An exec at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has publicly disclaimed the controversial "blogging guidelines" that leaked last week, saying that they are only a draft.
Last week, I posted about an internal memo on blogging policy at the CBC that set out harsh guidelines for bloggers. It said that anyone who was identified as a CBC employee (from on-air people to janitors) had to get permission to start or maintain a blog, and to refrain from "advocating for a group of a cause." This is violation of Canadian labor laws (at minimum, employees are allowed to advocate for their union during contract negotiations) and likely a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Now, the CBC's acting Editor in Chief of News, Esther Enkin, has sent a public memo to the InsideTheCBC blog saying that the guidelines were only a discussion draft and do not represent CBC policy. This is great news, though as a draft, this is still pretty disturbing — who thought it would be a good idea to indiscriminately muzzle CBC employees' blogs in the first place?
I emailed Jon Dube, an award-winning online journalism pioneer and Director of Digital Programming at CBC.ca, whom Enkin had identified as having distributed the memo to some of his staff. He replied:
When I forwarded them, I noted that they were not a change in policy, just simply guidelines intended to clarify how our existing journalistic, HR and other policies apply to personal blogging, since folks have asked about that. Those journalistic and HR policies are generally in sync with other reputable media companies, such as The New York Times and NPR. And as Esther Enkin, our acting editor in chief, mentioned on InsideCBC.com, the guidelines are a work in progress.
Many of our employees do blog — including myself and a number of journalists on my staff. I'm not aware of any desire or attempt on the part of anyone in CBC management to clamp down on blogging. I hope that the discussion about these draft guidelines don't create that impression: blogging can be a great form of expression.
It might be worth noting that we've also embraced blogging on CBC.ca in the past two years, launching blogs by our correspondents and two excellent ones aimed at greater transparency, the Editor in Chief's Inside Media blog and Tod Maffin's InsideCBC.com blog.
It's true that the CBC has some excellent official blogs — and great online stuff in general. Let's hope that this "discussion draft" gets "discussed" into a deep pit, and something more reasonable is proffered in its place.
