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By Steve Brearton
Illustration: Seth
Blogging: priceless?
With more than 34 million blogs worldwide and counting, you might think that some blogs somewhere
are getting people into trouble at work. And you’d be right.
1 Number of posts on Jeremy Wright’s blog that precipitated his being fired from
his job at Winnipeg, Manitoba’s Health Sciences Centre in 2005. The entry read, in part, “Getting to blog for
three hours while being paid: priceless.” Wright went on to be a consultant with multinationals on
blogging.
5 Years since US Web designer and graphic artist Heather Armstrong became one of
the first employees to be fired from her job because she lampooned her dot-com employer at dooce.com, her
online journal. Today, to be “dooced” is synonymous with losing one’s job because of something one wrote on
the Internet.
6 Months after starting, Penny Cholmondeley was fired from her job at Nunavut
Tourism in 2004. The tourism board was reacting to posts on the high cost of groceries, bad restaurants and
garbage on the tundra.
10 Approximate audience for Toronto blogger Matthew Brown’s online journal about
his life and work as a supervisor at Starbucks. Brown, a six-year employee, was fired for posting what he
considered“legitimate complaints about being mistreated as an employee” on the same day he was to start
management training.
30 Number of days leading up to January’s federal election during which Mike Klander,
executive vice-president of the Liberal Party of Canada in Ontario, suspended his online journal after
several posts were revealed to critique NDP candidates in an unacceptably tasteless manner. Klander also
resigned from his post with the Liberal party.
 95
Percentage of potential blogging-related employment disputes that can be avoided by communicating
expectations regarding online journals and other electronic communication by employees, according to
Vancouver lawyer Michael Wagner.
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