The Modern Journalist

Washington Post Scribe Canned for Personal Blog Or When Personal is Political.

I’m reading this recap of the Michael Tunison tale with a head shake.

The news aide was fired from the Washington Post after his editors found out — and by found out, I mean they read his blog where the writer disclosed who he was — that Tunison was blogging about the NFL and using some profane language, which apparently the editors felt disparaged the good name of the Post.

I’ve been a journalist for 13 years, and anyone who tries to tell me that a few profane words sullies are profession has neither been in a budget meeting where profane fights happen on a regular basis nor the local watering hole after work where affairs, harsh words and even a few curse words are uttered by the Fourth Estate.

Certainly, management has every right to hire and fire workers as they wish. We may not always like that, but within reason, our bosses have always needed the ability to change job descriptions, move employees and reconfigure the business for changing times. Firing someone for blogging, unless private details are disclosed, certainly smacks of self-righteousness.

It does raise one interesting point: what is the ethics of blogging outside work?

Personally, I’m a hard-liner on this. I believe that we should have a very clear separation between work and personal. What you do at home has no bearing on your work. If your work happens to suffer because of what you do on your personal time, that’s a different matter. If you boss happens to not like what you do on your personal time, tough.

I realize I live in a different world than most people, though. It’s hard to walk about from the private lives of employees, particularly as the boundary between work and person continue to break down because of the social media that enables us to easily publish the most intimate details of our lives.

Still, like a crowded subway, we need to arbitrarily ignore the aspects of the personal that invade the work environment, otherwise we will become a place when character — as defined by a mass collective — determines who and what we can do.