This BBC Online piece is about people who anonymously blog about their jobs.
Read these excerpts, and then I'll tell you about my policy.
Blogs - or online diaries - which chronicle people's life at work are becoming increasingly common. Here, two bloggers explain why they write about their daily lives at work.
Random Acts of Reality: Why I do it
"Tom" is an emergency medical technician with the London ambulance service, has kept a blog for 18 months.
I'd been reading blogs for a while, and was impressed with some of the things people were writing about.
I'm also a bit of a geek when it comes to computers, and wondered if I could use these blogging tools to do something interesting.
To start with there was no real focus to what I was writing about, so I was mainly moaning about things, hence the original name for the blog of Why I Hate Humanity.
I then realised that with the work that I do, I had a wealth of stories that I could tell, and that maybe some people would be interested in what happens in the ambulance service. ...
"David", a British police officer, has been running a blog since April 2004.
Firstly, I thought there was a huge gap between what the public thought we do (go on patrol and catch criminals) and what we actually do (write reports and record crime).
Secondly, I could read nothing on the internet about what it was actually like being a policeman so I thought I would start.
Thirdly, much of what we do is frustrating and faintly unpleasant but knowing that I'd be able to write something about it makes me see the funny side.
Response policing, which is what I do, means I deal with large numbers of people who are either temporarily or permanently unable to deal with life and they therefore call the police hoping that we'll be able to make things better.
We can't of course, but it means that I get to meet some very strange and amusing people.
Nobody at work knows anything about it. I'm still waiting for someone to come in one morning and say, 'Hey, I've been reading this brilliant thing on the internet' but it hasn't happened yet.
Their tips for blogging about work:
- Do it anonymously.
- Don't talk about specific incidents that could be traced back to you.
- Don't post anything you wouldn't feel comfortable reading out loud to friends, colleagues -- and bosses.
My CTV News Online bosses know I have a blog.
Even if they didn't and I was posting anonymously, I wouldn't comment on the internal happenings at CTV. I don't think it's ethical to do so.
I'm also opposed to the notion of anonymously sniping at people. I think people who do that are chickenshits.
So, while I try to offer honest, no-B.S. opinions about journalism and other subjects dealt with on this blog, don't expect me to talk about my current gig.
Here's someone who did. Daniel P. Finney, 29, was suspended by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after it was found out he was the author of Crazyrolandthompson -- apparently a reference to a Warren Zevon song.
"In his blog, begun this past September, 'Roland H. Thompson' ... took frequent, thinly veiled potshots against his employer and co-workers. He also wrote about stories he was working on for the paper," said a Dec. 22 Riverfront Times story on the case (this came to my attention when Patrick Cain posted a note about the story on CAJ-L).
The Times also has some excerpts from Finney's old blog, which it actually described as blog of the week shortly before the corporate hammer came down.
In one other case where a journo was whacked for blogging, it was again a case of someone writing under a pseudonym.
Maybe there's a lesson there. :)