Mind Your Mother Revisited

Seems like Richard Richtmyer might want to rethink his Facebook friends while the rest of us rethink how public or private social networking forums really are and whether employers may discipline employees over postings.

Richtmyer, a newsman for The Associated Press, commented on Facebook about the executive management of McClatchy Newspapers, saying, according to a wired.com article, that “It seems like the ones who orchestrated the whole mess should be losing their jobs or getting pushed into smaller quarters.”

That was a reference to the woes at McClatchy, whose stock price has been wearing lead water wings since acquiring Knight-Ridder in time for The Great Newspaper Recession. The Facebook comment drew a reprimand from Mother AP, apparently tipped by one of Richtmyer’s “friends.”

The AP’s ethics policy is pretty clear: “Anyone who works for the AP must be mindful that opinions they express may damage the AP's reputation as an unbiased source of news. They must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum, whether in Web logs, chat rooms, letters to the editor, petitions, bumper stickers or lapel buttons, and must not take part in demonstrations in support of causes or movements.”

The policy itself may be the last clear thing in sight for a while.

The News Media Guild, which represents AP employees, says on its web site that it has “has asked The Associated Press to provide copies of all its written communications with staff regarding Facebook postings and a copy of all the written reprimands given to employees since Jan. 1, 2009, because of comments made on Facebook.”

The Guild on its website mentions the National Labor Relations Act, which allows employees to discuss job-related things. McClatchy’s troubles are part of troubles in the news industry at large, and McClatchy is an AP member, so are comments about that job-related? The Guild’s web site explains that “Switching from job or labor issues to general attacks on the company's or a members' product, unrelated to any labor dispute, could fall outside the realm of protected speech under the act.”

So is it acceptable to say “the company (any company) made bonehead moves and that’s why we’re having layoffs,” but not acceptable to simply say “the company (any company) made bonehead moves because its leaders are boneheads?”

The flap also raises issues about how public Facebook postings are. Are they postings in “any public forum” as mentioned in the AP policy? Or is it just a password/privilege-controlled private discussion among friends? How many friends participating in a “private discussion among friends” turn it into a de facto public discussion?

These questions go far beyond the AP/Guild/Facebook kerfuffle and have their echoes in discipline and terminations in other industries that started when an employee said something their employer didn’t like. The online world, where employee and employer have digital megaphones of potentially equal volume, just highlights the issues.

Curious about how this will all sort out? Start with the assumption that all parties here are attempting to do the right thing, and start following the web discussions. Here are a few urls:

n http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/facebooksword/

n http://newsmediaguild.org/newsroom/guild_news/guild_presses_facebook_posting_reprimands

n http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090609/1837405183.shtml#comments

n http://gawker.com/5285261/ap-spanks-reporter-for-patently-true-facebook-post

n If the AP addresses this issue in a general press release, try looking for it here: http://www.ap.org/pages/about/pressreleases/preleaseindex.html

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