littlegreenfootballs.com had a great thread on this. There’s a link to another thread along the same lines. This was not just “brushed aside” by most people.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/ne...t_id=1003671462
McClatchy Bans Personal Blogs For Rotating Iraq Reporters
By Joe Strupp
Published: November 12, 2007 4:30 PM ET
NEW YORK Criticism of a personal blog item by McClatchy’s Bobby Caina Calvan, who has been on loan from The Sacramento Bee for an Iraq reporting stint, has prompted the chain’s D.C. bureau to ban personal blogs for those who work temporary duty in Iraq.
David Westphal, McClatchy Washington editor, whose bureau also oversees the paper’s foreign reporters, told E&P that reporters who serve temporary six-week tours in Iraq have been asked not to blog about their work on their own private sites.
“This only affects non-Washington bureau people,” said Westphal. “This is a group of people who come in and rotate.”
Westphal said reporters such as Calvan, who are based at McClatchy papers and serve six-week stints in Baghdad, create a unique problem because they are not technically employed by the D.C. bureau and they are on temporary assignment.
“That make it more important to make sure we have a say so in what is reported by them out of Iraq,” Westphal explained. “We are trying to find a way for them to blog on our site. It might be incorporated into the bureau chief’s blog, a way to get that amplification out there.”
Westphal made clear that Calvan was not disciplined in any way, nor should he have been. “This is not about Bobby, it is about us.”
Bee Public Editor Armando Acuna said that a recent item on Calvan’s non-work blog about a run-in with a U.S. soldier in Baghdad sparked the rule change.
“He got into a spat with an American soldier manning a checkpoint who questioned Calvan’s identification before finally letting the reporter and his Iraqi helper back into Baghdad’s secure Green Zone,” Acuna wrote in a Sunday column. “Calvan then wrote about the encounter in a snarky, arrogant way – including his attempt to ‘bully’ the soldier – on his new personal blog, which was intended to keep his family and friends updated about his work and life in Iraq.
“Except the blog wasn’t so private, as Calvan found to his everlasting embarrassment and chagrin,” Acuna added. “A day after his Oct. 23 blog posting, Calvan woke up at 5 a.m. in his Baghdad hotel room and signed onto his computer.”
“My e-mail started going crazy,” he told Acuna, according to the column. “That’s when I started receiving all this hate mail.”
Acuna wrote that Calvan’s item “&hellip was now whizzing around the very public blogosphere, put there by right-wing critics breathlessly passing it around like the discovery of a deep, dark secret, a digital Rosetta stone deciphering the media’s true heart. Even the mainstream media got into the act. On Oct. 25 USA Today’s ‘On Deadline’ Web site wrote about the controversy, including running an excerpt from Calvan’s blog.”
When complaints reached the level of Web readers blaming McClatchy and accusing the chain of biased reporting, Mark Seibel, foreign editor, pulled the blog.
“It was used by people with a political agenda,” Seibel told Acuna. “They were trying to discredit our reporting coming out of Iraq.”
Seibel could not be reached for comment Monday.
Acuna adds that “e-mailers by the dozens from all over the country sent their complaints to Calvan, my office, to Bee senior editors, McClatchy corporate headquarters and the Washington Bureau. A few had letters to the editor printed in The Bee.”
Eventually, the D.C. bureau cancelled such personal blogs for its reporters, Acuna said, noting Seibel said, “We don’t want to be surprised again.”
The blog controversy comes at a time when the McClatchy D.C. bureau has been pushing foreign correspondents to write blogs that are part of the Washington bureau’s official Web site. Those have not been affected.
Westphal said he did not necessarily object to what Calvan wrote on his blog, or what he did in Baghdad, but stressed that such items need to be able to be reviewed by McClatchy editors since they pertain to work he did as their reporter.
“We need to have it run through Washington,” he said. “For those who are there temporarily, we would have a review process.” When asked if Calvan’s posting would have been edited or blocked from being posted by an editor, Westphal said, “I don’t know, I suppose there would have been a conversation about it. What I objected to was that we didn’t have a review process in place.”
Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.