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Beware! ...
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Don’t blog about your company on the internet, or you just might be shown the door
Anna Bahney, New York Times News Service
On the first day of his internship last year, Andrew McDonald created a website for himself. It never occurred to him that his bosses might not like his naming it after the company and writing in it about what went on in their office.
For McDonald, the blog he created, “I’m a Comedy Central Intern,” was merely a way to keep his friends apprised of his activities and to practice his humour writing. For the show itself, it was a corporate no-no — especially after it was mentioned on a gossip website, attracting thousands of new readers.
“Not even a newborn puppy on a pink cloud is as cute as a secret work blog!” chirped the website, giddily providing the link to its audience. But the comedy show disagreed, asking him to change the name (He did, to “I’m an Intern in New York”) and to stop revealing how its brand of comedic sausage is stuffed.
“They said they figured something like this would happen eventually because blogs had become so popular,” said McDonald, now 23, who kept his internship. “It caught them off guard. They didn’t really like that.”
Most experienced employees know: Thou Shalt Not Blab About the Company’s Internal Business. But the line between what is public and what is private is increasingly fuzzy for young people comfortable with broadcasting nearly every aspect of their lives on the web.
Companies are beginning to recognise the schism and, prodded by their legal and public relations departments, are starting to adopt policies that address it.
“It is important that corporations make a choice as to what type of blogging they will allow,” said Alfred C Frawley III, director of the intellectual property practice group at a law firm.
While there are differences in laws among jurisdictions, from a legal perspective, he said, it is generally accepted that companies have the right to impose controls on their employees’ use of computers and other equipment used for communication.
The problem for the employers is that, in a few highly publicized cases, public airing of workplace shenanigans has proved to be lucrative — and young people entering the workplace know it.
Busted bloggers like Jessica Cutler (a former Capitol Hill intern whose blog is now a novel), Nadine Haobsh (a former beauty editor whose blog earned her a two-book deal) and Jeremy Blachman (a lawyer whose blog is being released as a novel) were all interns, entry-level employees and worker bees who traded up on in-the-trade secrets.
But a blog and a job don’t necessarily have to clash, some bloggers say. Alexx Shannon’s celebrity blog, came up during his interviews for his internship at Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles this spring because he lists it on his resume.
Shannon, 21, who is British and is spending a year at the University of California, Los Angeles, before finishing his studies at Kings College, London, said he signed an employee confidentiality agreement with both Paramount and Beacon Pictures, where he is now an intern. Beacon made clear that his blog, while about celebrities, would not include information he picked up at work.
“I just knew that I didn’t want to jeopardize anything for my career,” Shannon said. “My real life is more important to me than my online life.” But other young employees don’t see it that way.
Schramm of the human resources group said young people do not see their job as their identity. But that’s not as easy in fields with only a handful of jobs, as Jessa Jeffries Werner, a marine zoologist, found out.
Officials there also asked her to remove posts and pictures related to them from her site and her web page, and she did.
In an interview, she said she regretted crossing the line: “I came to the realization that I probably shouldn’t have been blogging about work.”
But it is the success stories that can embolden a determined blogger. Kreth was able to create her own public relations business out of the fallout. Because of his blog, Shannon was asked to be on a television pilot. For McDonald, the comedy show intern, it was the call of literary agents.
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