider" blog posts. In January, a Google employee was fired after several blog posts - some critical, some benign - about his job with the company.

And closer to home, last week, the Daily Business Review reported that the Miami New Times, an alternative weekly newspaper, suspended two editors for posting derogatory blog comments about current and former co-workers. New Times editor-in-chief Jim Mullin called the mess "a putrid mound of pettiness-associated conduct," the Review reported.

The same day, the New York Post outed Nadine Haobsh, the 24-year-old beauty editor at Ladies' Home Journal, as the writer behind Jolie in NYC, a gossipy blog about the New York publishing scene. Haobsh lost her job at Ladies' Home Journal and a job she had hoped to take at another magazine.

After the Post published her name, Haobsh wrote: "To all you would-be bloggers out there: 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."

Experts say this isn't a First Amendment issue, that what you say about your job can legally come back to haunt you.

Thanks to the Internet, bloggers are subject to a new kind of "on-the-record" speech. A company's public image is valuable, and a few catty keystrokes from one spiteful employee could dent a company's business and/or credibility - and leave the employee open to a libel or defamation suit.

"The technology has outpaced the law," said Luke Lirot, a Tampa lawyer specializing in First Amendment issues. "The employee is actually at a grave disadvantage."

Shel Israel, co-author of the upcoming book Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk With Customers, offers several tips to help bloggers keep from getting dooced: Study your company's policies on talking business outside the office. Talk to your boss about blogging, and maybe show him or her a few sample posts. Know how litigious or image-sensitive your company is. And above all, avoid saying anything stupid.

"The curse and the miracle of the blogosphere," Israel said, "is that everybody is connected to the same network. We all have worldwide reach."

Hurlburt keeps a personal diary, a hard copy full of private, unpostable thoughts and memories. Her bosses have not asked her to tone down her blog, which she calls College Confidential (http://me-and-my-life.blogspot.com/) They likely don't even know it exists; her blog's profile page has attracted only 1,025 hits since October 2003. But she plans to keep writing about her workday online, even as she enters the full-time work force.

"I would never write anything that could really cause me any trouble, but I'll definitely continue writing about my job and where my life is going," she says. "The Internet's a public domain, and anybody can read anything that is put out there."

Jay Cridlin can be reached at 727 893-8336 or cridlin@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 27, 2005, 01:03:14]