Blogging Journalists

Remember: Nothing online is private

Increasingly, journalists are buying vanity domains and setting up Web sites to display their resumes and clips (I have one, tjdegroat.com, and I agree that everyone should). It's not a big leap to go from updating a professional site to maintaining a personal blog, but some reporters have gotten into trouble for ideas they've espoused online. Hatch magazine (full disclosure: I help out with this online publication) recently published a first-person piece by a reporter who was sacked because of her blog.

"Who has never made a snide comment about their boss, their job or the day-to-day things that frustrate us?" Rachel Mosteller asks in the commentary. "Unless you're Mother Theresa, you've likely made them, at least to your family and friends. I've made these types of comments, too; but I made them on the Internet. And they cost me my job."

Plenty of writers post intimate details of their lives for all the world to see. I mentioned one blog on the class discussion board, electrolicious.com, which is full of everything from wedding photos to vents to complaints about past work projects. The writer, Ariel, generally keeps to a no-writing-about-work rule, though, and that's a very smart idea. As we all should know by now, in this google-obsessed world, very little of what we say online is private. And as employers increasingly conduct background checks and basic Internet searches on potential and current workers, there are more ways for a person's private life to screw up his or her work life. Be careful, folks.