Wasn’t that some fun we had yesterday? Got a bit of notice from the Romenesko link … visitor count quadrupled but the numbers are still a dribble: 160 visits Wednesday, 640 on Thursday. My gut feeling is people are sick of hearing about bloggers and their run-ins with their bosses. I’m sure I got double that number from previous Romenesko links to previous sites.
The good news is that Clay’s got his site back up. Jeff of Side Salad sent me a link to another blog he calls The Hammock — it’s a bunch of writing/editing related stuff for the people in his reporting team. I’ll add that to the rail today.
Dan Gillmor, the Merc’s technology columnist, posted a link to yesterday’s earliest post and seemed to have missed the part where I said “I don’t know anything yet,” because his blog said I reported the Trib forced three bloggers to close their sites (hey, we bloggers are always in a hurry). And a Canadian newsie reported that on his blog too. But: in both cases readers of their blogs corrected the record based on later posts here and at Dave’s site. Two advertisements for the Comments feature.
Over at Newsdesigner, somebody posted a comment detailing some of the things that might’ve got Daily Dave in trouble. An excerpt:
A synopsis of what was deleted (trying to leave these vague):
* Posts that seem to have mentioned things like “his mood improved once he left work” — a bit surprising
* A ‘transcript’/synopsis of a phone conversation at work. (Still Tampa property even if the editors didn’t see fit to print this ‘product’, fair enough)
* A reprint of his story prior to editing (this seems quite fair, it is the company’s intelectual property and can be treated as such)
So, a summation for all those who didn’t follow along: Daily Dave, a business reporter at the Tampa Trib, ran afoul of his bosses when they found out what he had been posting at his blog and said he would post no more. Within 24 hours two Trib co-workers closed their blogs as well. The second, Side Salad, was closed in a fit of pique over an unrelated matter, its owner told me. The third saw two of his co-workers’ sites down, assumed the worst and closed his before anybody came looking for him. First thing yesterday morning, I counted three Trib bloggers’ sites down, did the math and figured the Trib must have some grand plan to bring all its bloggers in-house or something. What else could’ve explained such a confluence of events? All sorts of things, it turned out.
So now we’re back to being actively ignored by the rest of the world. I’m reasonably certain Daily Dave knew the day would come when his bosses would drag him in for a talking-to, and his plan was to make hay while the sun wasn’t shining.
There’s still a faint odor of cowtowing to The Man in all this. It’s not like Dave’s audience was large enough to do even a pinprick of damage to the mighty Trib colossus. Most bloggers are lucky to have 100 visitors a day, and I doubt Dave’s traffic was much different. Why shut down a guy who’s shouting to such a tiny crowd? I guess because they don’t want anybody else to get the crazy idea that there’s anything called Freedom of Speech when speaking of one’s employer.