After an abortive attempt at drafting up guidelines for how CBC’ers should and should not blog, the corp today released the real version of it’s approach to employee blogging, Facebooking, podcasting and more.
It’s called “Self-publishing and self-expression on the Internet”, and - though not perfect - it is an eminently more sensible document. The tone is cautiously encouraging, and the bulk of it explains how existing policies - journalistic, IT and HR - affect what you do online.
Though I don’t know of any bloggers who were consulted this time or last, the change in tone certainly reflects the lively conversation that evolved last time around. I recognize a few bits of the text.
And I’m very much surprised to see the last bullet point referencing the CBC Blogging Manifesto, which I helped create more than a year ago.
- The CBC Blogging Manifesto that is referred to on Inside the CBC, the official blog of the Corporation, and elsewhere on the Web, is not corporate policy or guideline. It was devised and adopted independently by a number of prominent employee bloggers. While not formally sanctioned, it nonetheless offers good advice to those wishing to blog about CBC/Radio-Canada, or to those wishing to carry out any similar self-publishing activity.
I don’t mind CBC having a blogging policy.
I asked for one, more than a year ago, and got no answer. So did others.
I don’t mind following blogging guidelines. After getting no answer from CBC, I helped write my own.
I don’t even object to most of the line items in the “Personal Blogging - Guidelines for CBC/Radio-Canada Employees” document that was leaked out yesterday. A lot of them are common sense.
But I really, really resent the way this document came about. To wit: it was crafted behind closed doors, in secret, without any consultation with the people who know and care most about it, without any heed to industry best practices, without any transparency or public input.
That’s a pre-lockout mindset, and it coughed up a Web 1.0 policy that makes everyone look foolish. And that, in my opinion, is more damaging than anything any CBC blogger has ever said or done.
The document
The CBC’s blogging guidelines have not been officially distributed, although I have a copy of it. I suspect it wasn’t quite ready for primetime, and a few people have probably had their long weekends ruined as a result of the leak. Especially after it got BoingBoinged.
What’s the document say? After a preamble about the importance of the internet and the rise of blogging, the document states that blogging (and, of note, other self-publishing including podcasting) must be done according to the new guidelines, “if the content clearly associates them with CBC/Radio-Canada.”
Nobody understands what that means. The document later states that:
Blogs or websites which do not identify the bloggers as a CBC/Radio-Canada employee, do not discuss CBC/Radio-Canada and are purely about personal matters would normally fall outside these guidelines.
The ambiguity over what counts as “associating” yourself with CBC, and what counts as “discussing” CBC is worrying, and perhaps purposeful. (If I list myself as “a journalist who works for a Canadian national public broadcaster”, is that identification? Couldn’t you just look me up? What if it’s on my CV? What if I accidentally mention that I was in an elevator with Luba Goy? Can I talk about the bathroom stalls any more? Can I review a Dr. Who episode?)
If you determine you might be associated with CBC or might talk about your employer, there are a number of bullet points to follow. And I have to say most of them are common sense, and simply reiterate the rules CBC journalists already have to follow. Conduct yourself in accordance with your contract, HR policies, and the Journalistic Standards and Practices. Don’t waste CBC time or channels. CBC work belongs to CBC. And so on.
There’s a little confusion over the edict to avoid partisan politics and “controversy”, but that’s all in the JS&P already – a worthy, sensible document, though it could use a little internet-age revision.
The part that’s going to raise hell is the twice-repeated claim that “to start and maintain a blog of this kind, you need your supervisor’s approval.”
I don’t know if that’s legal, enforceable, constitutional or smart. Part of me wants to call a lawyer, call the union, call the Electronic Frontier Foundation to find out. I did consult a professional ethicist who drafts policies like these for a living, and his first impression was not positive. (He promises to weigh in shortly weighs in here with some interesting points.)
But my point is that all these calls should have already been made – by CBC, not by me.
A year late
See, the explosion of CBC employee blogging happened during the 2005 lockout, a time we’d all rather put behind us. Simply put, on the street level PR front, CBC management got it’s ass handed to it on a platter.
And to their credit they made some moves to get with the program: They launched an official blog and hired the most effective locked-out blogger to run it. They cleared the path for official CBC blogs and made an extraordinary push into podcasting. They sent out RFPs for Web 2.0 tools for CBC.ca, explored TV shows with civic input. And they talked a lot about nimbleness, transparency and collaboration. You can argue about the results, but the ship seemed to be headed in the right direction.
I started blogging a few months later, and tried to find out what rules I needed to follow. I asked a manager, a union rep and other bloggers, and nobody knew. Not only was there no official policy, but it appeared (rightly) that none would be coming for a long time.
So a bunch of us got together to write our own guidelines. We called it the CBC Blogging Manifesto (mostly in jest) but really it was just a statement of principles, designed to clarify what we thought was important. It started with:
Use common sense and don’t do anything stupid. Blog to make the CBC better, not to kill it. There are plenty of others who want to do that for us.
I guess the manifesto failed, though. Because what we really wanted was for CBC policy makers to read it and think of it as starting point when they eventually crafted an official policy. We hoped it would open the door to a conversation with people who care deeply about both blogging and the corporation. We hoped that maybe someday, someone might want to talk.
But they didn’t.
Instead, exactly one year later, the management version leaked out, without any conversation at all. It came from somewhere within the Editor in Chief’s office (though I don’t know if it came from the acting or outgoing EIC) and it was distributed somehow (but not to bloggers) by my boss’s boss, then leaked, then clarified as “guidelines” [update: then clarified as “draft guidelines”.] I suppose if I ever receive it through official channels, I’ll have to toe the line, if anyone knows where it is.
I don’t have a problem with that. It’s management’s right - they make the rules, and I’ll do what I’m told. I always do. But MAN! Talk about a wasted opportunity for some good PR, some good advice, and some goodwill.
Outside the box
Here’s what progressive companies do, the ones that understand technology, value employees and care about communication.
They take risks, like Sun Microsystems did.
Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. We need to do a better job of telling the world. As of now, you are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first …. By speaking directly to the world, without benefit of management approval, we are accepting higher risks in the interest of higher rewards….The real goal isn’t to get everyone at Sun blogging, it’s to become part of the industry conversation.
Being a part of the industry conversation seems like something CBC desperately wants.
Same thing happened at IBM more than two years ago:
IBM today is publishing an announcement on its Intranet site encouraging all 320,000+ employees world wide to consider engaging actively in the practice of “blogging”. This move follows several years of persistent grassroots efforts by an informal community of IBM bloggers. Technical leaders like Sam Ruby, Grady Booch, Robert Sutor and business leaders like Ed Brill and Catherine Helzerman have played a very significant role in this effort by providing excellent models for other IBMers to follow. Behind the scenes, a small handful of technical innovators developed and deployed an internal blogging service that has grown in a period of just 18 months to just shy of 9,000 registered users spanning 65 countries….
My godfathers, is the nation’s broadcaster really less progressive with communications than Big Blue?
It has always shocked the hell out of me that in a corporation of 10,000 people, all focused on communications, there are less than two dozen who run blogs under their own names. Maybe now I know why. Maybe my wife was right, and I should have never stuck out my neck. I thought I had proved her wrong when CBC Communications said they liked my work enough to let me fill in on the official CBC blog. Maybe not.
Maybe we should all blog anonymously, neatly sidestepping this policy. Then we can say whatever we want, like we did during the lockout. Lord knows that will reflect more positively on the corporation, right? We all saw what that world was like. Drive everyone underground and create a dozen little CBC Drones and Tea Makers.
Do we even need a policy? Has someone blogged the secret sauce recipe, and needs to be Dooced?
Or could we have just trusted people to use their brains and follow existing policies? Just days before his death, the late David Bazay, then CBC Ombudsman, wrote this on the subject. (He was responding to an anonymous blogger.)
If public broadcasters are to become bloggers I would hope that they would exercise their freedom of speech exactly the way they are compelled to exercise it within the CBC: with accuracy, fairness and integrity, with the responsible speech of CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices that has helped make this place one of the great places in the world where the citizen can be well informed.
That just about makes me want to cry. Whatever happened to those guys who trusted their employees and thought they might – just might – be able to inform people and reflect well on the corporation?
————
Update: According to CBC acting Editor in Chief Esther Enkin, the document circulated was “an early draft of proposed policies” which was “inadvertently passed on”. No specific corporate policies relating directly to blogging are in effect, though other policies still apply. Blogging rules may be coming in the future, and they may take some of this reaction into account.
It occurs to me that it was a year ago this month that I began this foray into blogging. Every blogger I know marks such anniversaries with some sort of lame lookback or “clip show” of their highlights and lowlights - I’m not going to bore you with much of that, but I will pause a moment, then move on.
My first actual blog post came on June 18, 2006, on an anonymous test blog I created called Chairman Mayo. Not much came of it, though it did launch my uneasy fascination with gazillionaire chairman Mayo Shattuck III. (Congratulate him too, I see he followed my lead and got his own web domain too. Once I build a nuclear reactor, look after Bin Laden’s money and marry a cheerleader, we’ll be even.)
Chairman Mayo lasted exactly three posts, after which time I realized there was no point in trying to maintain anonymity, and I stepped into the light under my own name. My first real blog post was on July 11, 2006, a piddly entry called “Does every blog start with ‘Welcome to my blog?’”
There have been some interesting steps and missteps along the way: pissing off a Web 2.0 guru on day 10, switching to WordPress, co-authoring the CBC Blogging Manifesto, hammering out a few obits, spoofing my employer and blogging about toilets.
And here I am, exactly 200 posts later - better than a post every other day, which isn’t so bad, plus another 76 posts for Inside the CBC. Also (though you’d never know it thanks to Akismet spam filtering) some 20,936 spam entries aimed at my blog comments fields. Check the ratio on that: more than 10 bits of crap targetted at every one bit of crap I crank out.
Another number that I appreciate: 483 legit reader comments, more than two per entry. I want to thank everyone who took the time to say their bit - they’ll never admit it, but you have no idea how badly bloggers crave comments and feeback to justify their time expenditures. Thanks very much, and keep them coming.
Oh, and I still boast the tidy number of posts read by my wife: zero, and holding. That’s probably a good thing too.
Here’s to doubling all those numbers for next year, including the last one.
On that note, I’m hoping to pick up the pace a bit over the next few weeks. I’ve got a dozen ideas in draft form, and I’ll be reintroducing a number of regular features I created in the early days of this blog. I’m kicking that off with a week-long series called “CBC Signage of the Apocalypse.” Should be good fun. Thanks for reading!
For the next week, I’ll once again be at the helm of the offical CBC blog, InsideTheCBC.com, while Tod Maffin is away. If you have any CBC-related ideas I should write about, please let me know.
I love this gig - what blogger wouldn’t like to get paid for it? - but it has its amusing pitfalls. Last time I filled it, I got called a “corporate lapblogger”, and I believe the current description of the job is “strange arm’s length sycophancy” (link, if you’re on Facebook.)
“I’m not here to boost my traffic,” Gorbould tells reporters
Taking his cue from Stephen Harper, Canadian blogger Paul Gorbould touched down unannounced in Afghanistan Tuesday to see first-hand what blogging is like in the war-ravaged country, and to meet with Afghan mommy blogger Habiba Qarqeen.
The surprise two-day visit began Tuesday morning in the capital Kabul, where Gorbould immediately live-blogged a cute anecdote about his children back home, and wrote an item on the state of Afghanistan’s toilets.
During an unattended news conference at the Kabul Circuit City, Gorbould reaffirmed his commitment to posting meaningless polls and pontificating on the minutia of CBC policies. He called the mission, “Canada’s least important foreign policy endeavour… but still.”
He also reiterated his belief that Canadian blogging was “of universal interest, and might inspire the people of Afghanistan to… um, improve.”
Motives questioned
Gorbould dismissed suggestions that his trip was a response to waning site traffic, telling the empty room: “I’m not here because of Sitemeter. I’m here because it’s the right thing to do.”
Gorbould’s message won him accolades from all three of Afghanistan’s civilian bloggers: Qarqeen, whose 11-month old son Ahman has recently learned to walk; university student and Battlestar Galactica afficionado Farooq Fahim, and British hostage Wesley Anderton Jr.
“We appreciate this show of support from the Canadian blogging community,” Fahim said. “We’re just not sure why he’s here. I mean, he seemed nice on the internet, but we really could have done all this on MSN.”
Qarqeen was more optimistic. “By tomorrow, or the next day, there will be some pictures of Paul and Ahman and me on my Flickr,” Qarqeen said. “And I’ve friended him on Facebook.”
“Get me the hell out before I’m beheaded on YouTube,” added Anderton.
Gorbould has committed to blogging until at least the summer holidays. The visit follows a week of heavy criticism about his sporadic and uninteresting blog entries. A key theme of opposition attacks is that, in terms of his subject matter, nobody gives a shit.
Trip shrouded in secrecy
In the 11 months he has been blogging, Gorbould has never been to Afghanistan, nor has he in fact mentioned the troubled nation. He did write an item about Kazakhstan once, in response to seeing the movie Borat.
Although Gorbould has given few travel details “for security reasons”, he wife has said she expects him back “pronto, or I’m taking the kids.” She later added, “He’s such an ass.”
Gorbould spared no effort to keep his surprise two-day trip shrouded in secrecy. His wife says she found out when she found the box labelled “summer sandals” open on the basement floor, and noticed the lack of dishes in the sink. She says she’s still not sure how to explain his absence to his three-year-old daughter, who has begun asking where “the tall grown-up” is.
CBC coworkers similarly had no idea he was overseas. At 11:15 Tuesday morning, his boss wandered by his desk and looked puzzled. By 3 p.m., his new office chair had been “claimed” by another writer.
Messages to Gorbould’s Hotmail account were not immediately answered.
I’m proud to say I’ve received my first blog award, such as it is.
Matthew Caverhill of the wonderful pop culture blog Culture Kills… wait, I mean cutlery has awarded me the Thinking Blogger Award, and I couldn’t be more grateful, even with this accompanying text:
Gor[b]: Paul Gorbould is a digital archivist for the CBC, and having access to that much information warps a brain. That warping has resulted in an entertaining and thought-provoking blog.
I’ll take warped and entertaining any day! Here are the rules for the Thinking Blogger Award:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.
I’m all for shiny badges, but the best part of this award is the opportunity to recognize five other bloggers who make me think. In the words of the meme’s creator, “Please, remember to tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all - blogs that really get you thinking!”
I’m adding my own stipulation, that I’d like to avoid tagging anyone already tagged, nor mention those all-star mega blogs that everyone knows about anyways. And I’ve resisted the urge to choose the people I’m most fond of, or the blogs I read most often - though all five are tied to the Canadian media.
Denis McGrath’s Dead Things on Sticks
Denis is a Toronto-based TV writer who writes not only for TV, but about TV. He gives an insider’s view of the industry without being insiderish; his posts are long without being ponderous – and he’s damned funny. Plus, the dude wrote Top Gun! The Musical. Now that’s gotta be thought-provoking. I was late to discover Denis – he seemed to be on everyone else’s blogroll, but I never got around to seeing what the fuss was about. Now I know. Nobody writes so effortlessly about Canada’s role in the flood of American media… I sort of think that if he had been named the next chairman of the CBC, everything would be OK.
Joe Clark’s Fawny.org
It’s probably not easy sharing the name of a former (and brief) Canadian prime minister. But accessibility advocate Joe Clark has been so vocal online that he’s managed to surpass his political namesake in Google rank. That’s saying something. And Joe has a lot to say – from web accessibility to public spaces to architecture to the over-use of Arial, Joe is Toronto’s harshest critic on… well, almost everything. He can be condescending, irascible, and sometimes downright irritating, but he’s usually right. And he fights the good fight, for a more aesthetic and equitable environment, real and online.
Alphonse Ouimet’s The Tea Makers
Ouimet – not his or her real name – became the stuff of legend during the 2005 CBC lockout. While management battened down the hatches in the PR war against its employees, one mystery manager broke the silence and blogged it like they saw it. Equally critical of management and unions, it became required reading for everyone even remotely interested in the CBC, and still is. It’s always “an exercise in tough love”, and speaking frankly about your employer can be a challenge. But there’s no questioning the fact that The Teamakers is about making CBC better.
Dan Misener’s DanMisener.com
Dan is a producer for CBC radio who makes podcasts and satellite radio, plays in a band and started a local reading series called Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids. He doesn’t blog terribly often, but when he does it’s usually thoughtful and forward thinking. I’m not sure why we don’t know each other.
John Gushue’s John Gushue…Dot Dot Dot
John works for CBC in Newfoundland, and his blog deserves a lot more recognition than it gets. When I started blogging, this was the blog I considered “best of show” for the crowd I run with. His quick and frequent updates suit the medium much better than the infrequent and overwrought style I developed; though his entries are not long, I always learn something new. Or something old – John shares my interest in history, as seen in his “Daily Dot” quick hits of today in history. Plus, he has a whole series of “A thought on”, so I think it counts as thought provoking.
Congratulations to all five of you!
I read a great story today, accompanied by a greater picture, about a real estate dispute going on in Chongqing, China. The house in this picture is referred to as the “nail house”, because it’s so hard to remove.
It seems that while 280 neighbours sold their land to this real estate developer, one family is holding out - for a rumoured $2.5 million (a different article claims the owner is demanding an apartment of equivalent size in the new building.) They’ve been without water or power for two years. If you check out the first link, be sure to read the comments - there’s not as much sympathy for the owners as one might expect.
The blog Peering Into The Interior has transcribed an interview with Ms. Wu Ping, who owns the holdout property, including some spectacular photos. And check out this link for a picture of what happens when a “nail house” holds out forever.
What’s interesting about this story is that it’s both universal - fights between developers and property owners happen everywhere - and peculiar to China, where for the first time since 1949, legislators are debating protecting personal property rights. (All land in China is the property of the state.) The issue is so sensitive that the influential independent biweekly Chinese business magazine Caijing was mysteriously pulled from the shelves.
Ah yes, that’s Chinese media, old school.
China may be making strides to open up, but it’s got a long way to go - particularly on the internet. Of the seven links I posted above, four have been censored and are unavailable in China.
In his very amusing post Me vs. the World, Sinister Dan points to a site called the Great Firewall of China, which lets you plug in a URL to see if it’s reachable inside China.
He even extended the courtesy of checking my blog, and found that it has not been censored:
![gor[b] in China](http://www.gorbould.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/gorby_in_china.jpg)
In typical fashion, STD explains my blog access as follows:
Since Paul works for the CBC, this was actually fairly predictable. One centralized tool of cultural oppression could hardly pick on the employee of another.
His blog, on the other hand, is blocked. His best guess is that he made an earlier post containing the phrase “Mao was a Stupid, Fat Hobbit“.
Now, I may be a tool of cultural oppression (hell, that might get put into my Technorati blog description!) but I did once mock up a photo of Mao on a jar of mayonnaise. But I guess that’s OK in the new China.
Getting blocked seems to be a bit of a badge of honour - I’ll have to come up with something more offensive, so I can get the big red boot. Or perhaps I can try to see how long I can hold out, like good old Ms. Wu, and become a “nail blog”.
Not that it matters - I don’t seem to get much traffic from China. In the past 24 hours I’ve had visitors from Kuala Lumpur, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Utrecht, Almaty, Victoria, Limburg, Poznan, Istanbul and Nantes, but nothing from the People’s Republic. I long for the opportunity to disappoint that fifth of the world as well.
A brief prayer of thanksgiving to the tech gods before I resume my usual blather (and no, this isn’t one of those “sponsored posts” - ick.)
Akismet, an indispensable spam-catcher for blogs, has now protected my blog from exactly 3,000 form spam comments - spambots that attempt to post junk messages in the comments area of this blog and others.
Sometimes these are obvious spam, like you get in your e-mail - links to porn sites, diet pills, etc. Sometimes they are more clever - the comments say something like, “Great information! I like your site design” - but the user name links back to a spam website. Sometimes they contain rather racy (and sometimes funny) jokes, then a link to spam.
Akismet is a filter that comes with WordPress which recognizes these comments as spam, and quarantines them for you. As you verify whether or not something is really spam, it learns from your decisions and becomes uncannily accurate.
According to their official stats, Akismet has caught almost one billion spams (and, on the down side, 53 million legitimate messages.) Their numbers indicate that 95 per cent of all comments are spam.
On my site, Akismet has a better success ratio: Of the 3,000 comments it caught, perhaps 10 were not spam, and it allowed perhaps three spam comments onto my blog. And those were early on - it doesn’t make many mistakes any more (though it seems to frequently mark Peter J’s comments for moderation because he often includes multiple links, which I appreciate.)
(By the way, Maxpower has a very interesting blog post about what happens when Akismet incorrectly thinks you are a spammer and sends you to “spam jail” - and how this knowledge could be used for evil.)
In the meantime, I’m afraid you’ll continue to miss out on entries like the following, which were repelled today:
penus enlargement
veagra
farmacology
Hi.. like your sit, congrats !!
huyaks
services of the lawyer
22 lady leg plus
sexy ebony hoe
womens coolmax underwear
Please, do not delete the given message. Money obtained from spam will go to the help hungry to children uganda
Intresting information about teeny angels model.
The bass head tab talking
Eye of adult female furry art
Your guestbook is example of middle-class guestbooks. Congratulation!
Just Who Has Strong Heart Can Enter This Wonderful Site…WWERAW
Approved articles about topless totty.
But I’m sure you can find other sites for that without much difficulty.
Guess who’s back
Back again
Ouimet’s back
Tell a friend.
.
.
.
.
I got burned by a colleague today. I came back from lunch to find this photocopy of a New Yorker cartoon sitting on my desk:
So I glance it over, and I’m immediately surprised to see mention of the CBC. Most American media don’t know we exist, and their reading public certainly don’t.
Then I read the rest - weird smells, raccoons… HEY! That’s stuff I write about!
For a full five seconds, I contemplated the absurd possibility that a cartoonist had chosen my lame blog to typify all lame blogs… and then immediately realized I’d been had. It is, as should be obvious to anyone less vainglorious and feebleminded, a doctored caption. The original read as follows:
“You want my latest opinion about the President? How about my opinion of Japanes enzyme baths. Or breakfast wraps - you need to hear what I have to say about breakfast wraps!”
She matched the font all right, though the missing endquotes should have tipped me off. The best part about it is that, for all my efforts at photoshopping, this gag was done the old fashioned way, with scissors and scotch tape. Can’t beat the classics.
But I will, colleague. I will…..
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