Free Expression Can Be Costly When Bloggers Bad-Mouth Jobs

Rachel Mosteller blames her firing from a newspaper on her Sarcastic Journalist blog. (Michael Stravato For The Washington Post)

And that is happening enough that there is even a word for it -- getting "dooced." Blogger Heather B. Armstrong coined the phrase in 2002, after she was fired from her Web design job for writing about work and colleagues on her blog, Dooce.com.

Although workers have been writing blogs for years, companies have been slow to create policies to cover them. "Most employers as of now do not have blogging policies, just as 10 years ago they didn't have e-mail policies and now they do," Segal said.

E-mail and Internet policies that have been developed were created to deal with improper employee usage during work hours. Very few companies have rules governing employee computer habits outside work.

Last October, Delta Air Lines flight attendant Ellen Simonetti was fired, she said, for what her supervisor called a misuse of uniform. Simonetti had posted on her personal blog, Queen of Sky (now called Diary of a Fired Flight Attendant), pictures of herself, in her uniform, on an empty plane. Her blog also contained thinly veiled work stories.

The airline would not discuss the firing, or whether it has a blog policy. But Simonetti has become something of a blog heroine. She filed a complaint against Delta with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming many men were pictured in their uniforms on other Web sites and were not fired. And she started a "Bloggers Rights Movement" calling on other bloggers to sign a petition demanding that companies let employees know their blog policies.

"We can't just let our employers trample our rights. I think there should be clear policies about blogging," she said.

Michael Hanscom started his blog, Eclecticism, before 2000, as a way to keep in touch with family and collect things he found on the Internet. A fan of Apple computers, he found himself working at a temporary job with Xerox on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash.

Hanscom said his family teased him that he would burst into flames when he walked onto the Microsoft campus. So one day, when he noticed a pallet of Macs -- the same version he just bought for himself -- ready to be delivered to Microsoft, he took a picture and posted it. "It struck my sense of humor," he said.

A few days after Hanscom posted the picture, he said, his Xerox manager called him into an office. The manager had Hanscom's blog up, and asked if the picture was his. Hanscom said it was, but said it was posted on his own time, on his own computer. According to Hanscom, the manager then said because it was posted on his own space and time, the company couldn't ask him to take it down, but he could never come to the Microsoft campus again.

"It makes sense, really," Hanscom said. "I've tried since then to look at it from their point of view. I never gave away any secrets, but I was in a position where I saw a lot."