first stop for the white house, inviting fresh faces to the press room. next stop, not stuffing everyone into the conservative dictum of what is right and wrong! (a gurl can dream, can't she?)
White House Admits 1st Blogger to Briefing
Mon Mar 7, 6:32 PM ET White House - AP
WASHINGTON - With an official credential hanging from his neck, a young man stepped into the White House briefing room Monday as perhaps the first blogger to cover the daily press briefings. He found the surroundings to be dilapidated and cramped and concluded that his morning at the White House was "remarkably uneventful."
Garrett M. Graff, 23, writes Fishbowl D.C., a Web log about the news media in Washington. He decided to see if he could get a daily pass for a briefing after a recent controversy raised questions about White House access and who is a legitimate reporter.
Graff said he got his pass after a week of asking. "The briefing room ought to be an inclusive place," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. Historically, he said, the White House has admitted "the traditional media and the nontraditional media, as well as colorful individuals with certain points of view from the left and the right."
The White House credentialing process came under scrutiny after a flap over James Guckert, who used the alias Jeff Gannon. For two years he was granted daily passes to White House briefings as Washington bureau chief for Talon News, a conservative online news outlet associated with another Web site, GOPUSA. At a news conference last month, he asked Bush how he could work on Social Security (news - web sites) and other domestic initiatives with Democrats "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality."
That attracted scrutiny from liberal bloggers, who linked Guckert with Web sites containing gay pornography. Guckert resigned from Talon News.
McClellan said Graff was believed to be the first blogger to be credentialed to attend his morning press gathering and his televised briefing later in the day. McClellan ran into Graff in the press room in the afternoon and greeted him as "the mystery man." The two went up to McClellan's office to chat.
On his blog, Graff wrote: "Our first impression this morning? As glamorous as the beat itself may be, there's little glamour to be found in the briefing room. The conditions of the briefing room, famously built over the old White House swimming pool, um, leave something to be desired."
Graff is the son of Christopher Graff, correspondent for The Associated Press in Montpelier, Vt.
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On the Net:
Fishbowl D.C.: http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/
and, as i scribe from my laidback work nook, i must bow and give a moment of silence to all those chained to the corporate american nonsense. i feel their pain from my own memories of the not so distant past of being tied and bound to a culture i neither embraced nor understood. stand free and write your blogs and let not "the man" bring your words down!
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Firms firing workers for blogging
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By ANICK JESDANUN
AP Internet Writer
March 7, 2005, 7:39 AM CST
NEW YORK -- Flight attendant Ellen Simonetti and former Google employee Mark Jen
have more in common than their love of blogging: They both got fired over it.
Though many companies have Internet guidelines that prohibit visiting porn sites
or forwarding racist jokes, few of the policies directly cover blogs, or Web
journals, particularly those written outside of work hours.
Simonetti had posted suggestive photographs of herself in uniform, while Jen
speculated online about his employer's finances. In neither case were their
bosses happy when they found out.
"There needs to be a dialogue going on between employers and employees," said
Heather Armstrong, a Web designer fired for commenting on her blog about goings
on at work. "There's this power of personal publishing, and there needs to be
rules about what you can or cannot say about the workplace."
On blogs, which are by their very nature public forums, people often muse about
their likes and dislikes -- of family, of friends, of co-workers. Currently, some 27 percent of online U.S. adults read blogs, and 7 percent pen them, according to The Pew Internet and American Life Project.
With search engines making it easy to find virtually anything anyone says in a
blog these days, companies are taking notice -- and taking action.
"Because it's less formal, you're more likely to say something that would offend
your boss," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a
workers' rights group.
Armstrong, who wouldn't name the company that fired her in 2002, said some of
her bosses took issue with such posts as "Comments Heard In, Around, and
Consequent to the Company Christmas Party Last Evening."
Soon after she was sacked, sympathizers coined the term "dooced," meaning "to
have lost one's job because of one's Web site," in her case dooce.com.
In 2003, a Microsoft Corp. contractor was fired after posting photographs of
computers from rival Apple Computer Inc. at a loading dock. Because Michael
Hanscom had described a building in his posting, Microsoft said he had violated
security, he said.
Last fall, Simonetti posted photographs of herself posing in a Delta Air Lines
uniform inside a company airplane, her bra partly revealed in one. She was fired
weeks later.
And in January, Jen was fired by Google over a blog that discussed life at the
company, even though he said "it's all publicly available information and my
personal thoughts and experiences."
Upon reflection, Jen said, he understood Google's concerns, given readers'
tendencies to read between the lines and draw conclusions based on "random
comments I made."
He said he hoped his case would prompt workers to "talk to their managers at
length about blogging before they begin."
Simonetti said she still doesn't know what she did wrong, saying that plenty of
employee Web sites and dating profiles identify Delta and include photos in
uniform.
"If there is a policy against this, why weren't all these people punished
before?" she said.
Delta and Google officials would only say that Simonetti and Jen no longer
worked for them.
In 1997, blogging pioneer Cameron Barrett lost a job at a small marketing firm
in Michigan after co-workers stumbled upon "experimental" short stories from his
creative writing class on his site. Now, he's much more cautious, and he
suspended his blog while campaigning for Wesley Clark during the Democratic
presidential primaries.
"I knew that everything I wrote would be scrutinized at (a) microscope level by
the other campaigns and their supporters," Barrett wrote in an e-mail.
Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst at the civil liberties group Electronic
Frontier Foundation, said employees often "don't realize the First Amendment
doesn't protect their job."
The First Amendment only restricts government control of speech. So private
employers are free to fire at will in most states, as long as it's not
discriminatory or in retaliation for whistle-blowing or union organizing, labor
experts say.
A few companies actually do encourage personal, unofficial blogs and have
policies defining do's and don'ts for employees who post online. They recognize
that there can be value in engaging customers through thoughtful blogs.
"There's always a risk, but you always have that risk anytime you put an
employee on the phone," Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li said.
Sun Microsystems Inc. encourages blogging, offering server space for personal
blogs but warning bloggers not to reveal secrets or make financial disclosures
that might violate securities law. Sun also offers advice on how to keep blogs
interesting.
Only in rare cases are employees "unofficially asked to soften some wording,"
said Tim Bray, the Sun policy's chief architect. Rather, he said, the policy
creates a structure for discussions between employees and their managers.
Jeff Seul, general counsel at Groove Networks Inc., said the policy he wrote for
his company aims to tolerate dissent but not disrespect.
Microsoft refused to comment on Hanscom's case, but pointed out that it
encourages blogging and has more than 1,500 unofficial bloggers -- the bulk on
Microsoft's official Web sites.
Christopher Cobey, an employment lawyer at the Littler Mendelson law firm's
Silicon Valley office, said publicity over recent blog-related firings has
prompted increased inquiries from companies about developing policies.
But some experts question whether a separate blogging policy is needed at all,
given more general employment guidelines and common sense.
Anil Dash, vice president at blog software developer Six Apart Ltd., said
publicized firings have been generally not over blogging but over other
violations that happened to be done through blogging.
Mark Dichter, chairman of labor and employment at the law firm Morgan, Lewis &
Bockius LLP, said policies can tie the hands of employers.
"It requires you to anticipate and draw lines," he said, "and once you set
policies then you get into litigation into which side of the line it fell."
* __
On the Net:
Simonetti's blog: http://queenofsky.journalspace.com
Jen's blog: http://99zeros.blogspot.com
Microsoft blogs: http://blogs.msdn.com
Sun policy: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/02/Policy
