The New York Times is reporting that CNN senior producer Chez Pazienza was fired for blogging.
Pazienza said CNN fired him for violating journalistic standards through his blog Deus Ex Malcontent. CNN's response thus far, other than declining to comment about personnel matters, has been to cite company policy forbidding employees from writing for a non-CNN outlet without permission.
Readers can form their own opinion about the Pazienza case from reading his posts. But the case raises some interesting questions for people in our own profession:
- At what point do our ethics as communications professionals and our right to express ourselves outside the workplace conflict?
- Is blogging itself an inherently career-endangering activity, or is it a matter of the appropriateness of the content?
- Blogging and other technological innovations make it much easier for people to express themselves without taking pause. Do the same standards applied to people in our profession regarding letters to the editor apply to blogs and the like?
