The fact that one of your motivations for your actions was that “it was easy” — this is one of the most frightening things about how badly you’ve misunderstood your role. It’s “easy” to do a great many things with the information people leave in your hands. And though it may not have been your conscious intent to flaunt your vengeful might, it was extremely clear in your language.

People who attack others just because they can are known as trolls. And they are still trolls, even when they have the power to delete comments and ruin lives. For the sake of your readers — and for your own sake — I truly hope you’re sleeping less well at night.

Kurt,

You could have simply set the blog so that it would hold this specific IP address in moderation.

Then, if anybody else from that IP address leaves a comment, including the original commenter, you could decide whether or not to approve that comment.

This would take less time than picking up the phone, snitching on the school employee and forwarding them the email.

So you are wrong when you say that blocking the IP address would have blocked anybody else from the school in accessing the site.

I would hope that a techno guru as yourself would know this fact.

In Wordpress, which I know you are using, it’s a matter of going to the “Discussion” page in your admin settings. And the rest should be self-explanatory.

Despite what you say now, you did come across as gloating. That is evident by your headline, “Post a vulgar comment while you’re at work, lose your job.”

In other words, mess with me and I’ll mess with you worse.

You caused a man to lose his job over a petty word he used that was meant as a joke. And your gloating continued with your comments on that same post.

Whether you violated the company’s privacy policy can be determined by lawyers. But you most certainly violated the confidentiality between the newspaper and its readers.

You owe your readers and especially that man a public apology.

You’ve managed to earn your paper a nomination for Internet Villain of the Year. Congratulations.

“Did I reveal private information? No. I had none to reveal and wouldn’t have if I had it.”

Sorry, Kurt, but you are absolutely tone deaf on this. You can try to explain it away all you want, but the fact that a journalist can’t see that they crossed a huge privacy line here is just stunning. You absolutely did reveal private information, because no one else but you and other stltoday.com admins had access to the IP information. The school would never have known that the comment came from the school unless you revealed the private information you had access to.

Thanks for the explanation.
It clears up my issues with the situation.
(hope it helps others, but they seem to be harder sells…..)

I respect this post, but when alerting the school what did you expect them to do? Any company, schools included, can easily trace this information. Couldn’t your employer easily trace your activity and e-mail? I thought that was common knowledge. You alerting the school, revealed him and forced him to resign. I think you and STLToday can take some ownership here. Yes, you clearly should have walked around the news room and thought about it more.

I have to say I find those who take offense at your actions a bit hmmmm interesting to say the least. The person posted vulgarity, of his free choice, not once which was then deleted but a 2nd time. The person used a school computer. The schools rep is at stake, they took the time to trace the user. The person resigned. So why shoot the messenger? Where’s the outrage over an adult who should know better acting better. People need to understand we have control over our actions, but no control over consequences once we make our choices. The individual did not have to use vulgar language a 2nd time. They did not have to use a computer that was not their own and when confronted chose to resign. Pointing blame at Kurt is a joke

Whatever helps you sleep at night.

Mr.Greenbaum-You say all the “should have-could have” things that could have been done,but than did the totally wrong thing.Look like the stress from the soon to be gone Post-Dispatch is getting to you.Time to cash in on some of your vacation time.

“I agree we are committed to working as hard as we can to foster and encourage discussion on STLtoday”

Perhaps that would be more evident if your paper or you hadn’t also closed comments on the story itself.

Why not admit you crossed a line,give a full apology and agree not to do it again, and finally, try to help this guy get his job back before the holidays? And I think most would disagree with your statement that you didn’t violate the mans privacy by journalistic standards, if not by your comments policy.

Editor’s response: Lisa, Kurt did not close comments on the story; I did. And I closed them because some posters began posting comments that were nothing but vulgarities, slang terms for anatomy, and the words that started this whole mess in the first place. It was obviously going to continue in that vein. Thanks.
Amanda St. Amand.

No wonder newspapers are failing. You are supposed to be the head of the social media department yet remain so clearly out of touch.

Your actions are reflected by the underwhelming response on this particular post. I am guessing the people do not want to post for fear they may offend you or whatever other thoughtpolice find something to be vulgar or offensive. I am on my own personal laptop, so I can be relatively fearless, however, the whole incident is going to create a very chilling effect on this entire stltoday website.

I think you owe a huge apology to your readers and hope that it dries up and goes away. It is very difficult to put the genie back into the bottle once it has popped out

Mr. Greebaum,
You were definitely in the wrong here. Not because it isn’t within your right to ban someone from posting on your site but because you are punishing someone for exercising their right to free speech. What you are entitled to is to keep that person from off of your site, but you were not entitled (merely for using profanity) entitled to having this person lose their job. If all of us were to be held to that standard, most of the American population would be unemployed. I understand that being glib, happy, or vengeful may not have been your intention but it is how you came off. You should have been more mature and responsible in the way you handled this situation. I think you had knee jerk reaction to the post and in my mind, that doesn’t make you any more mature then the fool who posted it. I’m not saying this person was right for doing it, I’m just saying you are no better.

This is really an unfortunate incident and there is plenty of blame to go around. What it comes down to Kurt is that two people made an error in judgement but only one gets to keep their job. Because you’ve the means and opportunity to explain yourself, Kurt, I can understand your thought process. I wonder though, what keeps you from acting on some of the hateful and violent comments I’ve read on this website? As for the unfortunate individual who crossed the line, I can only assume they did so because he or she was under the illusion of anonymity. They thought they were protected and they were not. I think the PD is very reponsible for the deteriation of this type of media format. I’d like to see real reform and a commitment to reasonable, respectful discussion. No more lip service!

This is quite a legalistic explanation that you are providing. You claim you didn’t “hunt someone down,” yet you thought calling the school would provide a “teachable moment”. How, exactly, did you expect anyone to be taught without some sleuthing?

Consider that no matter your protestations, your actions led directly to the identification of an anonymous poster and his “resignation” (or as everyone else in the known universe understands it — “termination”).

Regarding STLtoday’s privacy policy: you stated that you forwarded the Wordpress email alert to the school. That alert contained the poster’s IP address. Of course the school knew it’s own IP address but if you sent that email and the “meager information” it contained, then you violated the privacy policy.

If STLtoday truly wants to signal to the community that they take their privacy policy seriously, then they should accept your resignation immediately.

“Did I reveal private information? No. I had none to reveal and wouldn’t have if I had it.” What a hoot. In the very next sentence, you then talk about calling the school and revealing the information. You can say you didn’t reveal the actual IP address and dance around the issue all you want, but the truth is, you thought you would be clever by doing this in the first place and it backfired.

You made a huge error. Own up to it and admit that you crossed the line. You’ll maybe get back some of the respect you lost over this.

Post a vulgar word, lose your job. Violate your readers trust, keep on blogging, baby.

Two points.

You’re using WordPress to run this blog. There are currently more than 7000 plugins for WordPress, and many people who could help write or customize one if you couldn’t find one or more existing plugins that would help you with the deluge of idiots who make up the majority of internet comment posters.

And as for this bit:

“Could I have banned the IP address? Yes, but that would have prevented anyone from the school from visiting our site. That’s a step we preferred not to take.”

That’s a load of garbage. It is trivial to ban commenting or require comment moderation for an IP address without banning anyone from that IP from ‘visiting your site.’

You should work harder on using technology to help mitigate your technical/social commenter problem and less hard on making up transparently false excuses for your behaviour.

You clearly don’t get it. Sometimes if everyone is telling you you’re wrong, you may actually be wrong. The fact is that your privacy policy says “We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information.” No matter how you try to spin it, that’s exactly what you did. Saying that the IP address, time posted, and content of the comment is not “individual user information” is simply sophistry.

It’s not the P-D’s privacy policy where the privacy issue was violated, but rather the issue of notifying someone’s employer about something the employer would almost certainly never have found out about otherwise. Capish? Many people will be chilled by this because to many people, that vulgar term is WAY more socially acceptable than a lot of the garbage that gets posted on the P-D every day. So how will we know if we’re going to randomly get reported to our employer? We don’t. What’s to stop a political blogger from reporting me if I express a political opinion he disapproves of, or thinks my employer would disapprove of? Nothing.

You need to go a little further here Kurt. Where’s the apology? Do you think you’re the Fonz?

“I’m sorr-rrr–rrrrr….I’m sorrr-rrrr-rrrrrr”

Not buying it. This all seems forced and to prepared. Did your boss give you what for on this? Did he remind you that newspapers are a dying industry and laying you off would be viewed as a cost saving measure? Was this a statement prepared by the PD’s lawyers practicing a little CYA? Was the PD getting calls from other media outlets?

Until the actual, “I’m sorry” is said, you’re still on the hook.

In re: commenter Bruce and others - it is entirely possible that a business organization with many - even thousands of - users are all behind one single IP address. My own organization is like this. You - on the outside - can’t pinpoint a single computer because we all share the same IP. So banning anyone at my IP address bans everyone. My IT dept. can narrow it down to a single computer because they can use their own logs, but the P-D cannot.

Also, commenters’ IP addresses are not posted on your blog. That makes them *private information*. So if you told the school that the comment was posted from one of their IPs, then you revealed private information, no matter how many times you say you didn’t.

Kurt you have no ethical standing on this issue. To say you didnt provide any personal information is at best disingenuous and at worst a blatant lie. You sound like the typical public figure caught doing something they shouldnt, you try and rationalize your way around it through technicalities. “The school knows its own IP address” really thats your defense, what does that even mean.

You knowingly tried to out somebody for their comments on this site. If you and the PD can legally claim to not have violated your privacy policy than all that does is show how weak of a privacy policy you have to begin with. Your readers should be aware that there is a chance they become outted too, no matter what precedents you claim havent been set.

I will make a small leap and estimate that 99% of people with internet access at work violate their companies internet agreement in one form or another. It may not be vulgar in nature but a violation none the less. We do not need “do gooders”, “vengence seekers”, or “stiffs” outting us to our employers.

You should learn from Obama that people don’t need you to impose “teachable moments” on them.

I am not a PD reader i dont live anywhere close to Missouri. I heard about this through another site and frankly was absolutely appalled(for lack of a more obscene word) at your actions. It blew me away that something like this could actually go down on an internet message board.

Jenniferwhatnot: The point is that banning an IP from *commenting* is not the same as banning an IP from *viewing*, a distinction that our “Social Media Director” here is apparently too clueless technologically to grasp.

Ah, comrade Greenbaum. As First commissar of the people’s political oversite committee let me be the first to congratulate you on you informing on a fellow citizen.

Don’t you feel better now that you’ve cost this dissenter his/her job? You will sleep well tonight comrade and the people’s revolutionary movement will go forward.

Your are Big Brother and you are watching–now aren’t you?

By the way, through what filter and bias, do you get to define, “intolerant speech” ? Do you think filtering your version of so-called “intolerant speech” from a leftist politically correct perspective, is allowing freedom of speech to all, including those that don’t subscribe to the brainwashing and indoctrination of political correctness?

No, I’m not talking about allowing vulgar language, but I am talking about you censoring comments that your particular social, political, and/or religious bias may find personally offensive..

That is,in fact censorship and goes against the grain of the principles of American freedoms, and freedom of speech…

While banning this person from your blog may have been appropriate,(or not),you actually calling this person’s workplace adn ‘informing” on them I find reprehensible, creepy, adn actually quite scary…

Big Brother is truly watching….

“Your trust is paramount. I did not and would not violate our privacy policy.”

Kurt, would it be a trustworthy act to “turn in” one of your posters to their employer/hosting provider, because you did not like their language use?

Would you want that done to you?

Trust: you handed over all the information you had about the anonymous poster to the organization who owned the IP he posted from. Newspapers and news websites typically protect the source of their news and anonymous commentary.

Not in this case. You violated your readers’ trust by policing one of them back to their place of employment, resulting in immediate loss of his job.

What other characterization could we possibly give to that? Arrogant, going by this post. “Snitch” is another.

Another poster wrote:

“No wonder newspapers are failing. You are supposed to be the head of the social media department yet remain so clearly out of touch.”

Kurt, you severely mishandled this and offered a lukewarm apology and explanation. Are you sure, as the director of SOCIAL MEDIA you are capable of doing your job? Do you realize your gleeful posts and calls to an employer caused someone to LOSE HIS JOB?

No wonder newspapers are failing. They just don’t get it.

Some St. Louis blogs have been covering the issue of comments at the online Post-Dispatch for some time. This incident is getting all the exposure, the hateful, racist comments can be found at stltoday.com every day and no moderator addresses them. THAT’S the issue. The Post-Dispatch MUST go to a moderated system that REQUIRES authentication tied to Facebook or another profile. Posting the “p-word” isn’t half as offensive as what I see on a daily basis on this site.

http://stltomorrow.org
http://www.stlurbanworkshop.com/2009/11/saint-louis-post-dispatch-goes-nuclear.html

Privacy policy? Like the internet is some sort of great haven of free speech where people have the expectation of hiding behind anonymity to say whatever they want? You did nothing wrong. I’m sure what this person did was against all kinds of IT policies at the school in question, so what’ the difference? Just because people can make up whatever name they want, no one should have the expectations of being totally invisible on the internet. You’re accountable here, just like you are in real life, folks.

I do like the Ars Technica analysis of the situation. They say, “Then there’s the question of whether pulling this move and then telling everyone about it was really worth throwing the paper’s integrity into question — while other newspapers are fighting tooth and nail to protect the identity of their anonymous commenters [the Las Vegas Review Journal is currently fighting a federal subpoena to protect the identity of its commenters], the Post-Dispatch has proven that it will reveal that info with little prodding.”

I’ve been reading about freedom of speech issues for a long time now, and it’s rather scary what level Mr. Greenbaum and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has stooped to in the past week. Apparently the crew at this website doesn’t hold the First Amendment in high regard.

Shame on you, Mr. Greenbaum.

You are hiding behind a technicality on your assertion that you did not violate your stated privacy policy. An IP address alone does not identify the user, in so far as you couldn’t look at that IP address and directly contact them.

However, within the context you used it, it very clearly did identify them. While you can write you didn’t violate the word of your policy, you certainly committed one of the acts that a well-drafted privacy policy seeks to prevent.

The potential ‘collateral damage’ from banning the user is something that you’re going to have to deal with if you run an online community where people may post anonymously. Ban in whatever manner you can, and move on. It certainly is unfortunate that other people at that workplace can’t leave comments as a result of a ban. However, all through life we sometimes have to do without because one person ruined it for everyone else.

I’m not going to deny that what the user posted was juvenile. But your response was even more so. The move you made was something I would expect from the moderator of a worthless web forum, not a member of the editorial staff of a 131 year old newspaper.

In conclusion, it’s altogether laughable that you take this approach when someone attempts a failed effort at low-brow comedy, but you look the other way when people continually post racist and hateful remarks on these boards.

“Amazed at the readers who comment in defense of a jackass who posted a vulgarity on our site — and lost his job.”
This is from your Twitter page. These are not the words of someone who was not intending to gloat. Its probably why you shut down comments on the previous article people weren’t praising you to high heaven like you expected.
If this new article is the BS you need to tell yourself to sleep at night so be it. But the fact of the matter is you cost someone their job. Hopefully karma will be catching up with you shortly.

Kurt claims to take seriously the responsibility to monitor conversation on STLtoday. But that’s not what he states in his blog titled, “6 reasons we’re lazy about story comments.” Ref: http://www.igreenbaum.com/2009/09/6-reasons-were-lazy-about-story-comments/

Perhaps its time that Mr. Greenbaum, the Post-Dispatch, and St. Louisans check out a critique of the policy here: http://stltomorrow.org. Oh, and join our Facebook group here: http://j.mp/STLtomorrow

Why don’t you moderate the racist comments that I see daily all over the place on your “news” website?

You never have anything to say about that? THAT IS VULGAR! Why aren’t you outraged against that? Why aren’t you looking up IP addresses about that? Why don’t you think about pacing the newsroom floor about that?

While I agree that there is plenty of blame to go around, I’m curious as to why most people here find it acceptable that a school employee used a school owned computer to post some horrible stuff twice. Really?

Kurt, maybe you over-reacted, but that person would have been caught eventually. And I’m glad that they are not influincing our youth any longer.

I hate it when people write ugly comments. It just makes the world a less nice place. But you have lost my trust. When you say, “Your trust is paramount. I did not and would not violate our privacy policy,” you just lose it more. If you don’t see what you did wrong, then you can’t behave differently in the future.

Why does anyone assume complete anonymity? You don’t have it when you open a bank accound or on your Facebook account? No one should be shocked by this and I say the Post-Dispatch should be able to do whatever it wants on its forum. This is a business’s website, not the street corner where 1st Amendment rights are paramount.

If only the Post-Dispatch would crack down on racist and hateful comments in the same way.

When you post to a public site or forum such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, you automatically make yourself accountable under the site’s terms of service. And when you use a company-owned computer at your place of employment, you also immediately attach yourself to the company’s terms of usage. The commenter-in-question not only posted a vulgar comment once, but intentionally posted it again, thereby violating the Post-Dispatch terms of service and quite possibly the school district’s policy in regards to computer usage. Kurt merely brought the school’s attention to something that should have not been posted from school property; it was the poster who chose to immediately resign when confronted by school officials. Many commenters have formed quite the witch hunt for Kurt, forgetting that the poster voluntarily gave up his position, a result that cannot be attributed to anyone but that individual.

Mr. Greenbaum,
Certainly, the original poster was being crude. Certainly it was within your perview to ban his comment. Both times.

What were you hoping to achieve by calling the school? If it had been a student, s/he most likely would have been suspended and probably had their computer priviledges revoked. Is it better to have our children in school or at home playing video games and not learning? You mentioned you called the headmaster and I went to a very nice school in W. County with a headmaster. Were you trying to teach that rich, snob kid a lesson?

But instead of teaching that rich punk a lesson, you got someone fired (and make no mistake, this person’s “resignation” was in lieu of being fired). You claim you have no trouble sleeping at night, but you should have trouble looking yourself in the mirror. This person lost their job over a dumb internet joke…if someone called my boss everytime I made a dumb joke on the internet I’d never keep a job. Since you’re culpable in this person’s unemployment - and hey, s/he can’t collect unemployment now since it was a “voluntary resignation” - are you going to help s/he find a new job?

To top it off, the original title of your blog entry shows the satisifaction you felt getting this person fired. “Post a vulgar comment while you’re at work, get fired.” How else are we, as readers, supposed to interpret this other than what’s been said a 1,000 times before: do something I don’t like, I’ll get you!?!

Honestly, you’re not qualified to do your job. And I don’t say that as a reflection on your editorial choices. You don’t understand how Wordpress works, you don’t understand how to curtail vulgarity throughout your comment sections and you don’t understand your own internet policy. You can claim, “but I didn’t know his name” but you knew when you called the school that providing the time of transmission could lead their IT department to the specific computer and user (thus outing the person). Therefore, you KNEW your actions would cause an adverse action onto the poster. And if you didn’t know all this…THEN YOU’RE NOT QUALIFIED TO DO YOUR JOB!

“Third, it was easy. As I said, I didn’t have to dig for the school’s information. It was readily available on the e-mail alert. Had it not been there, I may have deleted the comment and moved on.”

I find the entirety of your non-mea culpa to be forced and false, but I find this part positively frightening. Just because the wrong thing is easy to do doesn’t mean we should be excused for doing it. A tasteless individual posted a provocative word, twice — there was no threat to harm anyone that would have warranted any action on your part, other than deleting it and moving on.

Everyone makes mistakes. You did the wrong thing and should man up and admit it. Your equivocation is just making it worse.

I happen to be in newspapers too. For a big newspaper at that, circulation of approx 1.5m.

Quite frankly, I’m embarrassed by Greenbaum’s conduct. It brings shame on all good journalists.

So somebody posted something childish and immature on the Internet. Not exactly a new phenomenon - just delete the post like every other website does. Or implement a proper commenting system that blocks profanity.

Complaining to an employer just because an employee said a word that you don’t like (but probably heard in your own workplace multiple times a day) just isn’t cool.

The only way for the Post-Dispatch to save face is for Greenbaum to go.

Of course since this is a criticism, I expect Greenbaum will try get me fired as well…

Yup, it’s already made Digg as well
http://carlosmiller.com/2009/11/17/the-snitches-among-us/

Wow- I coulndn’t get a teacher fired for cussing in front of classroom of kids. Good job and double thanks if it happened to be my kids school.

Kurt’s action to delete the comment is a form of censorship towards free speech, which initially strikes me as perhaps repressive, puritanical and even unenlightened. But as offensive as this act of censorship might seem, initially, it doesn’t lead me to the conclusion that all forms of censorship in a public blog are wrong, unjust and intolerable. The reality of censorship for this blog should be viewed in a wider context of community, which affects the social, the communal, the public. I don’t agree that the teacher’s comments were appropriate on this particular (public) blog.

I wonder if I would have considered placing a call to the school to report the comment. If a mistake was made, so be it. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life. Just as Kurt may have made a mistake, I’m certain the teacher may be feeling the same way! The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. Hopefully, each of us will learn from this chapter of “the book”. Often, our blunders mostly come from letting our wishes interpret our duties. Maybe sometimes we misinterpret our duties as well.

I miss the STL blog.

” But I viewed it as a “teachable moment” ”

I am not interested in a “teachable moment” from my online newspaper! I am interested in you posting the content for me to read. I *personally* don’t even care if you erase the vulgarity, but I understand that you need to do that for the sake of the larger community standard. Let me be clear … you are not here to “teach” me anything, either in my role as a reader or in my role as commenter. You are here to write, edit and curate. Please don’t get too big for your britches.

” I didn’t anticipate that the reader would resign. ”

Did you anticipate that he would get in some kind of trouble at work? Was that your intent? Is it okay for you to have the agenda of getting him in trouble but not the agenda of threatening his job? Where is the line there?

” I was motivated by the fact that it was a school. ”

Why should that matter to you? You are an online news editor, not a school administrator, school board official, that person’s boss, a parent of a child at that school, or any kind of designated keeper of standards for that school? How is what employees of that school do ANY of your business beyond the point where it intersects with your web site?

As a former journalist and an active commenter on a number of sites, this entire thing has just horrified me. I am not in the habit of posting vulgarities on blogs, and if I did I certainly wouldn’t do it from my workplace, but you stepped so far outside of your bounds that I don’t really know what to say … other than you should be ASHAMED of yourself.

This makes me think much less of the P-D as a news organization, and it certainly makes me less interested in continuing to read your site or participate in your conversation.

To say that revealing the IP address of a commenter is not a violation of privacy because the school already knew its own IP address is ludicrous. You did not call up the school and say “hey, this is your IP address.” You specifically called to tell them the IP address of one specific user.

Your argument is tantamount to saying that it wouldn’t have been a violation of privacy to tell the school the name of the offender because as a school employee they already knew what his name was.

Regardless of the user’s offensive, misogynistic comment, what you did was entirely inappropriate and as gross an abuse there is of your powers and responsibilities as someone moderating open debate in a public forum. Please have the decency to step down from this position.

Now I see why I don’t read the Dispatch. Way to make St. Louis look like a fool for the entire world to see, and for displaying how little journalistic integrity you, and possibly the rest of the papers journalists have. I mean, if the paper would hire you…heaven knows how little integrity the rest of the writers have. Well, except McClellan, he’s a paragon of the industry.

Kurt, I had never heard of you until today, but I had to chime in. Your excuses for your actions are pathetic. All I know is that in our bad economy and high unemployment rate, you just cost someone a job for something so petty. Being a journalist I would think you would develop some thicker skin. I hope he sues you and your employer. I hope you lose YOUR job!

This blog is FRIGHTENING. Greenbaum and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch are hardly journalists and I would urge the people commenting here to find a new website to read/comment on. Wow. It is amazing who can pass for editors and journalists these days. Greenbaum, which uncle gave you this job?

Kurt,

I see you’re now also censoring the comments here. I posted a thoughtful comment an hour ago. I saw it appear on page 3. Guess what, it’s not there any longer.

Was the term “pariah” on your list of unnacceptable “P” words?

This is really getting bad. You’re completely losing what integrity you think you may have possessed.

Damage control doesn’t include censorship of non-spam.

- Ira

It’s nearly 2010. Grow some thicker skin before you invade and destroy someones life.

Kurt,

I’m glad that you feel you’ve learned a lesson. I’m also grateful that you move within a relatively small ecosystem of a dying industry, because this mistake should make it increasingly harder for you find meaningful and relevant employment. Hopefully every time you need to search for a job, you’ll be reminded of this incident and learn a brand new lesson.

How do you even know it was the same person making the comment twice, if so much time had passed? It’s not like it was really the most original comment in the world that two people couldn’t have made it.

If FoxNews would have done the same thing Kurt, you would be screaming from the top of your lungs. How very sad and pathetic you are.

The title of this blog is totally wrong. Talk about trying to spin and minimize your culpability.

It is NOT about the “vulgar comment and the school” anymore. What it IS about is your actions and your behavoir subsequent to what you did.

How contrite are you? Didn’t you start calling the person who lost their job a “jackass” at some point?

The title of this blog should be;

“Kurt Attempts to Defend his Actions.”

Probably, just like the way you always wanted it Kurt, it IS about YOU now.

i find your rationalizing Pathetic. how can yoU poSSiblY expect us to believe that you called the school without any intentions of ascertaining the specific user? true, you did not personally identify the user. but you absolutely did intend for the user to be identified and for some consequence to be rendered. there is simply no other conceivable reason to call. and yes, you were gloating. this ”explanation” is nothing more than you trying to dodge a bit of heat from a blatant and over-reaching abuse of perceived power, and your subsequent jubilation in wielding said power. your original actions were way over the line as has been pointed out both here and on every single news outlet and tech forum that has picked up this story. your weak attempt to deflect criticism by pretending that your words were simply poorly chosen, or that you had no idea the school would track down the user, is annoying at best. you come off as a small, weak, cowardly man and you have dragged down the reputation of your employer more than the original poster ever could have.

I’m a NYer, but I have over 50 relatives who live in the St. Louis area. Almost all of them have stopped reading your paper due to the racially offensive comments that are allowed to remain on blog comments. I am disappointed, but not surprised by the double standard.

I am surprised by your lack of technical knowledge and your inability to recognize that you violated reader trust with your mean spirited reaction to the commenter’s post.

“I see you’re now also censoring the comments here. I posted a thoughtful comment an hour ago. I saw it appear on page 3. Guess what, it’s not there any longer.”

Two of my comments were removed as well. One was a link to a Gawker.com article about him, and the second was noting that he deleted the first one. Interesting approach from someone who ends their blog post with “My colleagues and I agree we are committed to working as hard as we can to foster and encourage discussion on STLtoday”.

After reading the article on Gawker.com, I can see why they deleted your entry. It wasn’t very flattering towards Kurt or the PD.

If the poster resigned when confronted there are several assumptions. 1) it wasn’t the first time he was caught. 2)posting was a blatant violation of his company’s (district’s) policy and he knew it. Whether he “deserved” to be squeezed out is something we can’t judge. We don’t know what else had happened that made this somethign he felt he had to leave for. What we do know is that some perve was at school posting smut on the internet. Where were the kids? What does he do with kids? If this is what he did adn got caught at, what did he do and NOT get caught at? Yes, a man is now unemployeed, but the other hand - one more perve is out of a school district. I’m having trouble feeling sorry for him. He played with fire and got burned. What if this went unreported adn he kept pushing? What if he continued to escalate? What if typing smut advanced to exposure and molestation? Would the negative posters still defend the perve? Would it be an invasion of privacy if he got busted for touching little girls but had closed the door? No. He was wrong. He learned a lesson. Sometimes lessons are hard - especially when you’re stupid. Thanks for protecting our kids.

Dude. You are a perfect example of what is wrong with America. I won’t launch into a rant here. Instead, I will offer two very clear points as to why you are wrong.

1) You can’t have it both ways. You can’t in one breath claim that you shared no information that could identify an individual user, and in the next proclaim that you hoped it would create a “teachable moment” for that user.

2) No one cares if you are “technically” correct or “legally” correct in your belief that sharing an IP address is not sharing private information. Your success, and the success of your paper, is predicated upon the trust of your readership. It is immaterial if you did not violate the letter of the law in regards to your privacy policy. What matters is that, clearly, the vast majority of your readers feel that you have violated their understanding of your privacy policy. Arguing the semantics does you no good. Given the lack of character that you have demonstrated so far it comes as no surprise that you would try to hide behind the technicalities. What amazes me is that your employer allows you to continue hiding there, offering weak excuses, as their customer base dwindles and they become a national, no, international ( I am in Toronto and we are certainly laughing at you up here), laughing stock. As the other poster said, you have damaged your organization far more than some idiot posting a mildly vulgar term could ever have done to his. Congratulations.

You did reveal personal information: you revealed that this person spent time at your site, when, and what they wrote. This type of activity is probably the most private we have.

You could have put this story and others into moderation. You could have turned on moderation for certain keywords. You could have done a hundred things, but in your smug self-righteous mind, you decided to generate problems.

To pretend that you didn’t contemplate the effect of your call is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst. If you didn’t think this could happen, why on earth would you have even bothered contacting the school?

Is your paper so desperate for attention that you would cause someone a job, just to get attention?

Shame on you.

And shame on everyone for responding in comments to any St. Louis Today story from this point on.

“Too much time had elapsed between posts for it to be a mistake or an accident. The reader was determined to post it.”

Presuming the poster had been sitting at the computer that entire stretch of time, and didn’t simply come back later, refresh the page and think the comment hadn’t gone through. You don’t actually know what happened on the other end, so you can’t really come to the conclusion that it wasn’t a mistake.

“Third, it was easy. As I said, I didn’t have to dig for the school’s information. It was readily available on the e-mail alert. Had it not been there, I may have deleted the comment and moved on.”

And that’s just damn scary. Because it’s “easy” is no justification to violate journalistic ethics much less your privacy policy.

But then, you clearly aren’t very good at technology, and you most certainly are no journalist.

You made a mistake. People do that all the time. It’s hard to understand why - with any intelligence at all - you wouldn’t just say that you made a mistake and abused the trust of your readers and promised that it would not happen again.

You can even, if you like, think of it in a cold-hearted way. It would be very hard for others to generate the kind of anger you are (rightly so I think) seeing. So, even without genuine remorse, if you had just said you were wrong, the incident would have eventually passed.

Now? I’m not so sure.

perhaps this horrible and thankfully-set-straight-by-you former teacher should have thought of one of your excuses: he should have said, though he seemed to admit his “crime,” that it “was not consistent with my intention,” which of course was to be a stellar and unflappable paragon of virtuosity and all things beautiful and american. seems like that would have been all it would have taken.

unfortunately though, it wouldn’t have mattered for this cat because he’s not perfect. he’s a jokester. he has whimsy in his life. sometimes he’s provocative. sometimes he messes up. heck, he has probably smoked a joint or two in his life? (have you? … be careful …) but there’s no room for that. one must shine the the bright rays of perfection of kurt greenbaum or get out of the classroom because you are, no doubt, a child molester waiting to happen and you don’t really deserve to keep your house or feed your own kids. lessons learned. though perhaps moderators could consider doing their job and pressing that sweet little delete button no matter how many times it takes … and avoid trying to teach lessons to the less perfect of us in the real world.

thanks, kurt. this was educational.

A teachable moment, indeed. We’ve learned that this publication and website can’t be trusted with private information, or as advocates of speech.

By all means, toss the “vulgar” label on this person and excuse yourself. But was anyone likely to be seriously hurt by the off color joke this guy was making? No.

Was someone seriously harmed by what you did, Kurt? Yes. We can’t imagine the consequences faced by this guy because of all this. I think an apology might be a little more appropriate than your slimy excuses.

This guy should never have posted that comment. He should have also realized that what you post on the internet is not exactly private. The guy is an idiot. But he should not have assumed, according to your own Terms of Service, that he would have a retaliatory effort made against him. It appears no where in your Terms that you would contact an employer but only a a proper public official which wasn’t the case here.

Mr. Greenbaum, you call this guy a “jackass” in one of your tweets that’s posted to this page. I’m not sure how that vulgarity is at all different from what the user posted. Could you explain that?

I also find it hard to believe that you are doing nothing different than trying to have your comments seen in a better light. It’s pretty obvious that you had a gloating if not gleeful tone directed at this “jackass.” The IT administrator “took a shine to the challenge”? Sounds like a fun little game. That you now say you “should take pains to measure my language carefully” tells me that there is a separation between what you really think (the gloating) versus what you want to convey to others. That’s quite a bit different than saying that you weren’t gloating in the first place.

To your point about not giving out private information about this person. Imagine this scenario: Someone calls into a radio station call-in show and says a vulgarity. The DJ notice that the Caller ID is from a local school. The DJ calls the main school number, gives the specific telephone number (which is traceable to only one phone) and the time of the call to an administrator. Mr. Greenbaum, you may not have given out someone’s name but it’s hard to argue that you didn’t given out “private” information (as you argue). At least you certainly gave out identifiable information. And, really, is there a difference?

Also, it appears that a large motivation for your actions was to teach a lesson, a “teachable moment” to this person, because they were at a school. How do you decide what kind of person should be taught a lesson or not. How is that your job? Should it just be those that work with children? Since when did you get to become the final arbiter of what is decent in what context? What if it had come from a library; what about a church; what about a local government office; what about a private home that also runs an afterschool daycare? I’m not sure that’s a decision you want a journalist making independent of anyone else. You make decisions about your moderating your own comments but it’s entirely different to carry that moderation back into someone’s job.

You say one of the lessons you’ve learned is that you “Should have walked the idea around the newsroom a little more before calling the school.” Would others have advised that you do something different? You say we’ll never know because you “couldn’t know without asking.” Well, that begs the question: what are they saying now? Surely, you could ask others in the newsroom what they would have done. And should be. Perhaps you should share that as part of your comments.

You strike a slightly more conciliatory tone now but you were aggressive and defensive for the first several days after you posted this. It seems you are only changing now because you realize you “were utterly surprised by the reaction” and not because you actually feel different about what you’ve done. That’s pretty self-serving.

What’s done is done but Mr. Greenbaum your issues seems much more to do with process than outcome. At several points you have shown that you ignored normal procedures, didn’t solicit the advice of others, and were truculent about your decisions in the face of overwhelming reader critiques. It seems like in this instance, it’s not about what the man did but what you did and didn’t do in return.

For other commenting: there’s no need to generalize this beyond Mr. Greenbaum when it comes to media or trust of journalists. What you’ve done, Mr. Greenbaum, is so far from what almost any other journalist would have done that you are nothing but an outlier, not worthy of generalization. You’re a cautionary tale.

Kurt -
Firstly, (having not read the comment to which you refer I’ll trust you had good reason to delete it twice) this anonymous person posted something from their work IP address at a school. Most such institutions have well defined policies in this regard that they advise their employees to know.

Secondly, you have stated that this person resigned, perhaps to keep the school from firing him/her wherein the school would have to enter their “cause” for doing so.

Thirdly, if this person had waited and posted their comment from home, the issue would not exist. You would have deleted the comment, perhaps several times, but it would not have been a work related issue.

Lastly, if said comment had originated from a school IP address and have been of a vaguely “threatening” type, I would assume you would have an obligation to notify the school as soon as you became aware of it so that the school would take all appropriate measures, regardless of the “reality”.

Sorry for all of the grief you have caught here, don’t lose too much sleep over it.

And let me be clear. Unlike some folks here, I don’t hope you lose your job. You don’t deserve that. Your family doesn’t deserve that. Jobs are certainly hard to come by right now, and that’s especially true in journalism. Unemployment, and all of the stress on people and families that it creates just isn’t something I would wish on someone who hadn’t done something that truly warranted it.

Let’s look at it a different way, shall we Mr. Social Media?

Let’s say I’m reading your story about food choices in a coffee shop, and you’re at the next table. I mumble “that” word that horribly offended you aloud - do you…

1. Ignore it
2. Lean over to me and say “That’s really not appropriate here”
3. Go to the owner of the shop and say “That customer said a bad word, please make him leave” ?

Me, I’d go with #2 if it was really that bad. You went for #3, but then followed it up by giving a sermon to everyone in the shop about how “You do your best to prevent these horrible transgressions, but you can’t police them all, however, you’re glad this person is getting removed” and then keep pointing at me as I leave.

Hmm, are they really deleting comments that point to the Gawker article? Let’s find out! It’s at http://gawker.com/5407559/tattle+tale-newspaper-costs-vulgar-commenter-his–job .

Kurt,
I have to say except for one comment, I 100% agree with everyone posted here. You are being called out, as well as you should, for creating a chain of events that led to someone losing their job. You did it on purpose and then wrote and published a story about it. You were gloating and trying to create a “teachable moment”. What on earth does that mean? I’m guessing the reaction to the initial story and your so-called reasoning in this one is becoming a “teachable moment” for you. This story should be sent to as many media outlets to get the attention you apparently wanted in the first place. I also am guessing you have possibly been contacted by a lawyer. Sleep well.

I would like to say that I will be boycotting any article written by Kurt (what a loss, huh?). And I would like to encourage anyone who disagrees with his actions to do the same. Lets see if we can show Kurt how it feels to get fired.

I censored my comment … and it still got deleted!

You people are a joke. Can’t wait for the globe-democrat…

Enlightenment era writer John Locke had the most eloquent way of being blunt in expressing how one gets their point across…

“He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.”

That pretty much sums up the attempts by the moderators here in covering themselves. I would argue that this is one of the gravest travesties of free speech ever conjured up by the mainstream American media. It used to be when I was an officer in the military, that we prided ourselves that our media would never do such things as we accused those in the former Soviet Union of doing. Yet, here we are just 20 years after the fall of the Wall, having traded places with the Soviets. Now it’s our media that betrays us, that spies upon us, that spreads the very propaganda that we preached a hatred of. My country tis of thee, why doth thou dishonor me?

I agree with most. You should apologize for going beyond what a reasonable administrator would do. This guy lost his job right before the holidays.

We all know we’ve done stupid things, but to lose your job over those silly things cannot be justified under these circumstances.

I would hope that you not try to minimize this situation by emphasizing this employee resigned. For the most part, this is permitted to allow the person to obtain certain service without being disqualified for being fired.

Moreover, you didn’t just report the IP address, you went out of your way to inform the school specifically what was being posted. Because this person’s conduct offended you, there is only one reason why you provided the school with the specific comment…..retribution. Gotcha! moment. Not cool.

I don’t condone vulgarity, but I also don’t condone going out of your way to report someone for such a minute matter and get them fired. Even if you assumed you were going to get a child in trouble…..not cool!

Kurt is a dork.

You’ve managed to earn your paper a nomination for Internet Villain of the Year. Congratulations.

— Leon Wolfeson
3:39 pm November 18th, 2009

—————
I second this, shame on you

Well, Kurt, as long as you can lay your head down on a pillow and sleep at night…..

I hope this person (who was apparently just being a smart-alek - vulgar maybe, probably shouldn’t have posted from work, but essentially harmless) doesn’t have a family that was relying on his income…

Happy Holidays, Kurt

I hope kurt loses his job

Boycot this site all together till he is gone. I am from an eye for an eye background. He deleted my last post. I called him out on the simple fact that if he knows he quit when he was aproched by his boss then our boy kurt had to have either stayed on the phone demanding he be fired or did a follow up so he could come here and gloat. Great personality there Kurt. You deserve the same.

You did violate your privacy policy. The definition you are giving now is watered down enough as to be effectively useless!

Most of us are primarily concerned with whether the comments we post here can be connected to our real names if we do not so wish (I’m posting under mine, by the way). I would expect you to refuse to release any such information without a court order.

This is why newspapers like yours are going out of business: you’re less accurate, less reliable, and less professional than sites such as the Huffington Post (a real achievement, by the way!)

Morally, you are completely and totally responsible for this man losing his job. Whether what he said was polite or sensible doesn’t matter - you tossed that all aside by taking an action which was not yours to take (we’re talking morality - I’ll let the lawyers cover the privacy policy).

Who decides what is right here? Well, obviously not you (because you still don’t get it) - so I guess it’s all of us who will find greener pastures for our news and commentary.

Good luck recovering your revenues, Kurt!

Kirt, what you did was absolutely wrong, much worse than somebody posting a vulgar comment. Delete the guy’s comment(s), block him from posting–fine. This is STLtoday’s board, and you are free to moderate it as you wish. But for you to go outside this board and pursue the commenter and report him–that goes way, way over the line.

The only time I could ever see something like that being permissible would be in the extreme hypothetical case of a commenter saying he was in the process of committing a crime, in which case you might notify the police.

Whatever happened to being accountable for one’s actions? The reader posted the vulgar comment twice from his work computer. Organizations have internet policies which state clearly what can and cannot be accessed or posted. Name one organization that would condone posting any vulgarity or profanity on the internet from one of the organization’s computers. The person who posted the comment–not once, but twice–is the one who is wrong. Not Kurt.

The poster obviously knew he was wrong if he resigned on the spot when confronted. His resignation makes me wonder what else he was looking at and/or posting from his work computer.

Kurt says he contacted the school because he was concerned the poster could be a student. I believe his intentions were good ones.

Kurt, first, I think you posted a bate question and two, I bet you were the kid in class that tattled on the kids who talked while the teacher was out of the room. Third, I bet the guy was a Democrat since he was a school teacher and who else would be looking at the STL TOTD blog for gosh sakes.
And the blogger who said he should have been immediately put into hold like I am on most of these blogs and not for obsenity, was correct.

Mr Greenbaum,

You should be fired. You clearly don’t understand the basic principles of good journalism - and that’s enough to fire someone from a job as a journalist, last I checked. More importantly, though, you are a low character person. To put it more simply - you’re a bad person, and a weak person. When put in a position to wield any amount of power at all, you abuse that position, and hurt someone very badly for no reason but that it’s easy for you to do it. Then you gloat about your pettiness and cruelty, which shows a complete disconnect with your readers, all of whom respond to your post by saying they think you’re completely disgusting and should be fired. You didn’t expect this - so why should you be writing for a newspaper? Shouldn’t someone in journalism have some ability to guess, with some accuracy, how people will respond to something? That seems like a prerequisite. The nail in the coffin, though, is this post. This should have been an apology. This should have been a simple, straightforward apology, an acknowledgement of responsibility, the admission of a gross error, a horrible lapse in judgment, and an aberration in an otherwise moral life. Instead it’s an impersonal, disingenuous defense of an act which the 180+ reader comments had pretty clearly shown was indefensible.

I suspect this won’t be posted because it contains the statement that you are a bad person. But facts are facts, sir. You are a poor journalist and a man of low character. As you are in a position of public trust, and as you do wield some petty power over other people, and have shown yourself utterly incapable of wielding even this small amount of power with even a modicum of responsibly, I’ll say again that I hope you are fired. In the meantime I am going to vote with my money and attention. I will never read this paper, online or otherwise, again, so long as you are employed here. I hope other readers disgusted by this act do the same. If your ‘lesson’ to this unfortunate man you got fired was that actions have consequences, then I would hope the readers of this paper teach you and your paper that lesson in a big way. But I doubt they will. Actions only have consequences if you’re poor.

“Your trust is paramount.” This is a joke, right? You completely destroyed your readers’ trust. And if I had a hot news item, I sure wouldn’t trust the Post-Dispatch to protect my anonymity. If this site is serious about trust, it should terminate Mr. Greenbaum.

Kurt,

I seldom comment on blogs, etc… but this deserves one. You did overreact & now most likely a good person is unemployed right before the holidays. Do you realize how impossible it is to find a job in St. Louis? I work in the business of employee placements & this poor sole has a rough road ahead. Not a reasonable reason to loose a job & you are to blame. Terrible decision & I think you should be disciplined in some matter. Stop making excuses & LISTEN to your INTELLIGENT readers. They are your livelihood.

This is completely pathetic. Is there anything the people at this paper can’t rationalize? This has to be one of the most unified, overwhelmingly negative response to a story I’ve seen on this site, and perhaps anywhere, and it you just shrug it off. P.S. This is my last post on this site, and when I can get local news from the globe-democrat, I’m gone for good. You think controversy drives web traffic, I’m going to guess a lot of that traffic will be going elsewhere soon. Good riddance.

“We don’t condone vulgarity or obscenity on our site. We won’t tolerate it.”

But Kurt, you do. You tolerate racist and homophobic content every single day on the PD forums and you tolerate it fine as long as there are no dirty words involved. You don’t tolerate dirty words. But most of what is tolerated is much worse than the comment that caused this furor. I wish you could see that.

Kurt,
The true vulgarity is this sham of an explanation you are shoveling. If I knew your mom’s email address, I would call her and tell on you.

I’ve scanned these blog comments, but it’s hard to find ANYONE that is defending you. Are we just not as smart as you? Are we too dense to understand this grand “teachable moment” that you so benevolently bestowed upon us?

I, for one, would appreciate some new posting guidelines in the following area:

1. When you don’t approve of a comment, which types of employers are subject to notification? Obviously schools are in, but how about hospitals, police departments or political campaign offices?

2. What comments will be allowed from school computers and what aren’t? I assume that you aren’t going to notify the school after every single comment from that email server, correct? Which will you allow, and which will result in employer notification?

Please update your terms of service.

Just to let you know, I’m posting this from home. If I was at work, posting a comment on your blog (vulgar or otherwise) would be a violation of my company’s Internet Usage Policy. I’m afraid if I tried that, you could tell on me and I might end up having to “resign.”

“As a fellow dictator I approve of the way you destroy anyone who says anything you don’t like. That is the problem with america, people think they have freedom of speech. Follow my methods - you are off to a good start to becoming a total enemy of free speech.” J Stalin

Didn’t you learn anything from George Carlin? Sticks and stones may break your bones but the 7 dirty words will never harm you. Acting like the Gestapo/Stasi and calling up the boss of someone who posts something you don’t like, however, is despicable behavior and as a journalist you should be FIRED for such an assault on free speech - which you supposedly make a livelyhood from. How would you like it if the government did something like this to you and got you fired?

Kurt, let’s see if you are willing to hold yourself to the standards you set for others. I encourage the Post-Dispatch to investigate whatever internet activity of yours has been retained on their servers. And you should be only so happy to request your home ISP to turn over their records to your employer, too. We need to make sure that a pompous, self-righteous man such as yourself hasn’t engaged in any questionable internet activity of his own, don’t you agree?

Obviously the school didn’t know about the man’s post until you called to complain about it!

You can play semantic games with technical jargon all you want. The bottom line is I will never post another comment on your “newspaper” without running Tor to protect myself from you.

“But I viewed it as a “teachable moment””

Are you a teacher or a journalist?
Apparently you think that you are a teacher, and we are your pupils?
I think *you* should resign and go find a job as a teacher.

I hope that this is all a hoax or media experiment.
If not, you have found a new low in journalism - lower than Glenn Beck.

While other newspapers are fighting tooth and nail to protect the identity of their anonymous commenters, Kurt Greenbaum is calling their employers to intentionally rat them out.

“I should have walked the idea around the newsroom a little more before calling the school. I was motivated by the fact that it was a school.”

The guy didn’t post that he had a bomb and he was going to detonate it in 30 minutes. He posted an off color joke. What does the post originating at a school have to do with anything? Have you ever actually been to a school? The word that you had someone fired for is probably heard 5 times on the bus ride home.

You weren’t motivated by the fact that it was a school, other than the fact that schools typically have Internet usage policies, and you knew you had a good chance of getting the poster in trouble. The whole “Defender of America’s Youth” schtick is just insulting.

“I should have walked the idea around the newsroom”

“I should take pains to measure my language carefully”

Kurt, You need to add one more “I should”… “I should resign for this reprehensible damage done to the trust commentors place in their right to both express themselves and maintain their privacy when posting on the Post-Dispatch blogs and forums.”

1. You invite anonymous comments. When you get them you should not be surprised - you can always make people sign up to at least cut down on the type of comments.
2. If the comments are increasingly concerning you, shut down the comment system.
3. Reporters go to jail to protect sources.
4. Free speech is free speech. Don’t try and hide behind it being a school IP - you had no business even looking
5. You are a liar. You did sleuth - you search for the IP.
6. Someone lost their job.

This is about your arrogant big ego. And yes, it was your intent to gloat - you just did not expect that your readers were better people than you.

Goodbye to you and your newspaper.

Dude, You could have just left it as “I’m sorry” - but you didn’t. You could have put this mess behind you with just those two words.

I wish you well.

I am sure that you watched the uproar closely. Hope you are watching your job just as closely. I hope that it is shown that you violated your privacy policy and the person goes after where it hurts you most - your wallet.
BTW, you going to track my IP now too?

Kurt et. al.,

I’ll state upfront that I came across this story due to an article by Wendy Davis of http://www.mediapost.com. After reading her point of view and then reading your original post and your follow-up, I’m terribly disappointed with you and you as a proxy for the editorial staff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. While I am not defending this teacher’s post, your actions are not justifiable. After reading the PD’s privacy policy and the “Blog Comments: Rules of the Road”, I can find no wording giving you cover. In this case, you acted as judge, jury and executioner. Your Privacy Policy states “even if you want to remain completely anonymous”, you helped compromise this person’s anonymity evidenced by the school’s IT director fingering this objectionable poster.

In summation, this series of events encapsulated my first interaction with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and as they say you only get one first impression. It is a shame too as I’m an avid news junkie and my impression of the Post-Dispatch will always be framed by this incident and the poor, poor handling of it by you, your peers and the paper’s managing editor.

Me again, Kurt,

The more I ponder this, the angrier I am getting.

Kurt, I do not want you to be fired, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but I DO want the PD to suspend you for a few months without pay.

There needs to be some sort of consequence for your irresponsible, knee-jerk actions.

If I do not hear of a suspension by December 1st, I am going to cancel my “delivered” subscription (I don’t need the weekend coupons THAT badly), and furthermore (and in an ironic twist), I am going to call up each and every online advertiser, report your lack of journalist integrity to them, and ask them to deal with it as they see fit.

Because it will be easy.

Sleep well Kurt - Happy Holidays

I will try again to post my non-vulgar, non-obscene comment:

You have violated the public trust. You took advantage of privileged information and your position with a newspaper in order to exact revenge on someone who broke your blog rules. What else can a headmaster do when faced with a complaint from the city newspaper, do you really think the Headmaster wanted to let him go? Why do you think a “resignation” was requested - it is because the Headmaster didn’t want to ruin this guys life over a mistake. You didn’t just get revenge on a rogue commentator you manipulated (some would say BLACKMAILED) his boss to get your way. You are a disgrace.

I am betting that this is a hoax.

Just a month ago Greenbaum wrote an article and tweeted about hoaxes in the media. What motivates people to do them, etc.

Now, it sounds like all the details come straight from Greenbaum. A guy wrote a naughty word on there. Not verified by anyone else. Greenbaum and his unnamed colleague took down the comment. Not verified by anyone. Greenbaum emailed the unnamed school. Not verified by anyone. The unnamed headmaster called back and said the guy quit. Not verified by anyone.

The story is outlandish anyway. No school headmaster is going to do what Greenbaum claims.

I think he’s just made up his own hoax.

A “teachable moment”?

You don’t teach a man by forcing him out of his livelihood. Less so if he’s a teacher. Seems to me you’ve caused a net decrease in the amount of teaching going on. Was this your intention?

You sicken me, and should sicken any human being capable of empathy. This man has been deprived of his income, in a time when employment is desperately hard to find. It is cold outside. He can no longer afford to heat his home. He may not be able to afford food. If he has a family, they too will suffer at your hand; if he has children, and if they are Jewish or Christian, you will have deprived them of the gifts that are so important a part of a child’s holiday season.

You are worse than a fascist. You’re an aspiring despot. In a single act, you have detracted from the quality of life of several people. You never met any of them. Could you have looked your victim in the eye and still acted as you did? What about his spouse? His children?

If the whole world acted as you did, if they delighted in severely punishing any infraction of their personal moral code, what kind of world would this be? Would you still have your job, Kurt? Would you still have your family? Whatever it is that you love… what if somebody decided to take it from you, out of pure spite, because you said something they found improprietous?

I simply cannot satisfactorily express the level of anger and amazement your actions have inspired in me, Mr. Greenbaum. Your actions are not the actions of a fair-minded and freedom-loving human being. Eris frowns upon your cruel shenanigans.

Let’s look at the part of your privacy policy that details the use of IP addresses:

“Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer’s connection to the Internet, including your IP address (but not the e-mail address), when you visit our sites. Your IP address does not contain personally identifiable information, nor does it identify you personally. We use this information to deliver our web pages to you upon request, to tailor our sites to the interests of our users, and to measure traffic within our sites.”

Firstly, the part about IP addresses not identifying someone personally is obviously false, as proven by you. Second, the privacy policy gives three ways that the newspaper uses IP addresses:
1) deliver sites to the user
2) tailor sites to a user’s interest
3) measure traffic

Can you clarify where “get someone fired” would fit under one of these three headings?

Believe it or not, just because you get an IP address in an email and you, the blogger, are easily able to see who owns that IP address, does not mean that you should release or abuse that information. Does your site post the IP address of every anonymous poster in a publicly viewable place? Does your site even make the IP address of a particularly offensive poster available to someone who specifically requests it? If this information is really isn’t something personal that should be kept secret (and used only in the 3 ways described in your privacy policy), then you can feel free to post everyone’s IP and prove it to us. I might recommend that you check with your legal department first this time, as you’re obviously not to good with this sort of thing.

This issue saddens me on so many levels! If only Kurt Greenbaum were more stringent with racist comments than off-color jokes. Leaders of the Post-Dispatch, isn’t it past time to seriously address your commenting policy? Laziness me be an excuse for Kurt, but the buck stops with you. Ref: http://www.igreenbaum.com/2009/09/6-reasons-were-lazy-about-story-comments/

Please read: http://stltomorrow.org

If it’s a hoax he should be fired even sooner.

Me thinks Mike may be on to something. Is this a self-promotion stunt? Attention seeking? Create your own drama? Hmm… of course why then delete borderline posts…I don’t believe he has the smarts to be that crafty… either way it is an abuse.

If it’s a hoax he should be fired even sooner.
— Paul
10:06 pm November 18th, 2009

I completely agree. Hoax or real though, it is a good indication why newspapers are failing.

Chilling effect, yes. And Kurt and his colleagues are “working hard to foster and encourage discussion.” Everyone should boycott this site. It is the most real and genuine part of the Post left. Irony is, journalists have the right to “protect the confidentiality of their sources” WHEN THEY WANT TO. Also ironic, if the Post does have a “privacy policy” and this guy broke no law, he may have a significant legal claim and this represents a risk issue and financial claim to the Post.

Kurt complained recently of being tired of the content of the blogs. Yes, some of them are hateful, but some are enlightening, some are inspiring, some are stupid, some are wonderful. In short, they are just like life and the people we know in our politically polarized, increasingly vulgar culture.

When we know that much of the “official” content of the Post comes from a marketing or PR desk, the AP, or just blindly quoting some politician without finding out anything “real” or “local,” the comments section is at least, entertaining and genuine.

So glad I never comment from work.

still think you went too far. You saw that someone expressed themselves with vulgarity and it offended your sense of decency. You let it get to you and when you saw you had enough information to get a little revenge on the guy, you that’s exactly what you did. Next time, ignore that little impulse, delete the comment and move on.

From the Post-Dispatch Privacy policy:

“We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in “Compliance with Legal Process” below. ”

Kurt, unless you were talking to a legal official at that school, how do you justify your action in light of the posted Privacy Policy on this site?

— Altongal
12:31 pm November 17th, 2009

—

An IP address can be considered individual user information — especially since the unauthorized release of this information by Kurt Greenbaum helped get this man fired. Mr. Greenbaum and the Post-Dispatch clearly violated its own privacy policy, the victim’s trust and that of its entire readership. I hope this newspaper has alerted their lawyers of a likely lawsuit.

If it’s a hoax, I’m sure the paper is in on it.

you’re going to have to try again, kurt.

this half-baked apology is almost as bad as the previous one.
no one’s buying.

now the word you took so much offense against is being used by most of us to describe you.

(how you’re keeping it off this comment thread is beyond me.)

one last thing. please let us know what disciplinary action the paper is taking against you for this completely unprofessional conduct.

what you did was so much worse than what he did.

it wouldn’t be such an awful thing if they decided they had to let you go.

of course, you could spare them the trouble and … resign.

If every website or blog went after every single individual coarse comment that was left, we’d have no time left to blog.

This “apology” (I don’t recall seeing you apologize for the fact someone is now out of a job) doesn’t really disguise the fact that you did over-react. Delete, filter, and move on.

There are bigger things to worry about than coarse language; and forcing someone out of a job (intended or not) is not the way to go about it.

Mr Greenbaum, you are a disgrace to your profession. As a journalist of close to 30 years’ experience, I have never been more disgusted with the apparent pride you feel over costing a man his job over something as trivial as one “offensive” word that was posted twice online.
Although relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, you are sacrificing the right to free speech - something journalists should value and strive to protect - and the right to post anonymously online. Why make such an effort? It was one word, posted twice.
Frankly your pathetic attempt at justifying your disgraceful behaviour and trying to explain yourself only makes you look even more like the evil thought Nazi who thinks it’s ok to ruin a fellow human being’s life over two words.
You have disgraced yourself, your employer, and you have made an absolute mockery of freedom of speech, freedom of the media and the right to express yourself online.
What’s next Kurt? Maybe burn a few books because they have “offensive” words in them?
Time to find a new job Kurt, you have no right to call yourself a journalist.

So releasing all the information you have on someone in attempt to get another institution (the school) to identify them personally doesn’t count as an unapproved release of personal information? The IP address alone may not identify anyone, but when you call someone up and tell them that someone at a certain IP address, at a certain time, was accessing a certain website, clearly you are attempting to release enough information to identify someone personally, and all to “teach them a lesson”. Lesson learned! This newspaper lacks discretion and integrity!

Follow-up from earlier comment:

So someone loses their job because they were “vulgar”. Does calling someone a jackass in a public forum come anywhere near the same thinking?

http://twitter.com/kgreenbaum/status/5778019649

Pot, kettle, black, Mr Greenbaum?

In some cases I can see where this may be ethically questionable, however the fact that this is a school clinches it for me. This was the right decision on your part, Mr. Greenbaum. I understand why so many are down on you for it. Someone got fired for doing something many commenters here do on a regular basis, violating their employer’s internet usage policy.

How you enjoying this ‘teachable moment’, Mr Greenbaum?

Kurt,

Why do you believe that IP address information is not private? Readers of the site can not see poster’s IP addresses. (If we could, it would be public.)

You are lucky that your bosses probably are older than you, and will believe you when you say you didn’t violate your own privacy policy, because they don’t understand technology. If you had a boss under 30, you’d be fired in a heartbeat.

You really are an idiot, Kurt, and I am looking forward to the day that you become unemployed.

This would make a great “ethics” case study for a J-school class. Or how about the St. Louis Journalism Review? Will Donnybrook take it on? Has it hit CNN yet? If the vulgar guy sues for having his privacy and identity outed, could it go all the way to the Supreme Court as a New Media case?

Have any enterprising lawyers called the vulgar individual yet?

There is no justification for your behavior, Mr. Greenbaum. Sadly, an apology is not enough to restore what you took from a man who was guilty of nothing more than expressing himself inappropriately (God forbid! Someone types a very common dirty word on a blog! Where are the pitchforks?). I shudder to think if we were all be expected to operate under the same ridiculous moral code you applied to him–and with the resources available to you as an employee of an outlet for free speech!

Track down my IP address, by all means. I invite the phone call from St. Louis Today inquiring whether my place of employment allows me free speech. There are a few choice words I have for you that I’m afraid might not make it past your censors here.

As a former journalist, I am offended by your decision to violate a sense of anonymity that you fostered. Everyone in your newsroom should feel the sting of this for years to come. “You want me to provide off-the-record insight about an important issue? No, I’ve seen what your organization does with private information.” The fact that the New York Times deigned it important enough to call you out (which is how I found this) speaks volumes about the journalistic impact of this.

As an employer, even one who didn’t care about journalistic ethics, I would fire you immediately. Whatever the official policy, this bonehead move discourages comments on your site, particularly controversial ones. Since someone is presumably paying you to run social networking in order to increase page views, your decision cuts into revenue and profits. You are now a liability.

Bad move for the press, bad move for business. Bad move for an employee.

The real story here isn’t a schoolteacher swearing on the net — frankly, meh — but that this “journalist” and the newspaper he works for have no respect whatsoever for the privacy of consumers.

Shame on you.

Dear sirs:

I am outraged by you actions today. Instead of quickly and easily deleting a sophomoric and ridiculous (albeit slightly amusing) comment, you chose to take action, as a reporter, sacrificing you journalistic integrity, and make that phone call.

You have made news. Your job is not to make the news, but to report it.

I print, as a reminder to you, the section of your professional code regarding the minimization of harm, the pertinent section of your code you broke today:

Minimize Harm
Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.

Journalists should:

— Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
— Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
— Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
— Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
— Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
— Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.

And in keeping with the final segment in your code of ethics, I call for your resignation, you need to be accountable, you have broken your ethical code.

Be Accountable
Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other.

Journalists should:

— Clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct.
— Encourage the public to voice grievances against the news media.
— Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.
— Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.
— Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.

First class journalism Mr. Greenbaum. If you believe that you did not violate a readers privacy you are in denial or stltoday’s privacy policy is impotent. You should not have to be lectured about the public trust that exist between a people and journalistic institutions. You’ve breached that trust, scared a life, and still do not seem to fully grasp that you were and continue to be wrong.

I agree maybe you should have walked the information about the newsroom, but I don’t view the action that was taken as wrong. This person shouldn’t have been using workplace equipment to be posting such language anyway, let alone from a school. He’s the one who made a huge mistake, not you.

“Amazed at the readers who comment in defense of a jackass who posted a vulgarity on our site — and lost his job.” Your twitter…
That man lost his job for posting a “vulgar” word. You, however, offended the dwindling readers of the PD. Do you expect to fare any better?

Also, for someone who was so offended by the “vulgar” word, you didn’t mind using jackass…

Come on, Margrave. Stop with the histrionics. There’s a big difference between this and confidential information given to a reporter to right a major wrong. Should the person have lost his job? Probably not, but I didn’t read where he was fired. I read he resigned, which — last I checked — is ultimately a voluntary action.

“Remember, I said it was a school, right?”

Uh, yeah, and that’s most horrifying justification of all. It’s none of your damn business where he was posting from. Absolutely none. You have zero right to go volunteering information to people about others’ internet habits simply because you have access to that information. Zero. Real journalists in countries that still value freedom of speech are wasting away in prison defending the anonymity of their sources from government officials. You’re emailing people to ask if they’d like some free dirt since some moron judged you worthy of access to users’ IP addresses.

By all means remove comments that don’t suit your terms of use. If you have to do it twice, boo-friggin-hoo, you have to do it twice. People are lewd–welcome to reality. But your authority extends NO FURTHER.

In all honestly, I’m shocked you weren’t fired on the spot. Violation of ethics, violation of trust, violation of power, bringing disrepute to your newspaper, and demonstrating complete ignorance about your role as social media director.

Im sorry that so many people care about this to such a ridiculous extent. Good job Kurt!

You seem to be under the impression that the setting in which this man was typing somehow justifies your complete misuse of power. It doesn’t. Your role is to moderate comments. Your role is not to supervise this man’s life. There is no relationship between the two unless you go out of your way to create one, which would be–and of course was–a complete violation of fundamental journalistic ethics.

Coincidentally, also a violation of your own privacy policy:
“We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials.”

There is no justification. There is only waiting until you are fired.

I can’t believe the line that was crossed here. You got a man fired for cursing on a website, I mean really?

I understand it’s one thing to delete or ban an IP but why call a school to complain? It’s simpler just to ban an IP.

You crossed a defining line of privacy and you should be the guy fired.

It sounds like you’re hemorrhaging readers in the wake of this. I’d fire this clown.

WOW this kid makes a mistake and you get him FIRED in the middle of a RECESSION?!? Seems like JUSTICE is only served by one thing — YOU GET FIRED TOO.

Otherwise I’m not going to trust this narc-ing site and its sleazy administration.

FIRED.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE RECESSION.

You need GONE.

Here is my follow up on this story.

http://carlosmiller.com/2009/11/19/does-kurt-greenbaum-need-to-resign/

I note in your sign-in screen that my email address will not be published. How can I now be sure?
You took it upon yourself, Mr. Greenbaum, to start an investigation (and however you are now trying to spin this, an investigation WAS conducted, and you instigated that investigation) that led to a human being losing his job, guilty of one count of stupidity and one count of immaturity. The bigger issues are the nature of vulgarity itself, privacy and the process of responsible journalism.

What is vulgar? Who is to judge? Libraries have been filled with these ethical questions, and these questions will outlive us all. Is criticism vulgar? Many nations, tyrants and governments have thought so, and continue to think so. If you or your newspaper finds my criticism of you to be vulgar, now that you have my name, email and, presumably, my IP addresses, will you now come after me and my job? If I state a political view contrary to yours, whatever that may be, will I now soon be at the unemployment office because you deem it vulgar? How can I know?

In the age of the internet, the raw power of the media is larger, and more capable of enormous damage, then ever. As the guardians of Democracy and the First Amendment (something you seem to have forgotten, for the individual in question had the perfect, legal right to use the language he used, as crude as it may have been) it is your duty and your obligation to uphold the standards of journalism; something you failed miserably to do in this case. I call for your resignation, for if I was a holder of private knowledge that must be made public for the good of society, a call to you or your organization would be akin to falling on my sword; perhaps literally. Your graceful, or otherwise, exit from your organization is the only thing that can begin the healing process between this paper and your readers, and restore some measure of trust in the journalistic integrity of your organization.

Kurt, I’d like to quote a line written by Stan Lee for a popular comic book character. “With great power comes great responsibility.” Seems like a fitting quote to use here. YOU have considerable power as a journalist and it seems that in this case you have grossly misused this power. By your actions you have created an atmosphere of distrust for readers of the newspaper you represent. You have also brought discredit to all journalists at a time when most readers consider the term “journalistic integrity” an oxymoron. I’ll place a rather large wager that your colleagues at the Post Dispatch and other news outlets are distancing themselves from you as your employer should as well. You have emerged as the Jerry Maguire of the Com-Post Dispatch, and your “mission statement” is the gloating you’ve done in your article about disclosing the privacy of a reader to his employer in order to have him/her terminated. This story should be picked up nationwide as a cautionary tale to both journalists and readers alike about the abuse of power by individuals in the media for personal gratification.

Kurt, In a blog you were quick to delete (for unknown reasons) in your first article on this subject Dr. Debunk brought up a good point. He asked why you were so bent on removing the offensive word by the blogger because it is seen as a vulgarity by you. Dr. Debunk then brought up the fact that your newspaper and reporters routinely use the word “teabaggers” in legitimate articles to describe Conservative activists. I and the majority of your readers and colleagues know the exact meaning of this word and I asked you to come forward and explain in graphic detail to all of your readers what this word means. You cannot do this, I know, because your definition of this word would be too vulgar to print since it mentions part of the male anatomy. I and many readers find this word to be “vulgar and offensive.” My point is, you found this bloggers use of a certain word to be vulgar by your personal standards, yet your newspaper uses clever obscenities to describe people with opposing viewpoints. You have no moral high ground to stand on to decide what is indecent and what is not. You vendictively set out to destroy this persons life and then bragged in an article of how you did it. Now you’re attempting to obfuscate the facts to your readers to justify your actions/reactions.

Kurt Greenbaum-

Was I gloating about this incident? That wasn’t my intention. And I regret that it sounded like I was. I intended to simply explain to readers a step I’d tried to help rein in the vulgarity. I was utterly surprised by the reaction.

Mr. Greenbaum
You can claim that you were NOT gloating about this incident, but let me show you how you are being disingenuous. You original article has the headline “Post a vulgar comment while you’re at work, Lose your job!” A headline meant to strike fear into any bloggers heart. (trembles at the thought) Now your follow up to this article has cleverly toned down the stark aggressiveness and softened the stance by the writer. It now reads “Follow up: The case of the vulgar comment and the school.” Kurt, you and your colleagues must think you are writing to a bunch of tools. These subtle tactics don’t work on us like the did our grandparents. Nice try though. Please don’t spit on us and tell us it’s raining sir.

“While banning this person from your blog may have been appropriate,(or not),you actually calling this person’s workplace adn ‘informing” on them I find reprehensible, creepy, adn actually quite scary”

I absolutely agree with this.I think you should have comment moderation in
place to filter vulgar comments rather than causing people to lose job.You acted in haste,Period.You could have handled it better.

As a moderator for several years I find Mr. Greenbaum’s excuses for Privacy Policy Violations very disingenuous. Saying he’d need to block a whole range of IP addresses to block someones vulgarities is total bunk. He could have easily put the offending word in his word block section. That way he wouldn’t have had to delete the post a second time. When the post appeared the second time all readers would have seen is “*****”
I guess Anonymous has a different meaning at STLtody.com than I understand it to mean.
If I lived in your area I would not be buying your paper.

An elderly Jesuit freshman religion teacher once challenged us to accept three faults in everyone before passing judgement on that person. I’ve always done that, and I’ve found myself to be a healthier, happier person.

Most of the negative comments on this blog remind me that we don’t have to be cruel to be tough and that our ability to practice compassion with others largely determines our character. A healthy self-image depends on our ability to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, tolerant of both the weak and the strong–because some day in life everyone will have been one of these!

If we fail to be compassionate, we will develop psychic numbing!

Why don’t we move on to something less destructive!

You sure are taking a lot of heat for your action of contacting a poster’s employer. I guess all those minds think it is OK to post offensiveness and then get it deleted and do it again.

I’m on your side-I’m quite sure if the poster hadn’t posted it again, it would have been deleted and that would have been that.

Lots of bitchery in all those comments. Kind of scary what many folks think about their “rights” in a public forum.

You done good, Kurt! That poster got what they deserved.

Posting from any computer other than your own is open to investigation from the owner of that computer. Work, school, library, etc-if people do the things that are the purpose of why they are there, no harm, no foul. When they cross the line and get caught for doing something that they know was wrong and not within the TOS, and then do it again, yes, they deserve what they get.

If this is what passes for journalism in St. Louis, then St. Louis clearly doesn’t deserve the affliction of an independent newspaper. I’m sure the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal will all appreciate the rise in circulation from your former readers, who you so blithely label “jackasses”. (http://twitter.com/kgreenbaum/status/5778019649) At least you, Mr. Greenbaum, will be eligible for unemployment.

Also: next time (if you remain employed long enough for there to be a “next time”), don’t “walk the idea around the newsroom”, walk it to the legal department. Granted, they may hurt themselves laughing at your contortions of the English language, or they may break your hands to prevent you from doing anything as self-injurious as this, but they are professionals whose purpose in life is to prevent you from exposing yourself (or, more properly, your employer) to the kind of liability you’ve just opened yourself up to. I’m sure they would have appreciated the courtesy of being called on *before* the lawsuits start flying.

You’ve broken your own privacy policy, if I was your boss I would reprimand you if not fire you for this.
In the UK you would be breaking data protection laws, I’m not sure how this works in the US.

I don’t believe the employee quit. Because Kurt wrote it happened that way doesn’t suit me. That may be what the school told him, but me thinks the school fired the employee.

Anyone who writes criticizing the school employee - that’s NOT the issue - not what some unknown employee did. Most of us know the employee was wrong. Most of us know his comment was vulgar and juvenile.

What’s at stake is what Kurt Greenbaum did.

Kurt - I wrote yesterday that I bet Mary Junck, Kevin Mowbray and Arnie Robbins didn’t know what you did in advance. As usual, my instincts were right, proven by you writing that you should have talked to others in the newsroom - ESPECIALLY YOUR BOSSES.

Kurt, don’t you know - if you did this in a non-journalism medium - you’d be fired. Period. And if you aren’t fired or suspended, it’s another indictment that media businesses think they can operate differently. Sometimes they can and should operate differently, but in this case, your management needs to act the way the rest of the business world would react.

This isn’t a journalism issue anymore. Kurt, you’ve wrecked the Post Dispatch’s credibility. It will take years before it can be restored. Just read the comments from some who are cancelling their subscriptions.

Kurt - it’s 2009. It’s no longer about you, your paper, and so-called journalism principles. We readers, viewers and listeners - it’s about us. WE’RE your judge and jury. Period.

Kurt, after reading your twitter.com post on November 16 http://twitter.com/kgreenbaum/status/5778019649, I have to write this:

You need some very serious “time out”, whether it’s a suspension or firing. Calling the person who started the issue a “jackass” AFTER your action tells me you have little regard for us - the consumer of your product.

I don’t want to see anyone fired - but that twitter comment along with no apology tells me you are:

1. Smug
2. Arrogant
3. Self Absorbed
4. Indifferent to others
5. All of the above

Kurt, I worked in your business. I know the education you received in Springfield as well as you do. I was friends with the late Sen. Paul Simon who started the Public Affairs Reporting (PAR) program at Sangamon State University (now University of Illinois-Springfield). I also was friends with the late Bill Miller who succeeded Mr. Simon and who tried to recruit me to his program in 1979.

I was flattered Mr. Miller asked me but I told him I did not need an advanced degree in journalism. I told Bill I’d take my B.S. from SIU-Carbondale and make common sense to Master’s degree. Bill liked that explanation and we laughed about that comment at Illinois News Broadcaster Association conventions through the years until he passed away in 2003.

I knew these two fine men. Kurt, if they were alive, they’d tell you that what you did was wrong in all aspects.

Frankly, I’m not surprised what you did. I sensed this control-type paranoia from the Post Dispatch earlier this year. I was banned from posting comments to stories - and was NEVER given a reason why. I asked. No reply. I used my REAL NAME, not some non de plume as most people do.

Because I used my real name, I didn’t use profanity or wrote racist threats. I’m proud of my name. But because you banned me, I now have to use a non de plume. Using a pseudonym, I could write nearly anything I want without repercussion.

I have my reason for being banned; because I was critical of some of the paper’s policies and the agenda’s of some writers. I learned quickly people in the profession I used to work don’t have as thick skin as in the past.

But now I’m going to use my real name, signed at the bottom. Kurt, if I were Kevin Mowbray and Arnie Robbins, you would have been suspended for not seeking advice on what to do in advance.

However, after seeing that you called someone a jackass after they were fired, it proves you were gloating about what you did.

And because of that, I would have asked for your resignation. Just as what I believe is what happened at that school.

Whoever it was, he or she didn’t quit. They were either forced to resign or they were fired.

I chose to leave journalism and the media a few years ago because of the direction it was going, and that direction was created by people who cause incidents like this. I miss it, but I’m happy I’m no longer a part of it.

Kurt, good luck to you. You’re going to need it.

Scott Simon
now known as “daHood”

I disagree completely. You did indeed violate privacy by “tattling” on a poster to his or her employer. You’re being disingenuous and perhaps not even honest with yourself in claiming otherwise. Readers need to be able to trust a newspaper in order to bare their souls and contribute honestly to a public dialogue. You have thrown cold water on that and destroyed much of the trust you had. I don’t care if you violated the letter of a policy or not. You violated the readers’ trust. And that’s worse.

Nobody reads this paper anymore anyway, just look at how Lee screwed up the journals. I suspect they love this kind of attention, since they don’t get much in the form of subscribers anymore (when my parents stop subscribing because “there’s nothing in it anymore” you know you screwed up).

The post is devoid of any real content, a pale comparison of its former self and I personally cannot wait for it to close its doors for good.

In no particular order:

You violated your own employer’s privacy policy.
You took great and pompous pleasure in the job loss for the guy who posted (as evidenced by your own comments in a previous posting)
You don’t understand how the internet works
You have no journalistic ethics
You have no real ethics at all
You can probably expect a multi-million dollar lawsuit in the near future
Your employer can probably expect a multi-million dollar lawsuit in the near future.
You are a liability and an embarrassment to your employer
You are an embarrassment to the human race
You are a pretentious, pompous, self-important needy little man
You have exhibited no remorse whatsoever (lawyers will already have noted this, along with your previous blog response comments)
You are obviously in the wrong job
You would probably be a liability in any journalist job henceforth
You have the mark of Cain on your forehead for any journalist job you apply for
You have cost your employer it’s reputation
You have probably cost your employer a significant part of it’s revenue
You have certainly cost a family part, if not all, of it’s livelihood
You are a disgrace as a human being

YOU SHOULD BE FIRED - ON THE SPOT!

Sorry, you don’t get off on this one. Chalking up your motivations that the IP address was a school does not cut it. You were out of bounds. If you called my place of business about a comment one of my employees made you would be discussing it with them, not me, after I read you the riot act. Trust? No one trusts you now. There is much worse that appears in the comments section(s) of your newspaper than this one. Maybe you should start with all the bigotry and racism.

I, for one, will boycott every advertiser that supports your site.

Kurt,
It’ easy to hide behind your words and ignorance and say that I did not know what was going to happen. Your actions of gloating are unacceptable, and costed someone their Job. As that person that was dismissed from school because he violated the school policy or what ever other reason. I feel that you violated your companies privacy policy and because of it should also be let go. I understand that this person was posting profanity and he violated the sites terms. But you violated the privacy policy, I hope you have a great holiday.

I would just like to echo that this is why newspapers are failing- they are so out of touch with the mainstream. Also the statements of Mr. Greenbaum are appalling- especially where he denies violating the privacy policy and where he lies by saying that the school would not have been able to read the blog if the commenter was banned by IP. I refuse to believe someone who blogs as much as he does is so ignorant; therefore, he is lying.

Editors, have you no shame or honor? Do you feel no sense of right and wrong? Why won’t you own up to the mistakes and lies perpetrated by Mr. Greenbaum?

I find this incident very much in concert with the Police State attitudes that are now the prevailing mindset in the former USA (United States of America) now the new USA (United Socialists Army). The police, the media and the government no longer believe that laws and social constructs apply to them. That the citizen is merely garbage to be crushed under their tank treads. The media has always felt that it has exactly the same rights as the police state to smash down doors, interogate prisoners, torture……. Why doesn’t the post just snatch bloggers and fly them to another country and torture them in to admitting things they didn’t do or keep the blogger awake all night with blaring music, waterboarding, strip them naked and make butt pyramids. If you’re going to act like Imperialists why not take it to the next level and be officially like the US Government, afterall you spread their lies for them, why not torture too?

Your privacy policy mentions IP addresses. And then says what you will do with IP addresses.

Is it public knowledge what IP addresses were used to post which comments? Have you abandoned the whole ‘Anonymity’ thing that was mentioned here: http://www.igreenbaum.com/2009/09/6-reasons-were-lazy-about-story-comments/

Your actions are above and beyond what the Privacy Policy states you will do with IP Addresses.

You lost someone their job, by acting outside of how you agreed to act. That’s a big deal to that someone. That should be a big deal to me. So I’m canceling my subscription.

> We take our privacy policy seriously.

Coming from you, this is the most puzzling statement I’ve read this month.

The following is the STL Dispatch’s privacy policy on how it handles IP Addresses”

“Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer’s connection to the Internet, including your IP address (but not the e-mail address), when you visit our sites. Your IP address does not contain personally identifiable information, nor does it identify you personally. We use this information to deliver our web pages to you upon request, to tailor our sites to the interests of our users, and to measure traffic within our sites.”

As you can, it does not state that we hand your information over because we disagree with your post. No matter Greenbaum might have been doing the ethical thing, he broke a company policy and a bind contractual commitment with a visitor to the website. There is no justification for Greenbaum’s actions, he must be fired with immediacy and the fired teacher needs to sue.

The big point everyone is missing here is that the St. Louis Dispatch makes money on people placing comments. The more comments, the more ads being show. The contract between the paper and the website user is extremely important, as they agreed to maintain confidentialities in return for using that user generated content to generate revenue. Greenbaum’s actions can only end with his firing.

Face it Kurt, you’re the most despised man in St. Louis. The left, center, and right all hate your guts. Don’t bother trying to fire me, I’m self-employed. You should, however, tender your resignation. Good luck on the breadlines, KURT.

Why don’t you install software that automatically blocks comments with vulgar text in it?

Wow; you’ve really made some friends here, Kurt. Sure, that educator’s judgement was more than a bit lax in posting a crass comment from work, but you went WAY over the line in conducting your witch hunt. Why be so vindictive? All you had to do was not post his comment and it goes away forever. You’ve probably really screwed up that guy’s life; for what?

So, what does the P-D newsroom think about your behavior? I assume it’s been walked around by now, right?

Anyway, on to tips for Mr. Greenbaum, “Director of Social Media” and Defender of the Public Discourse (two diametrically opposed roles, it would seem):

1) Don’t snitch on your readers. You’ll lose their trust.
2) If you snitch and get someone fired, don’t brag about it publicly.
3) If you brag publicly about getting someone fired, FFS DON’T LEAVE YOUR PERSONAL INFO ON THE NET!

That’s just insane.

Anyway, you’re certainly getting a whole boatload of page views now. Success?

I think the problem here is too much ownership in these blogs by the writer. I do not feel comfortable with a professional snoop(ie reporter, journalist) having access to my information. No offense to anyone here, but you become a writer because you have pride in creating your piece of work. Now, add a troll who belittles it, or starts controversy which can even turn on you personally. Maybe you start to feel like you’re babysitting a free-for-all. What did you get that journalism degree for, anyway? What are you tempted to do? What? You know. Now, don’t try to deny it, all you writers have been tempted at some time or another. And you are a gossipy, gabby group. You’ll at least defame the person amoung yourselves; don’t lie, you know you would. And those that say they would go to the ground before they’d reveal a source, hahahahaha. Most of you, especially the men, are the biggest cream puffs I’ve ever met. A Social Editor sounds like a job for an elderly woman on “The View”.

Get a nerdy web person to moderate. No curiosity running through their veins about opinionated people.

I cannot believe the hyprocrisy and arrogance of the Post Dispatch as a whole.

A thread about censorship, free speech, the management of it. I respond this morning, and it’s deleted.

It contained no vulgarities or libel. Just hard opinion including some historical facts.

It was clearly deleted because everyone at the paper is circling the wagons, on the defensive, and in fear of the public backlash its getting from us.

Get this Post Dispatch. It’s not about you. It’s about us. We are your judge and jury. And right now, you’re guilty of a lot of things.

I’d be scared, very scared. Because you have damaged your credibility beyond repair.

Interesting. I now see my original post after it wasn’t there after logging off. Don’t know if he was removed and reposted.

All I know is I’m just digusted with Kurt Greenbaum. I know quite a few reporters at the Post Dispatch. I got to know Margaret Gillerman during the recent Prop N campaign and find her to be a stellar reporter.

The paper has fine examples of outstanding journalists. Kurt Greenbaum isn’t one of them.

I hope you loose your job over this. School or not you blew it. I will never subscribe to your paper, or anything affiliated with stltoday.com. At least not as long as people like you are employed there.

Whether intentional or not you got someone fired. As far as I’m concerned I am done with your paper and website. I hope you are all proud of yourselves.

Even with this update, I think you’re only thinly reconsidering your position — instead, you’re really simply rephrasing and justifying your actions. And that’s what life is like today: everyone’s right, and no one will change that.

But in my opinion, you and your paper have chosen to leave the discussion wide open — not even implementing freely available, easy-to-install and customize profanity filters on your commenting engine. And then you’re shocked and appalled when someone doesn’t have your standards for clean language.

First of all, that’s not realistic. Secondly, what IS the precedent? If it’s clear that the comment came from someone within the Catholic Church, or at IBM, or from the St. Louis Cardinals organization, or a local Kinder-Care day care center, do you take the same action? Do you do it if they comment during “business hours”? This was so helter skelter that it definitely appears you felt you needed to ride in on a white horse and save the rest of your readers…rather than proactively handle it with technology or edit out the offending word.

That man has just as much right to freedom of speech as you do to freedom of the press. You demonstrated nothing but poor form by contacting his employer. Tattling is what immature children do. Besides, it is none of your business and all you had to do was delete the comment. You ruined his career and you tarnished your own reputation. Brilliant move.

You are an idiot who ruined someone’s job (in this economy, no less) for absolutely no reason. I’m glad your childish “apology” is no more of an apology than your ridiculous escalation of the issue was a response.

I dearly hope that this will be the end of your crap-town paper online for the foreseeable future.

What you have done like it or not Mr. Greenbaum is begin the Sauberung. You have opened the door to censorship from within the ranks of the estate whose duty is to protect the citizenry from censorship, to inform the citizenry when it is being opressed by those who would foster tyranny, and to goad the citizenry to action when injustice has taken place by shining your ever present light upon the injustice.

YOU are responsible for the injustice this time. You have breached trust with your readers (glad to say I do not number myself among your subscribers else I would be in a right state of outrage over this particular hideousness) You have used your position of trust to inform to an outside source on one of your confidential sources. What would have happened had Woodward and Bernstein outed Deep Throat because they disagreed with Deep Throats politics or use of language skills? What would our world have been like then?

I give you two quotes by your first namesake to ponder:
“All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let’s get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States — and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!” -Kurt Vonnegut

When we place our trust in those whose job and duty it is to protect that first amendment and they then breach the confidentiality of one of us by outing him or her to some authority with some measure of control of that persons life or pursuit of happiness, then we have truly failed to honor the commitment that comes with the freedom enumerated in that first amendment.

“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?” -Kurt Vonnegut

Do you find that you have run out of topics to blog upon? Is that why you outed this person? Should we pity you rather than be outraged at what you have done?

I anticipate that you will be sued by the employee, and rightly so. You clearly did violate the privacy policy of STLToday — and you probably can’t say that in print because your company’s lawyers have advised you that if you do, you are making the case against you and the company even more open & shut.

(Not that I condone what was posted — but his action was isolated and easily dealt with. You’ve let the genie out of the bottle.)

Pretty weak apology. Now are you ready to pony up to make up for this guy or gal’s lost salary? That would be the right thing to do. Or are you going to wait until the courts force you to?

Kurt,

You did violate your privacy policy, and if you contact your attorney(s), they will tell you the same thing. By revealing the IP address to third-parties, you broke the trust.

Boo on you Kurt.

Your career as a serious journalist, especially anywhere else, is so over and you don’t even realize it. And now the integrity of stltoday is on the line as well, thanks to your actions. Time will tell if they take their journalistic responsibilities any more seriously than you.

Sorry for your situation; even good people make mistakes. But between you and the guy you “got,” at least he could accept responsibility. He’s the more honorable person in this mess.

We had this kind of censors, denunciators and “citizen militia” in Central Europe some years ago. I’m glad those times are gone (hopefully) forever. But I see America didn’t learn anything at all from 20th century history.

Honestly with the question that was asked did you really think you would not get any raunchy or dirty responses? Come on if you thought you were only going to get pure and wholesome answers you are retarded.

You can try to act as innocent as you want but you as a journalist should know this above anyone we have the Freedom of Speech in this country, not only that but we also have the right to publish pretty much what ever we darn well please. If you came under attack for something you put out there you would cry and fight because you were being censored.

I really hope this guy has someone talk to him or he gets a pair and sues the crap out of you.

Kurt,
The way I read it, you did violate the privacy policy: “We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information.” The IP address, content and timing of the post are specific to an individual. And obviously, by providing them to whom you gave the information, they can be used to identify the person. The fact that you, or some other third party likely could not identify the user based on the information is a technicality. The bottom line is that you violated the spirit of the policy and the trust of the users to “teach that guy a lesson” — “teachable moment” is a more pleasant turn of phrase, but I think the former relays the intent more accurately.

I would also say you overreacted in a big way. Was the comment juvenile? Definitely. Was it vulgar or offensive? Mildly. Was it unexpected? I certainly hope not. There will always be jokers who make stupid or offensive comments in an attempt to be funny, or for shock value. Obviously there are ways to deal with that kind of thing, as others have suggested.

Kurt,

You are mistaken in your assertion that you did not reveal private information. Tying an IP address to an anonymous user, to a school and calling that school absolutely, indisputably was revealing private information. It identified the user. Period. Your denial is shallow, and clearly ignorant of the law. I think you know this, but I think you simply must deny it at this point, as defense against the impending civil lawsuit that you and your paper will soon be defending.

If you were worth your salt as a journalist, you would understand the value of Publius, and the dangers of outing Publius.

If you had any integrity as a journalist, you would tender your resignation.

If your employer had any integrity as an institution of journalism, they would demand your resignation.

At this point, I suspect, it’s not about integrity — rather about circling your legal wagons.

Kurt,

You routinely claim that you alone acted in bad judgement, then use “we” in the decision making process, which was it, you alone or a group of people?

Kurt - “I should have walked the idea around the newsroom”
Kurt - “Could I have banned the IP address?…That’s a step we preferred not to take.”

Routinely you use the identity that seems to be either most apologetic or authoritarian based on how it best serves to quell the anger you have stirred up. To be honest an apology from you (which this a rather pathetic “I did nothing wrong” sort of apology, or a “I’m sorry that you just don’t understand” sort) is not what is needed, what people want to hear is your boss saying that you did the correct and justifiable thing, and that you did not break the privacy policy, and have him explain how he felt this action is and will be called for in the future.

Problem is it wasn’t, isn’t, and won’t be. I would doubt your boss would even be willing to stick his neck out for you on this since so far only your reputation is tarnished. He may fail to see from the comments that the reputation of your paper has also been tarnished.

Honestly If I was the fired employee, I would be contacting a lawyer, I don’t think that your Privacy Policy would stand up in a court of law, and you would likely be fired which would be a fitting end to the debacle you created.

-Jonathan

(footnote for all you retarded conservatives [not referring to non-retarded conservatives] claiming this to be some hidden liberal agenda, get over your selves, and grow a brain, you make all the people who are rightfully offended by this look worse)

There are a number of things readers can do in addition to posting here:

1. Contact the editor. Use the contact us button at the top right of the page. Their main line seems to be (314) 821-1110.
2. Contact the EFF - they deal with all things related to online privacy @ eff.org
3. Contact the ACLU - they deal with all things related to civil liberties @ aclu.org
4. Contact the owner of the St Louis Today - Lee Enterprises 201 N. Harrison St., Davenport, IA, 52801 (563) 383-2100.

Remember to be polite and professional!

Kurt,

You have absolutely crossed the line. Your actions are MUCH worse than the vulgar commenter’s. Nothing you say or write will ever make up for the damage you’ve caused your victim, or the disgrace you’ve placed on the PD and STLToday.com website. If anyone should be resigning, I think it’s obvious who that should be.

I’ve been a journalist for 25 years, and I have to say I’m stunned by your complete lack of conscience and inability to take responsibility for what you did. In a fit of pique, over some juvenile behavior, you directly caused a man to lose his job. And then you crowed about it, no matter what you say.

What troubles me most is that you seem to have forgotten is that journalism dies when we lose the public’s trust. You have destroyed your credibility and trust with your readers. As a result your have gravely damaged the credibility of this newspaper, and of this website in particular. That you are free to post a glib and disingenuous “follow up” demonstrates that the paper’s management has forgotten, too.

So you would have pursued anyone who posted a similar phrase? Or did you set out to punished this person because you noticed they worked at a school and used technology at work. Wow aren’t you such an upstanding little person; bet you tattled to the teacher in school too? Not excusing the person for their mistake, but I would fire you too if I were your administrator. Done reading you column.

“This isn’t new, but it reinforces what I have always known: Your trust is paramount.”

Too late….

Aww….it was a school….awww.

Freedom-of-expression police! At a newspaper!

Disgusting.

1. The internet relies on freedom of speech, which relies on anonymity.
2. Journalism should probably focus on things of merit, instead of tracking down people who use foul language.
3. What you have done is absolutely disgusting. You went out of your way, for no reason, to mess up a persons life.
4. You should be fired and barred from ever using the internet, because you clearly don’t understand it.

As I fellow journalist, I find what you did — and your rational in trying to justify it — inexcusable. As if newspapers (and their Web sites) aren’t struggling enough, you’ve just given us another black eye. Way to go.

The comment came from a school. A school with children. Children who do not need an employee who would take time out of his day to post vulgar comments on a website. These vulgarities were posted not once but twice. I can’t believe the people who are comfortable having children around such a person.
He did not get fired (though he should have been) he resigned.
When did it become okay for someone to be sexually offensive and still be around your children?
Shame on all of you who think so.

I am in complete agreement with the above comments. I’m even tempted to use the numbers listed to call and complain.
I just hope the author really did have his moment of clarity and that it will help him to be a better person in the future.
This world is FULL of jackassery.

it all comes down to this: there is software in this world - free software - that you can implement with very little effort that looks for certain words, and replaces them with asterisks or something. it’s simple. it’s acceptable.

what’s not acceptable is allowing people to post pseudo-anonymously and without any type of bottleneck.

either moderate with far more effort, or implement a software solution. it’s far easier to find a better way than to do what you did.

the internets are riling, kurt. and you riled ‘em good. we treasure our privacy far more than we treasure anything else. i would give up my internets if i had to surf with a name tag. granted, you didn’t pull the trigger, but you supplied the gun to an outfit chock full of ammunition.

Your actions are not justified. You are in the wrong because you DID leak the IP information of the person. Only the site admins (you) know which comment ties with which IP. You saw the IP and it belongs to a school. You then decided to call the school up and brought up the comment posted by the person. This is a breach right there.

You obviously do not know how the internet works. You also do not know how IP’s work. Lastly, you do not know what internet and privacy means.

In short: You stepped out of your jurisdiction. Your jurisdiction allows you to ban the person’s IP only. Not share that with another person/school/department/company.

You should be fired. STLToday, if it had any integrity, should fire you on the spot.

I encourage everyone to cancel subscriptions and stop reading this website.

You’ve made an enemy of the internet, you ruined someones career over a powertrip.

I hope 4chan raids you.

Disgusting. And disgusting that you are still employed.

I hope this paper crashes and burns, and I will make every attempt I know how to do this, and motivate ANY negative action towards your blog, yourself and this website, without ANY restriction.

Commenters beware. Dont post without a privateVPN or a public Wifi.

I think a previous post hit the nail on the head. Kurt was annoyed with the vulgar post, searched the IP address, found out it was from a private school, and called the headmaster to teach some rich punk kid a lesson. Instead of a kid, he caught an adult, and the headmaster had no choice but to fire him. Definitely a breech of trust, violation of privacy policy, and disproportionate to the offense, when the alternatives (delete post, ban IP address) were much more reasonable. The fact that Mr. Greenbaum initially took pleasure in the outcome of his actions, as well as his subsequent denials just reinforce the perception of his lack of character. And the lack of response from supervising editors reflects badly upon the reputation of the newspaper, since this has become a national story.

Blah blah blah. More public journalism crap. We need the punishment to exquisitely fit the crime: fire Kurt.

@Shelby:

You are completely missing the point. The teacher in question could have turned out to be a closet baby rapist, and Kurt’s actions would still be inexcusable.

This is about an organization (that is laughably trying to deem itself a social media site) breaching a contract that it has with its users. A serious line has been crossed, and it makes people wonder if the things that they say on here may trigger an unexpected consequence only because what they said rubs some rogue editor the wrong way.

”

There are a number of things readers can do in addition to posting here:

1. Contact the editor. Use the contact us button at the top right of the page. Their main line seems to be (314) 821-1110.
2. Contact the EFF - they deal with all things related to online privacy @ eff.org
3. Contact the ACLU - they deal with all things related to civil liberties @ aclu.org
4. Contact the owner of the St Louis Today - Lee Enterprises 201 N. Harrison St., Davenport, IA, 52801 (563) 383-2100.

Remember to be polite and professional!”

Done. Also the Vice President in charge of this particular paper appears to be Kevin Mowbray (314) 340-8970.

Both Mr. Mowbray and the President of the company in Iowa appear to be out of town today, but their secretaries will take messages.

It might also be worth contacting other organizations who would give this the attention it deserves. The two that immediately spring to my mind are “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report”, however I’m sure there are others.

@anon

I would not be surprised by a 4chan raid. Wouldn’t that be a wakeup call …

–I have taken ‘Tor-user’s’ advice and researched ‘tor’. It is a free down-loadable program that allows you encrypt your IP, and also protects you from most mal-ware.

–It is simple, free and available for any web browser as an add-on. I am now protected by Mozilla ‘tor-button” and recommend it highly to all concerned with their privacy. Also recommend WOT. WOT is an Internet browser security add-on that warns users about risky websites to help them avoid spyware, browser hijacking, identity theft, phishing, and other mal-ware.

Kurt supposedly wanted to “help” some errant student.

How can he be employed in the media so long without sparing a stray thought or two to what happens to some students when they come under the radar of school administrators?

Fortunately, they can no longer conduct a strip search for Ibuprofen. But they can and do brand first-graders as sex offenders and have 8-year-olds led away in handcuffs.

Any teenager (especially a teenage boy who isn’t part of the A List) who indulges in some edgy writing is lucky to stay off the no-fly list.

And since the justification is “vulgarity,” let’s bear in mind that teenagers may even become convicted sex offenders for their texts and photos.

What if the offending poster had been a student posting an “eating” anecdote involving another student who happened to be 3 years and 1 day younger? Or who happened to be of the same gender (thus nullifying the Romeo/Juliet exemption for stat rape)? Prison is a real (albeit far-fetched) possibility.

Think before you tattle. Play hall monitor on your own website and leave it at that.

I agree with what others have said in the comments section. The fact that you wanted to send a message meant, as you admit, you had to exercise some amount of effort above and beyond the usual of just deleting the comment until the poster got the hint.

You thought it was a student and wanted to show that person what real power was and descended to their level to prove it. Unfortunately in so doing you cost a person their job.

I hope you’ve learned a lesson about what being a grown up in this day and age actually means and how hard it can be at times to just let things go.

Reading the follow-up I see you’ve yet to understand this and are seeking to try to justify your actions for the purpose of, I assume, receiving absolution for them and thus regain trust that you are smart enough to be aware that you did lose.

I’ll leave the rest to decide whether that is possible or not, as for myself, I don’t think I’d care too terribly much in always wondering if I have to watch over my shoulder for commenting here.

I don’t curse as a general rule, and tend to think poorly of those who do so readily, but I might not always agree with everyone else I read or work for.

And that raises the question, how long before I too will get that knock at the door for posting here? I mean if it is so easy, I can’t imagine I would have too long to wait….

I can’t get over the inanity of some people posting here. To say this is why newspapers are failing is to disregard the system that will be delivering the characters they’re typing in front of their faces right now. To borrow a phrase from James Carville: It’s the Internet, stupid.

Give Kurt a break, guys! Has anyone among us not done something equally unfortunate? When we make mistakes, critics call it evil. When God makes mistakes, they call it Nature. Put a perspective on this thing!

yeah, I won’t be coming back here much for news. I think it was the sheer stupidity of the story that caught my attention.

thanks for the heads up on your standards and practices.

“Did I reveal private information?”

Of course. You enabled the identification of an individual through your actions. Just enabling a non-law-enforcement third party to take action on an individual is enough to breech the site policy, if not actual state laws themselves.

It is my own opinion sir, that you need to lose your job. The IT admin and headmaster both need to lose their jobs as well for their role in taking the privacy issues with a grain of salt. I’m especially worried that a so-called IT admin at the school took action based on handing them the email you had. It would take much more forensic analysis to determine if the internal machine at the school was not an infected proxy-bot allowing someone in Korea to have posted that comment.

All in all, a complete failure on all of you. You should be ashamed, and change this page to an official apology with a direct link to your own resignation announcement.

KevC
http://www.Silicon-Vision.com

I can no longer take this paper or its staff members seriously. Sorry, but you’ve lost a reader here.

Kurt,

In this particular case, you did the right thing. You were dealing with a user who was determined to violate your reasonable prohibition against the use of foul language. The alternatives being mentioned here are laughable to anyone who has to deal with this sort of online behavior.

In general, message boards are an embarrassment to most of your readers because too many users think they have an absolute First Amendment right to post whatever they want.

They don’t, and this isn’t a First Amendment issue anyway. The Post-Dispatch has the right to determine guidelines for comments that reflect on the newspaper.

Perhaps if users posted their comments with their real identities, this wouldn’t be an issue. But the cowards who hide behind anonymity and then cry foul when they are exposed and punished get no sympathy from me.

Your rights carry responsibilities and your actions carry consequences. It’s amazing that so many online users forget that.

I wouldn’t worry to much about your critics here. They’re part of the problem; not the solution.

To “Ryan on the Euphonium”:

You are exactly right about giving him a break. Mr. Greenbaum made a bad mistake in judgment in this situation. But I don’t wish him to lose his job over it. Sometimes people make mistakes but it doesn’t mean they should be forced to resign. Don’t you agree, Mr. Greenbaum?

It seems that Kurt Greenbaum is getting a lot of flack. Unfortunately, people are getting more tied up in the “way” he presented his side of the story, than the actions themselves. Of course he gloated, that’s as clear as day. He “own3d” the employee, and wanted to make an example of it. This rubbed many vocal people the wrong way, so they’ve become convinced of their own self-righteousness now, and want to make an example of Mr. Greenbaum.

The question of privacy can go both ways. There are a lot of reasons, both legal and ethical, on both sides of the argument. There is nothing wrong with contacting the owner of an IP address and saying “I know what you’re doing”. The originating individual is not a third party, I think we’re all agreed on that. Now, is that what happened? A school is not exactly an individual owner, but neither is it a massive IP block. At what point does an individual become “an entity”?

I’m really of two minds about this, and I think any final decision would take much more information.

Now, if the school did what many people are saying, I think it’s insane for firing someone, or even pressuring them to resign, for a single word. If the employee had a past record of unprofessional/unethical activity, that of course gives them more of a leg to stand on. But that’s completely aside from what people are getting worked up about. And a word is a word. Come on people, grow up. It’s just a word. Is the world really so scary that people have to suffer real-life stress, duress, and hardness as atonement for a single word???

Lastly, as an aside to all those saying things to the effect of “he lost his job right before the holidays”, that’s just dumb. The school employee’s, Mr. Greenbaum’s, and the administration’s actions aren’t judged for worthiness based on the time of year. You should be ashamed of yourselves for such specious reasoning.

In conclusion, Mr. Greenbaum, you have a public relations problem on your hands. The best answer has already been posted here. Find the employee, help him get things back on track, and wash your sins– imagined or not– away.

The point is, you took these disproportionate actions when you ignore dozens of racist, vile, and downright ignorant comments on a daily basis. YOU IGNORED OVER 70% OF YOUR READERS WHOIN SOME FORM SAID THEY WANTED COMMENTING -GONE- OR -COMPLETELY OVERHAULED-. Instead, you do nothing. STLToday race baits in their articles, post crime statistics for the city every other week to remind commenters why they hate the city so much, etc, etc. You allow people to post false, insensitive garbage on a daily basis and DO NOTHING. Now you are seeing a curse word and reporting it to the school?

I am glad to see you guys getting such negative press, and I hope a lawsuit is in the filing process.

Go ahead, keep trying to save face so you keep your job. You look ridiculous.

I would recommend sending an email to the general manager if you feel strongly about how the actions of an editor of this news organization affects discourse on privacy in the context of a collaborative web.

To contact the STLtoday.com general manager: generalmanager@stltoday.com

Additional contact information can be found at http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/help/stories.nsf/contactus/story/2F4402FE763C70EE86256EC40053DE1F?OpenDocument

The story here isn’t about whether you over-reacted, but whether you betrayed the trust of your employers and readers by violating the site’s privacy policy.

The fact is that you did communicate information to a 3rd party, contrary to your site’s privacy policy, which states:

“We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the
user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some
cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described
in “Compliance with Legal Process” below.”

The individual user information was the post timestamp and the IP it came from. While the poster did not own the IP, you gave enough information for them to be personally identified. That comes under the definition of “individual user information” - that an individual user used a specific resource at a specific date and time.

Trying to defend your mistake by saying that it was right shows you don’t “get it” when it comes to privacy on the Internet.

If this were a poster from China writing about human rights abuse, would you have been so quick to say that handing over the IP address and time of the post isn’t “individual user information”? It’s certainly information about the activity of an individual user by any reasonable interpretation.

What if it were a poster in your community posting about corruption in local government? Wouldn’t your editors have argued that handing over the IP and time are “individual user information”, and say “get a warrant”?

We enjoy a certain amount of freedom of speech, and that means that sometimes people will say things that are stupid, outrageous, or asinine. The original one-word post could be categorized in such a way. It didn’t do nearly as much damage as your reaction to it has. A reasonable person would have either continued to delete the posts, added a new rule to the spam filter, or set all comments from that block of IP addresses to a moderation queue.

As director of social media, you have to realize that on the web, it’s about trust. Your breech of that trust cost someone their job. This is not right, and not morally defensible. “I was motivated by the fact it was a school” is not an excuse. We’ve tired of “think of the children” as an excuse for eroding rights. That’s a slippery slope that can be used to justify all sorts of excesses, including cameras in every room of your home.

Hopefully, you’ll come out of this with a better appreciation of just how important a privacy policy is, and how necessary it is to make sure that you avoid not only breeching it, but even the appearance of breeching it. If nothing else, it certainly has brought the topic to the attention of people, so some good has come out of it

I could possibly let it fly under it wasn’t your intention to gloat if it wasn’t for the blog’s headline. And remember, that isn’t the same as a regular headline. You have to take responsibility for the entire blog, headline and text. Perhaps a lesson can be learned from that proverb: “never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

What a round-a-about way to say that you screwed up. How about a simple “I’m sorry” you pompous jerk. Instead you decide to make it personal. People like you don’t deserve their own blogs.

If STLtoday can’t do its job and moderate, it has no business being on the internet at all. Ever.
One curse word and you share someone’s IP (doesn’t matter if its with the owners of that domain, it’s still a violation), crying about how it offended you? Big bad internet tough guys, just know everyone who is informed on the internet is screaming for you to get fired Kurt (and company), you screwed up badly here.

“We’ve watched the uproar…”

Kurt, the only true solution here is for you to resign. Seriously. You purposely broke the Terms of Service of your own site (yes, you did — your ignorance of this fact doesn’t make it go away). YOU messed up. Period. End of discussion.

Back-track and make excuses all you want, but YOU are the one at fault here… and you can’t even admit it… which is even more shameful than your original act.

You opened up the chance for possible litigation (fired employee, feel free to contact a lawyer: You have a case) and in typical shameful-fashion, you’ve stuck your fingers in your ears and are lalala’ing until this blows over.

Thankfully, this is the internet and it won’t.

Don’t even bother, Fred. I posted Greenbaum’s boss contact information earlier this morning and it seems that the “moderator” have already deleted the post. They let it sit for a couple of hours and then it mysteriously disappears lol.

Way to go. This guy posts on his twitter “A j@ck@ss who posted a vulgarity…” (without the @…funny how it censors here) Irony?

Utterly disgusting.

This reaction was completely over blown in my personal opinion–the action did not match the reaction. KG’s response was classless. As a result, STLtoday will be blacklisted from my array of local sites that I visit, until KG is replaced or demoted from editor/director.

On a separate note, apart from the reaction, KG has proven to be utterly incompetent at his social media duties. It only takes a quick search to find that Twitter, Reddit, slashdot, and more sites are abuzz with KG’s actions, and in a specifically negative context. Call me crazy, but I’m guessing KG was hired to present STLtoday in a positive spotlight to the social internet world, and he has done far more damage this week than he ever accomplished. STLtoday’s best move would be to cut the fat and replace KG.

Give Kurt a break? For what? He violated his own company’s privacy policy which resulted in a man getting fired, opening the door to a certain lawsuit. Not only that, but he gloated about it, called the commenter a jackass, and has yet to even apologize. Not only was he wrong, but he was arrogant in the process.

The internet is in an uproar, and justifiably so. An immediate apology from both he and the Post-Dispatch is necessary but isn’t enough. The Post-Dispatch is going to pay for this dearly in the lawsuit. And they need to revamp the commenting policy and enforcement thereof.

http://stltomorrow.org

Thanks for posting something sensible, Ryan. My guess is that most of these posters who are after Greenbaum’s head are hypocrites. They’re probably the type of people who consistently stab their own co-workers in the back, without a concern about leaving one of them without a job. Oh, such bravery and high morals on this blog.

You’ve usually been right on the mark about this stuff before Kurt.
our jobs don’t consist posting vulgarities on the internet all day.
understand that it was not dont to hurt the guy.

Please, let me be the first to say I appreciate you doing what you did.
unbeknownst to Kurt the guy lost his job, which was not the intention.
sucks for the person but they should have thought about what they were
saying before they said it.
yours, Travis.

this is one of the most frightening things about how badly you’ve misunderstood

Alright,

Kurt I really expect more professionalism on the part of STLtoday.com. What you fail to realize is that this guy who posted vulgarity may have been out of line but calling his place of work and “tattling” on him in lieu of working on your websites security or increasing moderation is extremely low. I just hope that when you receive your next paycheck or even better next time you are Christmas shopping you realize what you have done to this innocent man and his family. You should feel ashamed and disappointed in yourself and more importantly I hope your news company realizes that your actions are inevitably hurting business and fire you.

Wow. Just - Wow. You’re a real piece of work now aren’t you? /b/rothers?

To Paul N.:

You said, “Mr. Greenbaum made a bad mistake in judgment in this situation. But I don’t wish him to lose his job over it.” Now let’s switch that around: “the school employee made a bad mistake in judgment in this situation. But I don’t wish him to lose his job over it.”

Don’t you agree?

Mr. Greenbaum, you clearly still feel that you did nothing wrong, which is evidenced by this language: “Second, that I somehow violated our privacy policy.” Somehow? Scads of readers have posted the language that the PD’s policy uses. I don’t think there is a “somehow” about it - you did violate the policy. Glad to know that you’ll continue to sit upon your high horse while this employee scrambles to find a new job.

You’re delusional if you don’t think that what you did blatantly crossed the line. You should be fired.

You violated a man’s privacy and cost him his job. He posted a word that some people may find vulgar. Your actions are much more reprehensible than the poster’s. When will we be seeing your resignation?

I hope the man sues your paper.

Way to steal my title as the guy who ruined Christmas!

You did gloat, and I imagine you did feel some smug gleeful satisfaction at getting the guy fired for disturbing the peace on your site… but now that the internets have called you out on it, you’re backing down… but that doesn’t mean you didn’t enjoy it.

The fact of you calling this person a jackass on your Twitter makes you a hypocrite. How could you ever respect yourself? You are no better than him in the regard you hold him in. I hope you feel proud of yourself, you internet hero. I believe an internet “storm” is a-brewing. I wish you the best of luck…

Please, time to let up on the Kurt bashing and get what’s broken fixed. What do you say, Kurt? So what should be done about the school worker? Kurt, what are you going to do to rectify the situation? Are you going to contact the headmaster to tell him things are not going too well with this, and if there is a lawsuit, he’s likely to be pulled into it too? Are you going to ask him to read your pages, and see if he can feel well about his actions after reading the comments? Are you going to ask him to reconsider letting this employee go for this reason? You can’t say you’re sorry and do nothing about the employee. So…..what are you going to do, Kurt? What?

dude, seriously i’ld hate to be you right about now. guess i’ll catch the rest of this story on CNN

I happened on the link to your original blog entry on another site. What you did was a blatant abuse of power, the very thing that journalism exists to deter. It needlessly besmirched the reputation of your newspaper and journalists everywhere. You should be ashamed of yourself. The after-the-fact excuses and self-justifications don’t wash.

–That makes 4 posts of mine on this subject that have been taken down today, all on topic, all “non-vulgar”, and all in response to other commenters…and all added to my file.

–Let’s see if I can go five for five.

Hope you have a clear conscience on that one buddy, but then again, altering a man’s life to fuel your own ego wouldn’t bother you that much.

Nice to know this type of behaviour is possible online.

The IT director at the school should be fired, or whoever at the school directed the witch hunt.

I also find it incredibly ironic that the journalist here used his twitter account (@kgreenbaum) to call the commenter a “j**k*ss” for using profanity:
http://twitter.com/kgreenbaum/status/5778019649

Thank god for projects like tor (http://tor.eff.org) and so forth to protect individuals’ privacy on the net (to some degree), and counter un-american stuff like what happened here.

Enough, already!!! I haven’t witnessed this level of hatred since I did diversity counseling for a local youth group. Let’s not forget that, typically, the first reaction to truth is hatred…. and that hatred narrows and degrades the soul and cages everything that’s good about you! And when you look deep into your own known desires, that’s where you’ll find the deadliest hatred that you’re capable of!

To all of you bloggers who obviously and conveniently continue to overlook your own failures and mistakes, I sincerely hope you sleep well tonight!

This entire column is, bluntly, a cheap excuse. You claim that you did not “hunt down” the teacher, but you somehow think calling someone’s place of work counts as within sensible boundaries. There are journalists who go to prison to protect the public, you are no journalist.

Kurt -
I see the “hang’em high” crowd is in full cry against you. As with most mobs, they have chosen to ignore the salient facts.

You reported to a school an inappropriate comment from someone (unknown to you as to their status). It was the school in the person of their IT person that chose to track down the “culprit”. It was the decision of the anonymous poster at the school to “resign”.

Privacy policies on all web sites vary, however, in such cases there is enough “gray area” for individual choice. However, you are not responsible for the school’s policies — which may be the “real story” here.

This may be a good question: Just what are the internet policies and privacy policies of the various school districts? How can these policies affect the student, teachers and staff?

What you did was completely unneeded, and honestly juvenile.
All he does is make a “smart-ass” remark, like we all do at multiple points in our lives, then you go and get him fired from his job over it, and then call him “a jackass”. You have no real right to try and make yourself out as a good guy here because being up your own lower intestine is not a good thing, and doesn’t warrant such privileges.

You clearly do not know what wrath you have brought upon yourself.

Not by me, I have a life, but there are many out there who make it their life to ruin the lives of people they can locate on the internet, especially when “they” have a reason or cause to agree upon.
That reason today being, that Kurt Greenbaum is “a jackass”

Wondering who “they” are?
They are Anonymous.

The comment came from a school. A school with children. Children who do not need an employee who would take time out of his day to post vulgar comments on a website. These vulgarities were posted not once but twice. I can’t believe the people who are comfortable having children around such a person.
He did not get fired (though he should have been) he resigned.
When did it become okay for someone to be sexually offensive and still be around your children?
Shame on all of you who think so.
— Shelby

No, Shelby, shame on you and the five other Kurt supporters. Authoritarian prudes like you want everyone to behave like robots. Life is not like that. Posting a vulgar word on a two bit online article does not make you a child molester or a bad person, as you would like to think. Resign Kurt. You know what you did was wrong and anyone who supports Kurt is absolutely delusional.

Just who do you think you are to cause someone to lose their job because you view something as a “teachable moment”??? You’re not his mother. If you have any role at all, as the employee of a newspaper, you should see the value in freedom of expression… the actual content shouldn’t matter. You, Sir, should resign.

Apology is not good enough. Please remove any reference to “journalist” in the “About the Author” section of your webpage. While I too find the ‘word’ objectionable, I find your actions unconscionable.

I want to love newspapers, but you’re a shining example of an out-of-touch columnist with a pulpit. My heart goes out to the “jackass”, as you’ve named him.

Looking forward to the lawsuit. If I was licensed in your state, I’d be all over this. The guy who was fired is probably being hounded by lawyers as we speak. You can rationalize it however you want, but you broke your TOS and you cost someone his job. I hope the power trip was worth it.

Well Kurt, as the saying goes, “hindsight is 20/20.” While I appreciate the fact that you’ve come to the conclusion that you might have handled things differently had you known what you know now, I hope that you’re coming to a grander conclusion - that you have really lost any credibility or professional integrity that you might have had before. While I’m sure you’re getting sick of debating the legality of your actions, I’m equally positive that you know deep down that you’re going to end up losing your job over this incident. Don’t let this depress you too much as it’s just the way things happen. The best way to handle it is to proactively get your ducks in a row and resign before anybody has a chance to fire you. That will keep your options open while you go looking for other work in hopes that you can maybe take a less-public job for a few years or so while time does its job of healing wounds.

I do have one suggestion about your strategy though, and that is to stop stating that your reasoning for contacting the school is because you thought it was a student. Whether true or not, by saying this you are effectively admitting that you intentionally violated the privacy of a minor and shared this minor’s information with a third party, which is notably worse of an offense than simply breaking an website privacy agreement. I would try to keep this argument “under wraps” from now on as it is only hurting your chances of escaping legal scrutiny.

Best of luck with your future careers, keep your head up!

Kurt,

The problem with your actions is that you acted out of malice. You were seeking revenge and wanted to hurt this person directly. The “easy” thing to do is to ask your web developer to implement a comment filter on vulgarity (I’m a developer, this is a 1 hour task!).

I hope you feel ashamed for your actions.

It’s a shame that you feel justified in taking a man’s job for something as silly as a vulgarity on a website. Your own TOS explains that you may perform “message deletion or user bans”. There is no mention of destruction of your personal life. Maybe users should think twice about posting anything on a website where this type of thing is done without remorse.

Enough, already!!! I haven’t witnessed this level of hatred since I did diversity counseling for a local youth group. Let’s not forget that, typically, the first reaction to truth is hatred…. and that hatred narrows and degrades the soul and cages everything that’s good about you! And when you look deep into your own known desires, that’s where you’ll find the deadliest hatred that you’re capable of!

To all of you bloggers who obviously and conveniently continue to overlook your own failures and mistakes, I sincerely hope you sleep well tonight!
— Ryan On The Euphonium
3:25 pm November 19th, 2009

No one cares what you think, RYAN, Mr. self appointed Gandhi. Why don’t you feel any sympathy towards the guy who LOST his job? I have yet to see you post anything about that. You’re a complete hypocrite.

Ewout… The world `jackass’ is nowhere near as obscene as the particular word in question, especially considering the context it was used in, and in a public forum. I think most reasonable people would agree. Personally, I don’t see the first word as being obscene at all. Coarse maybe, but not obscene.

Kurt - Most of the clued in internet seems to think you are a tool based on what you did in this case. Based on this post you still don’t get it. You can jump up on your high horse all you want, but you can’t escape the truth that you’ve cast your employer in a very bad light. As you know newspapers are struggling, and the only real hope for survival is “social media.” The fact that the “Director of Social Media” and the Post-Dispatch would punt something like this as badly as you did tells me that this particular paper is not going to make it.

I’ve skimmed your Privacy Policy and I think you are right. No where in your policy do you say that you will keep my visit to your collection of web pages a secret. No where do you say that you won’t track which pages I’ve visited to better understand what I might want to buy in the future, and more importantly you don’t promise to share my IP address and that gleaned information with your advertising partners. Based only on your actions I now have to assume that you will do just that, so shortly after I leave your advertising partners will know what pages I’ve viewed. That is a violation of trust, as was your ill-advised call to the school.

I’m not a reader of your paper and this was my first visit. It will also be my last. I suspect there are other frequent visitors who are reconsidering their browsing habits. The next time you Follow-up you might want to consider apologizing and even perhaps promising that you will ask Santa for a clue.

you violated the privacy and confidentiality of one of your readers; in the end he lost his job because of it. you can’t type your way out of this one.

I find it interesting that you’d take such offense to someone using an obscenity, then call them a “jackass” on Twitter. Hypocrite.

It is fairly clear to me that Kurt violated the PD privacy policy, and if Kurt is an employee, the PD would be responsible for his and his editor’s actions. It may just be a matter of how much the guy recovers in a lawsuit against the PD.

Typically, the lawyers at a place like the PD will make the journalist issue a non-apology apology in an attempt to reduce their damages. Hence, although Kurt probably would love to actually call this guy and profusely apologize for what looks like a major league screw-up (can I say that without being reported?) his lawyers likely will not let him.

If the parties fail to settle the inevitable lawsuit, it’ll be interesting to hear the PD arguments at trial: They were offended by a vulgarity in a message that invited readers to discuss the most interesting thing they’ve eaten–and they list rocky mountain oysters (bull balls, again, can I say hat?) as an example.

Perhaps the PD should avoid inviting readers to submit messages based on sexual innuendo and stick to “Who sells the best hamburgers in St. Louis” type discussions.

As for Kurt’s protestations that he did not mean to be vindictive or gloat over getting this guy fired, well, just read Kurt’s later posts and tweets and decide for yourself whether Kurt is being truthful about that. I think any reasonable person on jury would be holding Kurt (and his editor) and the PD jointly and severally liable for any wrongoing in this matter.

I think the only thing the guy who was fired should worry about is whether a possible bankruptcy of the PD will stand in the way of an eventual recovery.

I give credit to the PD for letting all these comments stand. It can’t be too comfortable for them…I hope other social media sites take notice of this matter.

Just apologise already.

I find it very amusing that the person who posted the “vulgar word”, posted it in response to a question you asked “what is the craziest thing you have ever eaten?”. Yes, it was crude, but maybe he was being honest, or just trying to get a laugh. There’s something terribly sad about a journalist who goes out of his way to punish someone for expressing his/her rights to freedom of speech.

Wow…. I have to say that I agree with the majority of these comments saying that KG has overstepped his bounds. As an IT admin who happens to run a personal wordpress blog I am utterly astounded at the lack of thought and understanding of the IT piece of this story. If you don’t know how to run and maintain a wordpress blog, then you shouldn’t be running it in the first place.

The terms of use obviously don’t mean much to you Mr Greenbaum. Here’s what I see as the motivation: “Ohhh a 15 year old punk at school xyz has posted a vulgar term… let me be the one to teach him a lesson” Well it didn’t turn out to be a student, but an employee. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that resigning from a job is not usually a matter of life or death, but what happens when you don’t agree with a dissenting position on Human rights and/or censorship? Do you rat them out also? Well, this might turn out to be a political activist from China who will be picked up by the government and killed or tortured.

TRUST is a big deal between the media and public.. that’s why other journalists have gone to jail rather than reveal their sources. Why should we trust you any longer?

I hope you have seriously considered resigning your position. I highly doubt it though after your recent follow-up “justification” of your position. If there is justice in this world, your supervisor/s have seriously considered firing you and issuing a public apology.

Such behavior from a journalist is outrageous to me. And what’s with the low threshold for “bad” words. Sticks and stones, remember?

Man, you’re wrong. Shame on you… Shame for you people from stl..
God will close the door for you. I hope so…
You close a door for a man, God knows how him is suffering now.
I hope people leave this site alone… i’ll never come back because of you attitude.

“We take our privacy policy seriously.”
Really? What could you make with my IP or e-mail??? Send a note to my boss? ( i’m at home… try it…)

Do you really think someone deserved to lose their job over using foul language like this? It sounds like you were frustrated, and behaved vindictively. As has been said before, simply change your comment system so that comments must be approved before they are posted. This was an unfair, disproportionate, and unprofessional response.

LOL, Kurt Greenbaum’s twitter(http://twitter.com/kgreenbaum/status/5778019649) uses the word “jacka$$” to describe the reader he got fired.

Funny that KURT GREENBAUM can USE PROFANITY BUT NONE OF US CAN.

THIS, DESPITE KURT GREENBAUM RAILING AGAINST THE PRACTICE OF USING PROFANITY IN A PUBLIC SPACE ON HIS BLOGS.

KURT, YOU HAVE LOST ALL CREDIBILITY.

Dumb, just dumb. Everyone makes mistakes, but something like this is a character breaking moment. It shows everyone who you really are inside, and I’m not surprised that your biggest regret is the rest of the folks in the newsroom think you’re an idiot. It must be pretty bad over there if even you can get a sense of that.

I called the editor and to their credit they call me back. I asked the managing editor who called me why it was they tolerated racist commentary in their blog comments but not vulgarity and he said “what is racist to one person is not racist to someone else but there was no dispute about what was vulgar.” When I asked him if he could tell me of an instance where they had contacted the employer of someone who had posted racist comments he could not.

Hi, I just read about this thing on an online Italian newspaper…

Just wondering: since I am not at work, if I post a couple of foul words (either english or italian) all around here, will you still call my employer? Alternatively, would you escalate to police? If so, please consider the use of ”113”, we don’t dial ”911” here. We have some US Army/Navy bases nearby here, but please do not send in any GIs… I am easily scared by big guys with guns.

Ciao
Mario

PS
to honest people using brains, ”firing someone” or ”having someone resign” is the same thing …even on our Italian dictionary

I think you have nothing to be sorry about. This person posted their comment twice and used their work computer. You didn’t do it so this person would get fired, you did it because this school ought to know who they are employing. This person should only blame themselves. I would feel a little differently had you done it after the first time, but they chose to do it again. Once is too much, twice is just sickening.

You didn’t “somehow” violate the privacy policy; you DID violate it. I’d post something more pointed, but you’d probably rat me out to my employer.

I would think by the OVERWHELMINGLY negative response you are getting, you should start to realize that you were certainly in the wrong. You COST A MAN HIS JOB OVER AN INSULT ON THE INTERNET. I hope you’re proud of yourself. Just in case you aren’t, go ahead and Google your own name. Notice how many of the top results are about this situation here.

You have irreparably damaged your and your organization’s reputation. Good luck out in the real world, because I don’t know how you make it day to day with such a fragile ego.

I am rarely disturbed by profound miscarriages of power to the point where I would comment on a website in a state that I don’t even live in, but this, this one disturbs me just the appropriate amount.

I won’t bother reprimanding and calling you out on your clear misunderstandings about what your role is as a journalist and what your role is as a “director of social media,” but I do have a few questions.

> No. There was no “sleuthing” involved.

I recall reading a post where you clearly explained the process you went through to have an IT director at a school “take a shine” to locating the machine used to post said vulgarity on your site. If not, sleuthing, what do you consider this? Amateur detective work? Sleuthing via proxy?

> I was motivated by the fact that it was a school.

Why? Are school’s not allowed to say vagina? Do you feel that because that employee posted from a school they have a limited set of rights in regards to their the use of slang vulgarities for anatomy?

> I did not and would not violate our privacy policy.

Could you elaborate? The quote below implies that you will only disclose personally identifiable information (which earlier in your policy, you imply IP addresses are exempt from) to law enforcement. Certainly you went out of your way to use information to personally identify one of your readers. Did they do something illegal?

“We may disclose personal information if we or one of our affiliated companies is required by law to disclose personal information, or if we believe in good faith that such action is necessary to comply with a law or some legal process, to protect or defend our rights and property, to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our web sites or to protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public.”

You’ve only succeeded in one thing, Mr. Greenbaum, and that is driving up your online traffic by your recent actions. We’re all curious to see what kind of person would do such a thing and you’ve certainly shown us. I’ve worked in the news industry for more than 26 years and never, not even once, felt compelled to use my position (my profession!) as a “teachable moment” for any of our readers. You abused your position and it cost someone their job. But there’s an upshot to this: Now we know what you’re all about.

Completely reprehensible on your part. I think you owe your readers an apology as the man who’s job was lost as well. An actual apology and not a post where you backtrack and say you don’t feel like you were gloating (you were gloating).

I had typed of a lot of things that were mean spirited and even a little vulgar. I would just like you to apologize to the guy you helped resign, not on the internet but face to face.

Hopefully you’ll have a chance to apologize to the guy when you meet in the unemployment line.

”I made the decision to call.” Why, why, and why again? ”We take our privacy policy seriously.” Pshhhhhh. Go do your job.

A truck can be driven through the holes in your justification, Kurt. Please prepare for the IHS.

Maybe you could send out one extra holiday card this year?

There’s no point in commenting about your intentions because there’s no way of knowing what your original intentions were or whether your response is genuine or not.

But I can’t believe you’d ask if this sets a precedent or not. Of course it does - how could it not?. From a user’s point of view: you use a word the editors don’t approve of; you post it twice thinking the first post didn’t, for whatever, reason, post; your employer gets called and you get canned.

Perhaps the user in question was just working a pointless menial-labor job that can be easily replaced (although in this economy, that’s questionable,) and perhaps this won’t be catastrophic. Or perhaps the person you got fired was someone in a career, that wanted desperately to have the job they had and due to one obviously poorly-placed attempt to be funny, is now careerless.

What you did can’t be undone, explanation or no explanation, apology or no apology.

Kurt,

How dare you attempt to raise the level of discourse below that of a sewer! What an outrage! We should all be able to act obscene on a public forum with no repercussions whatsoever! What we say is not a reflection on ourselves and our community! It’s the internet, where we are all free to act like 8 year olds!

Sincerely,
People who think they go through life unaccountable for their actions

Your behavior was petty, vindictive, overly sensitive, and violated your privacy policy. Your self-satisfied and clueless attitude about the damage you’ve caused makes me hope you lose your own job over this incident.

Kurt,

Just to show you how ignorant and benighted you are, and yet another one of the many reasons that thousands of people are howling for your blood, check my IP. Do you think I’m really writing you from Beijing? I’m sitting in my office in Clayton right now.

YOU DO NOT CONTROL THE INTERNET.

Take a breath, and repeat it to yourself.

YOU DO NOT CONTROL THE INTERNET.

It frankly doesn’t matter if you follow your privacy policies from now on or not; nobody in their right mind would post on your site without taking measures.

So, Kurt, you asked “What is the craziest thing you have ever eaten?” and at no time anticipated the answers you might get? Come on.

I’ve read rumors this was a self-promotional hoax, truthfully now, Kurt — Did you set this guy up?

To think a nice little script:
replace(”vulgarity”,”*****”);

Would have saved the paper the trouble you’ve stirred up.

It’s too bad that we couldn’t harness the power generated by your frantic backpedalling. You could light up a city for a week.
Perhaps someone has dangled your job in front of you – I can only hope, as your actions warrant standing in the same unemployment line as your victim. The ‘I didn’t MAKE him post it’ excuse is pathetic. He didn’t post that he was going to kill someone, or commit a crime. He offended you – how horrible – and clearly you feel that is enough to warrant him losing his job, because your reaction was smug and gloating. Have you forgotten that freedom of speech DEPENDS on the freedom to offend? Your right to post drivel is only protected if everyone else’s right is too. At best, you had the ability to remove his post and act the censor – which you should also abhor, but apparently hypocrisy is the least of your problems. I eagerly await your last paid written word.

I had never heard of you before this incident. I think you made a grave error in judgment over this. First of all, the fact that you freaked out about this comment in particular is…very weird. By Internet standards, it was pretty mild. It wasn’t threatening anyone or hate speech. It was just a word that some people consider vulgar. Second of all, I have to wonder what you would do in the face of a concentrated spam effort if one guy posting a comment twice made you throw up your hands in defeat and call the school. If you are going to flip out over one vulgar word that wasn’t even directed at anyone, maybe you should invest in a comment moderator or moderation software. But then that would cost money, and wouldn’t allow you to go on these little vigilante expeditions. I’m sad that a journalist would have this attitude.

You are misinformed. An IP address is already potential Personally Identifiable Information by itself. So, it does fall under private information.

Basically, you have violated your own privacy policy. And you are in denial about it.

You keep saying that you did not violate your own policies by telling the school about this guy.

Can we get a confirmation from your boss about this? Myself and every other person I’ve shared this story with have gone over your posted policies, and your actions appear to have clearly violated them. Your justification seems to only be in the way of semantics, but your interpretation is in direct contradiction to everyone else I’ve spoken to.

Perhaps if nothing else, you should clarify your policies?

C’mon, Kurt, when are you going to let everyone know this is a hoax? A grand social media experiment?

All the facts in this story come from you. No verification of anything from anyone else. Not even from your colleague who supposedly deleted the first comment. How about having that colleague speak up — or doesn’t the colleague exist??

Good one, Kurt.

Fungo: You’re absolutely correct! (But) neither of us has expressed any sympathy for the teacher who chose to resign from his/her job. (Read your posts. All your comments only (weakly) attempt to denigrate those whose opinions differ from you own. Now, how intelligent is that?) But, Fungo, I actually support Kurt on this one!

I do regret several things, though.

First, I regret that you found my comments to be so threatening. It wasn’t my intent. I forgive you for expressing your childish, sophomoric comments, both to me and to others, but I apologize to you because you felt compelled to lash out as you did. “Let it be threatening like truth,” says the wise man!

I regret that the teacher chose the Post’s (public) blog to express high-school, barnyard references to the female anatomy. PUBLIC, FUNGO!! CERTAINLY NOT PRIVATE!! None of us should be subjected to that.

I also regret that the teacher chose to resign his position. I find it interesting that his administrator so readily accepted his resignation. Could there be more to the story than we actually think we know? Maybe we’ll really never know the whole story, Fungo.

I sadly regret witnessing the violence and hatred in this group. And I regret the impact it is having on Kurt. I’ve always admired Kurt’s appreciation for the written word and his obvious respect for journalism, qualities I feel he still possesses and demonstrates.

I really regret that you and others like you are so unforgiving.

But thanks for your comparative reference to Ghandi. As a child psychologist, I view any comparison of me and my comments to the pre-eminent political leader of India during their independence movement as a compliment, and I accept it from you on that level.

Say a prayer for the little ones, Fungo. They can always use our help.

You say, “Did I reveal private information? No. I had none to reveal and wouldn’t have if I had it.” Apparently this is supposed to be a defense to the accusation that you violated the site’s privacy policy. But the privacy policy says, “We will not share INDIVIDUAL user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information.” Whether an IP address is private information is irrelevant. It’s clearly individual information. (Apologies if someone already pointed this out–don’t want to wade through the 288 comments before mine to find out!)

Kurt,

At a time when the U.S. Congress is considering a national shield law for journalists, you turn around and do this? Your comments in the last section of comments were pathetic, as are your excuses now. I agree that on your own blog you should be able to remove offensive things - so remove them. It is your space, you have that right.

If you can’t trust a ‘journalist’ to protect their sources, how can you trust anything they write. No wonder traditional journalism is downsizing.

I cannot say that this affair comes as much of a surprise, especially given that it involves a “social media” expert at a flagging fourth-estate property. The print media has long been host to such prima donna attitudes in its approach to handling the distribution of information, and this is yet further evidence of the “we know better than you” attitude that all-too-many print workers take in dealing with matters of public discourse.

A visitor left an infantile and most-likely obscene comment, and you decide to play vigilante and get the person fired from their position? Yes. That demonstrates a true understanding of, and reverence for new media. You knew full well what the result of your phone call would be - and it demonstrated *very* clearly the lengths you will go to carry out your own brand of “justice” to whomever is guilty of felony potty-mouth.

While I’ll go so far as to agree that you might not have violated the letter of the company’s privacy policy, you did in fact violate the spirit of it. Your excuse of “it came from a school” is a decidedly transparent attempt to desperately justify your decision to quash what you considered bad behavior.

What would a real blogger…a *real* “social media expert” do in a situation like yours? Would they have gone off on their own personal witch-hunt? Or, might they have taken some time to address the issue in myriad *different* ways? Perhaps a post about the tendency of modern colloquial language to be more profanity-laced than in days gone by? I think you’d have garnered a great deal of support for bemoaning that issue, and at the very least, you could have used the situation to do what you claim to understand about the “social media” - started a real conversation about the issue.

But finally, what is most amusing about all of this is the fact that this situation has clearly underscored what the actual “blogosphere” is all about. You see, the social media you claim to understand so expertly has been utilized primarily by those disenfranchised by the same stolid, uncaring, bloated dinosaur of an institution you now firmly represent - the mainstream media. “Blogs” and so-called “social media commentators” are nothing more than the desperate attempts of an ivory-tower industry to remain relevant as they continue to hemorrhage both cash and subscribers.

I think you and your management are in for *quite* an education in the near future. Hell hath no fury like 4 chan all riled up. Welcome to the internet, Mr. Greenbaum. It ain’t a place for the dainty or weak. And you either get tough enough to deal with the occasional obscenity and prank, or you will quickly be reduced to nothing more than an object of scorn and ridicule.

I certainly hope the rest of the so-called “social media” experts employed by other newspaper organizations are paying attention to this. Because the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson certainly is…and he’s watching you, right now…and he’s most likely calling you very, very bad word.

Wow, are you new here on the internet?

For the past 10 yaers the simple act of accepting user input opens the flood gates of spam, vulgarity and rudeness.

When you jump in the ocean to you complain if you get wet?

You are such a punk. Couldn’t handle a bad word so you get a guy fired, then you gloat about it using the word “jackass”, then you backpedal without any admission of wrongdoing. I sincerely hope you lose your job over this.

I hope this “journalist” gets fired and finds a new career.

I’m generally not mean-spirited, but watching Mr. Greenbaum dig himself deeper and deeper into a hole is the most fun I’ve had (online) all month.

I suspect that the PD will suffer in a number of ways for this gaffe. It can kiss goodbye any serious investigative reporting for the next few years as confidential informants stay away in droves, for one. The only way I see for the PD to rectify matters at this point is to let Mr. Greenbaum seek employment elsewhere; this was his last opportunity for a mea culpa and he blew it.

His original post also implied that the vulgarity was much worse that it was, but it’s easy to determine if you closely read the comments in the various threads about this. In fact it’s a perfectly acceptable English word in other contexts, but in his (yes) gloating and self-aggrandizing original post he omitted that fact - in order to cast himself as a bigger “hero” presumably.

Given the question that was responded to (about eating, I think?) and the fact it was apparently just the single word posted, the proper response would have perhaps been to edit the comment to something like “Consumption of housepets is pretty sick. Your IP address is now banned” — and then lift the ban a week later if you were afraid others at the school would not be able to post. I guess acting like an adult - even when dealing with someone making admittedly juvenile comments - is too much to expect from a “social media department head.”

How many times in the past 90 days have there been posts from that IP block, anyhow? I’d be willing to bet that it’s vanishingly small and your “concern” is just something thought up after the fact. Your IT people can answer that question for you with minimal difficulty, assuming the logs are retained that long.

i don’t like you

Simply put,

“Snitches get stitches.”

It’s the golden rule.

You must have spent many a lonely day on the playground.

May God bless this person you so quickly judged, and forgive you for doing said judging on his behalf. I hope his/her family has an adequate holiday season, no thanks to you. Stupidity is not a crime, as proved by your incessent blogging.

–D block

please ahead before you do something this stupid next time.
unfortunately you probably will not
steadily you will find yourself becomes more and more of a jerk until
someday you realize what a husk of a man
you’ve become.

Kurt, most journalists and online activist are fighting against providing information which permits retaliation for online expression. Here you are taking the side of reporting people to authorities.

Ar Technica nails just how wrong you are:

“Then there’s the question of whether pulling this move and then telling everyone about it was really worth throwing the paper’s integrity into question—while other newspapers are fighting tooth and nail to protect the identity of their anonymous commenters, the Post-Dispatch has proven that it will reveal that info with little prodding. If commenters on a story can’t trust that he won’t report them to their employers if they say something he doesn’t like, what about sources? It might give someone—say, if there was inside information involved—pause that Greenbaum might be indiscreet with that information as well. Whatever the end result, as evidenced by the comments on his blog post, he has certainly hurt the relationship the newspaper had with some of its readers.”

“Could I have banned the IP address? Yes, but that would have prevented anyone from the school from visiting our site. That’s a step we preferred not to take.”

Wow… either you are more clueless about technology than it seems, or you’re trying to pull a fast one.

In any case, your post is hilarious. You sound like that guy who pulled a major party foul, and is trying to talk his way out of it. Congrats on being such a tool. But good for you. Your overreaching response to a corny joke wound up in this guy losing his job (don’t give me this “he resigned” nonsense. The guy’s not working anymore because of this. Period). Hopefully he won’t be unemployed for too long, and other members of his family work.

Keep that in mind while you’re cutting the Thanksgiving turkey.

You got someone fired because you’re protecting…who, exactly, from words like that? Go fight your moral crusade somewhere else, Kurt. Us adults are busy enjoying ourselves.

Golly Gee*, Kurt, you sure got sensitive* over someone posting a tasteless joke a whopping* twice on the internet. Maybe the hardcore internetters will think twice before crossing someone whose journalistic integrity has led to such Peabody Award-winning queries like “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten.”

*(Bowdlerized, lest someone gets a wild hair and decides to call my job, too)

Add yet another voice. What you did was wrong beyond wrong. You broke the law and potentially destroyed a family’s well being over something so ridiculously petty it boggles the mind.

Shame, shame, shame.

Simply disgusting and overreaching. A complete breach of privacy and then a tonedeaf rebuttal, ‘because it was easy’. You’ve obviously erred and someone in this economic climate is now out of a job for but mentioning a vulgarity. More importantly, and all that really matters for you, is the stigma you’ve created for yourself and negative publicity for stltoday. I should hope advertisers respond in similar fashion to readers.
Disgusting.

Your a disgrace to the journalistic profession. Maybe a job at fox is in order?

You’re a jackass, you deserve to be fired!

I’m sure this has already been posted.
Mr. Greenbaum’s tweet on the incident:
“Amazed at the readers who comment in defense of a jackass who posted a vulgarity on our site — and lost his job.”
http://twitter.com/kgreenbaum/status/5778019649
A amateur vulgarity posted by an internet commentator, in return for a vigilante seek and destroy, character assassination and vulgarity by a professional journalist.

I’d say you should be fired but you and the rest of print media’s finest will all be out of jobs soon anyways!

@ Ryan On The Euphonium
While tough, most of it has been fair. This is America at its worst and best. Worse, because the press that have fought hard for freedom have been sold out and worse still, reader’s trust has been betrayed. But the response is America at our best - standing up for what is right, standing up for the guy unfairly betrayed, speaking up when for some reason they cannot. 30 pages / 300 comments. The justice Kennedy story got 2 comments (when I last looked)! Now, should Fungo have called you names? No. But that is not ”hatred and violence”, just over zealous outrage at what had happened. And by the way, I doubt very much the Ghandi would have sided with Kurt Greenbaum. After all, he had integrity and courage and humility.

Way to go STL, what happened to freedom of speech and expression? And you ‘TOLD ON HIM’? This is so wrong on many levels, and shows that STL really doesn’t understand the internet. And that you show no remorse for being directly responsible for this man’s unemployment just shows the kind of people STL are about. Two thumbs down to STL.

Ryan, you are no Gandhi so don’t take it as a complment. What you are, like I said before, is a so-called self-appointed Gandhi. You have absolutely no moral high ground when you defend Kurt and refuse to defend the teacher. I did not find what the teacher posted offensive. Crude, but not offensive. He probably should not have done it at work, but in the America I was taught to believe in, it doesn’t matter. I don’t believe in “free speech free zones” like you do. What Kurt did is set a very dangerous precedent that can only be reversed with the firing of Kurt. This will send a message to all journalists that if you violate someone’s trust, then you pay the consequences. That is a minor price to pay for privacy for all. Finally, I did not threaten you. You feel that way because I hit a nerve and you know I am right. So please, stop bloviating from your digital soap box, because no one agrees with you, except the seriously deluded.

Kurt should lose his job because he is a hypersensitive control-freak journalism grad acting like he knows how IT works.

It would behoove the PD to remove you from its staff and sever all ties, Mr. Greenbaum. You’ve tarnished the newspaper’s image with one malicious act. And, honestly, you make all of St. Louis look a little worse for it, too.

I would hope that you would not be so burdened by the thoughts of this man unemployed during Christmas, but somehow I don’t think that’s going to be a problem for you.

Kurt,
You still do not understand the enormity of what you did. You severely affected one person’s life over two stupid comments posted on an innocuous subject. He or she will probably suffer financial hardship for a long time because you were irritated for five minutes. Congratulations.

In addition, you’ve irreparably damaged the Post-Dispatch on the internet (the only game in town for newspapers these days) and reader participation on this site. There was somewhat of a trust there but that is long gone. I have taken this website off my favorites list even though I rarely post here.

I used to have a subscription to the Post and still do buy it on Sunday but I have to reconsider after this debacle. With the dwindling circulation of the Post, you can thank yourself for even less readership.

I hope you still feel good about the mayhem you’ve created.

Happy Holidays

Here are two simple ideas:
1) Don’t immediately post comments from readers. Require someone at the paper to review and approve them, thus screening out the worst offenders.
2) Join the 1980s and get a computer that can scan posts for the most blatant offensive words, and screen posts that way.

The first approach is pretty solid, but requires manpower and may frustrate readers if their comments suffer undue delay before appearing. However, some other major-market newspaper sites use this method pretty successfully.

The second approach is pretty weak, since it can be defeated by various misspellings or character substitutions; you can’t screen for everything. But even locking a screen door is better than leaving the door wide open and then complaining about how someone walked right in and messed up your stuff.

I love how you tweeted: “A jackass who posted a vulgarity…” Hypocrite much?

Ryan, I want to respond to quotes from your last pathetic post.

1.”I really regret that you and others like you are so unforgiving.”

You can’t forgive someone who doesn’t genuinely apologize first. If Kurt resigns and apologizes genuinely, then forgiveness can begin. You cannot forgive someone unless they are genuinely sorry for their actions. Kurt has shown none of this. He is a coward. I have heard no response from him. Instead, he is probably lawyering up like the pathetic sorry mass of meat he is.

2. “I can’t believe the violence and hatred…”

What violence? No one has physically threatened anyone. There’s no hatred. Just a collective howl of indignation from the all three spectrums of political ideology.

You know what I regret? I regret that people like you hate free speech. I regret that people like you cannot think critically and are willing to blame the victim. I regret that you think so highly of yourself. I regret that you are so insecure that you have to passively insult me. I also regret that you were ever a child psychologist, because those children’s minds are now probably warped forever. Cheers, Ryan.

This is the Internet hoax of the year! I give Kurt credit for getting his name out there–but I fear that the backlash once the hoax is exposed will be greater than what Kurt is “suffering” through now.

Think about it–The PD is losing readers–they need a bump in page views. The balloon boy hoax has just riveted the nation. And the STL Social Media Director acts clueless about the backlash of outing a poster who posts a mildly vulgar term? All you angry posters are being played big time. Great social experiment, Kurt (but you probably should take down your resume with your phone and address off your personal blog)…

Cheers!

I support Kurt. I think that if saying something in a social setting (without the “anonymity” of the Internets) would subject you to public shame, there is no problem in a moderator calling you out (including to your boss).

I know that people will scream that Kurt violated the privacy policy and possibly, the sacred compact between readers and the PD. I disagree. If the privacy policy stated that the PD would report any vulgar language to an employer, then people would be less likely to post such vulgarities (and then we would not be able to catch them). Lots of people “think” things that are bad–you can’t call them out if they don’t vocalize them. For example, I know alot of right wing nuts who “think” Obama is a socialist, but they will not state as much for fear of being labeled a racist. If I were to confide in such a person that I think Obama is a socialist, they might open up to me and then I can get them fired for being racist. So, Kurt did the right thing by saying that there is a “privacy policy” so as to get the fired dude to let his guard down–then Kurt CAUGHT him. I applaud Kurt’s cunning and deception.

What the original commenter did was juvenile. What you did was heinous.

Sadder still: You probably once even had a reasonable chance of redemption if you had said something along the lines of “I screwed up. I acted impulsively when I shouldn’t have. I failed to see the implications of my action. And for that, for the harm that came to the original comment poster, and for the harm it has caused this publication, I am tremendously sorry.”

But no. Instead, after a “few days of reflection,” the best you can come up with is this blog post that tries to minimize your blame and further demonstrates you just don’t get it.

There must be a separation of personal moral crusades from journalism. That doesn’t seem to have happened. It’s a pity, really. St. Louis has enough problems, and now Internet users everywhere are reading about this event. Ok, so it’s small in comparison to the wide array of other civil and governmental issues in the city, but it makes me just a tiny bit less proud of being a Saint Louis citizen.

Kurt did not write the following, a lawyer did:

Your trust is paramount. I did not and would not violate our privacy policy. I regret that this episode may have cast doubt on that. We take our privacy policy seriously.

We also take seriously our responsibility to monitor conversation on STLtoday. We know there is more we can do, operationally and technologically to improve. We’ve already talked about how and when to escalate our response to bad language.

This follow-up demonstrates the utter lack of understanding of the issues involved that so many commented on in the original blog. It is clear nothing was learned, and Kurt still remains childishly defiant.

Here’s what you do, Kurt:

First, man up. What you did was seriously wrong. Not academically wrong. Not vaguely wrong. It was wrong in the real world affecting a real person’s life. Over something that was not affecting other’s lives. Coming out with excuses and distant apologetic-like verbiage is pusilanimous.

Second, say what you did was absolutely wrong and violates the intentions of your employer. Or is your employer really willing to support calling up people’s jobs when they post? Even if it’s a school, or even if it’s a nunnery, it’s a precendent for your employer. Either it stops now, or it never stops.

Third, take a pay cut or resign. The guy you screwed over did the honorable thing. You are still a coward.

Feel free to call anyone you need to about this post. Baby Kurt.

This is complete garbage. This pissant reporter got his panties in a wad and decided he wanted to show how big and tough he was and cost a man his job. In this economy, he has taken food off of this man’s table and forced his family into untold hardships. This is what the liberal media has become. Instead of bringing us the news and letting us free citizens have our voices heard, they censor anything that doesn’t fit their socialist liberal agenda, and when we rise up against it, do what they can to destroy us. Greenbaum should be fired and sued, as should the paper, for ruining this man’s life. Hopefully this liberal rag will be out of business soon, and the only poor in the streets will be the liberals who are reaping what they sowed, having to burn their Obama-sticker covered cars for warmth. The sooner all liberalism dies, the better.

Mike… If Kurt did concoct something like this, he’d be done in the profession. Recall Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley, Janet Cooke?

I think the critical piece of information you gave away to a thrid party is that a specific comment came from the school. We’re not stupid, Kurt. Given that information, anyone — trained in the art or not — could easily put two and two together.

You released key information that, for most comments on most websites, could be traced exactly back to one machine, and most likely to one user. To make it sound like you didn’t do anything wrong is insulting to hear.

Your “few days of reflection” have accomplished nothing!

Kurt, I can’t believe how intellectually dishonest you are. You must have absolutely no integrity at all. And that’s the kinder of two assessments. The other is that you’re a vindictive little man who found the idea of a joke referencing oral sex (oh noes!) to be so abhorrent that you CALLED HIS EMPLOYER in what can only have been an effort to stir repercussions.

Your petty little sense of moral outrage (or possibly your equally pathetic sense of journalistic muck raking) you returned to the internet to crow of your “victory” only to be roundly mocked, derided, and called out for the small man that you are.

I’m disappointed in STL Today, and I’ve removed it from my RSS feeds and bookmarks and have instructed others via Facebook and Twitter to do the same.

Shame on you.

For all you people hating on Kurt and taking the side of the fired dude: Crimea River.

PD owns this website and can dang well do with it what they please. This is no different than in Iran and China, where the governments own the information superfreeways and can jail people for sending or getting subversive material (like ReadersDigest online). Here, the guy didn’t even get jailed even though he said bad things on the Internets.

If I owned a restaurant and a guy said a curse word because I forgot to put cheese on his cheeseburger, I could call his boss and get him fired too. This is America and you can do things like that now.

John Abassian… Kurt should be fired? Uh, like the school employee was?

The facts remain the same, someone has now lost their job in this economy because of your “atomic fly-swatter” over-reaction.

Your have brought opprobrium to your site and to your title. I feel sorry for the man who resigned, I wish he fought harder or had the courage to outline the foolishness that is this debacle.

Perhaps you can find another way of resolving your differences in the future. One that is straightforward, honest, and dignified.

I would ask everyone to slow down and take a deep breath. There is nothing wrong with an American citizen exercising his 6th Amendment rights as Kurt did here. That he is a blogger and a journalist is of no import. I think all the people who are criticizing him need to take a look in the mirror and ask themselves: “Would I not also expect to be fired from my job for saying or printing an expletive on a website of another?” Of course you would expect to be fired. This guy is better off being unemployed. I hope that the Department of Jobs can keep him from getting unemployment too, because I do not want my tax dollars supporting such a foul mouthed person.

So, to summarize:

6th Amendment = right to police the Internet (penumbra right of bloggers)
Curse words = unemployment

That is all.

I hope you lose your job over this, and if you don’t, shame on the paper. You should be ashamed of yourself and I hope no one takes you seriously as any kind of “journalist” ever again as long as you live. May you be condemned to cleaning toilets at a big city drunk tank for all time.

I guess the truth hurt, huh?

Still sleeping well?

Impressive, You played a part in making me not trust todays journalists to an even larger degree. That’s not an easy task. You go, Grammar policeman! visit me at reddit.com under rhammonsster to get the true gist of my feelings. ( I trust that site to honour my privacy )

What Kurt Greenbaum did was unquestionably wrong.

It is clear that Mr. Greenbaum has no remorse or conscience for his actions.
While his ego will not allow him to realize his grievous error, instead making shallow justifications for his actions, and his clear violation of the TOS of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website.

What is also clear is that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Kurt would rather spend their time trying to figure out how to spin wrong into right, rather than make it right. This will not succeed.

Vulgarity or no, you have violated the basic trust of all of your readers. Can you comprehend that?

You should be fired immediately.
I will repeat that:
Kurt Greenbaum SHOULD BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY, and his career in journalism be over, permanently.

I will never again support Kurt Greenbaum or the St. Louis Post-Dispatch until Kurt Greenbaum is fired.

I will never knowingly support any company or entity that allows the kind of childlike behavior that Kurt Greenbaum has displayed and obviously relishes.

If it takes a loss of revenue to your paper (you can grasp that, right?) I hope you feel this deeply in your bottom line.

Its called a profanity filter. You should know this since you’re a “Social Media Director.” Also, you’re pretty thin skinned for a “journalist” and you know almost nothing of journalistic ethics. I don’t need to go over the reasons why you’re scum, people have already explained that to you. I just hope you realize that you’ve ruined your own reputation for the sake of ruining another person’s. I hope you lose your job too.

Oh yeah, PS: I told on you to your boss.

William stated: “Your have brought oppossums to your site and to your title.”

If a man comes into my restaraunt and utters a curse because I served him Mango tea instead of Currant tea, then I too can call his boss and get him fired. This is America and you can do that now.

Since you are the Director of Social Media, it seems like bragging about using administrative information for retribution wouldn’t be the best way to get more people to participate in the social media you direct.

Having recently moved to the St. Louis area (really, check my IP!), I will not do any business with the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and this will be the only time I post a message on any Social Media associated with them, or you.

I very much look forward to reading about your resignation, as you are far worse at your job than the person you arranged to have fired.

Here’s an interesting tidbit. Extract from Lee Enterprises Code of Conduct and Ethics.

“8. Confidentiality

Employees must maintain the confidentiality of confidential information entrusted to them by the company or its customers, except when disclosure is authorized by the company’s General or Corporate Counsel or required by laws or regulations. Confidential information includes all non-public information that might be of use to competitors, or harmful to the company or its customers, if disclosed. It also includes information that suppliers and customers have entrusted to us. The obligation to preserve confidential information continues even after employment ends.”

Guess you didn’t read that one too closely did you Kurt?

I sincerely hope that you are fired. You violated your “no profanity” rule when you tweeted that the guy was a jackass. That is every bit as vulgar as what he said. If he loses his job over a profanity, you should as well.

The far more troubling thing is that it appears that racist comments appear on your site frequently. How many racist posters have you gotten fired? Do you just tolerate it? Why would you go after a guy that gave you a one word term, but not go after people who spew dangerous and hateful invective? There was nothing particularly harmful about his post.

If you do not see the harm in your actions, or you do not seem how your post about the situation is gloating, or if you do not see that using the term jackass to describe the commenter is making you guilty of an identical crime, then you should be fired. A reporter should really be better with words. If you dont beleive the junk you are selling, you should be fired because you are just on a power trip due to the fact that you actually get a desk these days (and dare I venture to guess the possibility of a cubicle?) What responsibility! What power!

Everyone in the area has seen this. The next time your paper needs some confidential information to make a real story (not like the ones that you apparently do) no one with half a brain will divulge any information. If your paper does not fire you, it loses all journalistic integrity.

Let’s say this guy is caught putting $.50 in the vending box and taking 4 newspapers. If the PD ran a sting to find out who’s been taking extra newspapers and this guy was caught, then the PD could call his boss at school and the school (at-will employment) could fire him for his lack of moral turpitude.

What happened here is no different–just interchange:

steal newspaper = say curse word on Internets;
PD sting operation = Kurt sting operation
fire employee = fire employee

Can we put this to rest now? Kurt, get back to work, you go-getter…

Greenbaum, I wanted to thank you. As of this morning, I was working on my application to the University of Missouri’s grad school for Journalism. It’s funny because one of the questions were “what were 10 under-reported stories of this decade” and I was stumped. And the essay question was “what are the greatest threat to American journalism in the next decade?” My original answer was the decline of paper and literacy but I have decided to change my answer to you.

The problem with all of this, isn’t the story. My problem is that you have purely forgotten your roots. As a journalist and former beat writer and reporter, you have forgotten your roots and your time in the trenches. You have forgotten the greatest axiom in reporting. “It’s not about what is right or wrong. It is about the truth. And what the truth can do to another person.” You have solely forgotten the lessons you have learned on the field. That you are a reporter. You are responsible for the truth and telling the American public the truth. Obviously, you have absolutely no regard for your past as a reporter. You are a disgrace to journalism. I hope you get fired.

I think it’s important that we take a moment to commend the Post-Dispatch for giving people an avenue to respond.

I don’t know what went on in the office, but I suspect Mr. Greenbaum was told “This is your mess … you have one last chance to clean it up. Make what you will of it.” He could have come clean, admitted he messed up, taken his lumps, and life would probably have gone on with another lesson learned.

Instead, he chose to try to shift responsibility to anyone but himself. That’s obviously failed, and now the Post-Dispatch has a freer hand in making decisions with respect to Mr. Greenbaum without having to worry about him suing them.

At the same time, they’ve demonstrated, by not shutting down comments here despite the fact that the response is almost entirely negative, that they’re willing to listen - and that’s important. Maybe this will be the catalyst for some needed changes.

Yes, the old ways are dying, we know that dead-tree newspapers are in a bind, and change is painful. Hopefully, people will realize that “director of social media” is a bit of an oxymoron - you can’t “direct” people; people resent it when you try to herd them; it’s as bad as trying to herd cats. It’s not about “social media”, despite all the web 2.0 buzz - it’s about communications, same as it was 100 years ago. The methods may have changed, but the essential element - trust - hasn’t.

Mr. Greenbaum has clearly broken that trust. The Post-Dispatch, by allowing people to continue posting, perhaps now “gets it” in trusting that readers will respond in a civilized, adult fashion when given the opportunity. They may even, with the right advice and people, turn it around.

This is my issue with this. I think you at least addressed some of the questions I had, mainly with the banning the IP’s or whatever. I’ll have to take you at your word and just guess that you can’t simply hold that specific IP to moderation.

With the number of comments you get I can imagine having the entire site moderated before posting would take a lot.

My point is you keep saying “he resigned”. Do you honestly think he freely and willfully resigned?

Do you think everyone who gets “let go” from their jobs in the political world also “resigned”? No, they were fired, only to save face they “resigned to spend time with their family” or some other crap.

The fact that the economy is what it is, and with Christmas right around the corner, that fuels the anger against you for doing this. I’ve never been on this site before, and won’t again due to the likelihood that something I say could be deemed offensive enough for you to contact an employer or the ISP to report me.

You say that you would only do that in extreme cases or whatever, but how can anyone buy that? *shrugs*

Bad look for you, I have to say.

But please don’t insult your readers by playing the “I didn’t get him fired, he resigned” bullcrap because I’d like to think you’re smart enough to realize what happened.

If you can’t realize that, perhaps you’re not mentally up to the standards of making decisions that apparantly affect people’s livelihoods.

A horrible backpedaling excuse for a post. You owe him a formal public apology.

The backdrop says keep it civil in the comments. Way to fail at keeping it civil.

“It was easy.”

I would insert a pithy putdown here but you’ve drawn the ire of the internet and will suffer accordingly so you’re not worth any “you fail at moderating comments” or “power-trip freak” or “way to ruin someone’s livelihood over an anonymous comment.”

Internet denizens of the world, unite!

Oh, and in case you’d like to see what the interwebs are plotting…

well, you’ll have to google that. Or snoop around and call reddit or 4chan to find out.

FreeKurtG:

What if your restaurant had a big sign on the front door saying “We won’t tell anybody what you say in here”? Would it still be okay for you to go and call his boss?

Another nail in the coffin of good journalism.

I’m dumbfounded that you’d be surprised at the outrage brought on from the actions you took.

The rest of the “internet” may hate me for this, although I couldn’t care even the slightest - the majority of them are sheep. A few are against you, so everyone is against you, although thats just a standard human-trait.

The internet is a dark and evil community. A well worded article can turn most of us for or against someone or something (regardless of its truth). Once these views take shape, you’re pretty much stuck with it. No judge, no jury or whatever, your usually guilty or innocent. Take note everyone.

While no doubt you are clearly covering up your mistake (pretty much every post here will point that out), a stupid one at that, it was a heat of the moment one. The trouble is you don’t sound like you’ve learnt from it, and you clearly do (or did) seem smug about busting the guy. A very big mistake. And busting a guy like that for something that will inevitably occur, shows clear ignorance.

If you learn one thing from this: respect the internet community. They’re like a pet dog. Respect them, they’ll respect you. Disrespect them, and they’ll rip you to shreads before you have a chance to apologise.

Ok, took about 20 minutes for the post about the details available on internet searches to disappear. You just don’t get it do you? I’m not your problem, the comments on this site aren’t your problem, the whole world of the internet is your problem, and YOU CAN’T CENSOR THAT! Much though I know you’d like to. Go ahead, try and censor slashdot, digg, reddit, ArsTechnica, Huffington Post, the Globe & Mail, National Post, 4chan (mess with the last and you really are in trouble).

You’ve shown the world what you are, and most of them don’t like it.

Also, Mr. Greenbaum, I am truly ashamed that you are a fellow graduate of UIUC. I do hope their effort to increase workplace ethical awareness in 90’s have paid off and no longer result in a spectacularly utter failure as it is in your case.

site admins, the anti-spam text scripting appears to improperly fuction with restrictive cookie privacy.

You were previously, and remain, wrong.

You *did* reveal personal information about someone - to a third party. You revealed, to the school, an action by someone at that school.
No, you didn’t name names - but gave the school, a third party (that is, no you and not the commenter) enough info to figure out who the commenter was.

Since the commenter got identified it is apparent that you obviously managed to provide “identifying information” and that amounts unequivocally to “personal” information; even though one degree removed.
For example: your street address doesn’t “name” you - - but it “personal” isn’t it?

Also worth noting is that - -Some of your language in an early version of the blog item and some Twitter remarks was completely consistent with gloating - not a wonderful state of mind; but very telling.

Ok the comment was puerile but at least they guy had enough integrity to resign after embarrassing himself and letting his employer down.

He’s the better man. I wish him well in the future.

The comment came from a school. A school with children. Children who do not need an employee who would take time out of his day to post vulgar comments on a website. These vulgarities were posted not once but twice. I can’t believe the people who are comfortable having children around such a person.
He did not get fired (though he should have been) he resigned.
When did it become okay for someone to be sexually offensive and still be around your children?
Shame on all of you who think so.
— Shelby
11:49 am November 19th, 2009

Shelby - shame on you for being ridiculously ignorant. Most of us agree the comment was out of line.

Shame on you Shelby for thinking its ok for a journalist and his platform to practice, as Jane wrote, “Freedom of Expression Police.”

Freedom of expression police - at a newspaper no less.

Shelby, this kind of stuff goes over well in China. Since you want that here, shame on you.

Lets just cut this down to the basics: someone shouted a swearword at you (the site/article) in a public place (online comments) and you, in retaliation, felt it was ok to probably ruin the rest of this persons’ life ?
No income, no references, no income, foreclosure… Going down is very easy nowadays.
Journalists normally live by a few guidelines, one of them is ‘protect your sources at all costs’. An opinion or comment, relevant or not, should be treated just as equally. Morals exist to be respected by yourself, to make you the better person, not to be dictated.

It is vitally important that u understand how wrong yr action was, Mr. Greenbaum. You violated the privacy supposedly guaranteed by this forum in order to tattle on a student who used a bad word. I sympathize with the frustrations of yr job, but to make yr actions crystal clear to you, imagine that u think u are anonymous when u make a dirty joke online, and I, as a webmaster, call your clergyman to encourage you to watch yr langauge. IMHO, u deserve to be fired much more than a school employee having a mischievous moment encouraged by the simplistic wording of another lame story in the Post. The violation of privacy is SCARY-WRONG and u acting as moral watchdog is just as SCARY-WRONG. This should be very disturbing to all who hear about it. You are the story now, Mr. Greenbaum, and yr defense above changes nothing.

If you where honest, YOU should be resigning now, for violating the TOS (”We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information.”).

I think it is really a shame that the paper is backing you up on this one. There is no justification for your behaviour, leading up to and after. A man who is too small to admit he was wrong is no man at all. I would not be unhappy, and might even consider going back to SLToday.com, if the paper takes some editorial control of the situation and lets you go. It is a condemnation of journalisms ethics and an admission that the paper is neither a forum for open discussion or even remotely respectful of privacy, which is unforgivable. There is no way to demonstrate trustworthiness and class short of cauterising the wound, which is you.

And we need to stop.

I just saw a web site that is exposing personal information about Kurt Greenbaum. It is not up to us to retaliate against Greenbaum. It is not up to us to form a mob and seek to get him fired, or to harass him at his home.

Greenbaum should have taken the higher road, and he didn’t. That’s between him and his boss. But we’re not taking the high road by demanding he lose his job, and by forming a mob out for blood.

We should, as individuals, express our displeasure with his actions. Evidently he nor the paper understand the why we consider such behavior wrong. But getting Greenbaum fired, harassing him at home–that’s just as wrong, just as ugly.

These comments need to close, this story needs to end, before more people are harmed. We, those who are unhappy at this action, need to take the high road. We need to act with maturity. We need to show, by example, that we live by the ethics we’re demanding from the paper and Greenbaum.

This needs to end. And end now.

Perhaps you should have gotten clearance from your supervisor and the your company’s attorney.

School district = government. Freedom of expression applies here and you are walking in a legal minefield.

Besides - how did you know the employee resigned on the spot? Personnel issues are confidential.

Something about this entire incident smells fishy.

You should have just removed the comment or blocked the IP instead of acting like a five year old girl, running to daddy and tattling. I hope you can sleep well at night knowing how you altered someones life over some silly bad words. You are most likely too selfish, arrogant and obtuse to get the real gist of what you have done. You are a disgusting autocrat and an enemy of freedom.

I worry - not about the privacy rights of this employee - but rather about student well-being and safety. As society, we go to great lengths to protect youth from abusers. Verbal abuse, which is a form of bullying, cannot be tolerated from children or staff. Our children have a right to attend a safe school.

Anyone who uses such language in a public forum is inclined to use that language in daily life. What bad behaviors might the young people learn from them? Are the young people subjected to this taunting and these outbursts as well? (Perhaps the school district has more information on this employee than it is sharing with the public)

This situation allowed St. Louis to make progress on three fronts: First, a newspaper found the courage to set standards for civility — and a man found the backbone to pursue a person determined to violate these community rules. He was protecting me and other readers who have a right NOT TO BE exposed to toxic language and poisonous communications. Secondly, the school made it clear that employees are not to use equuipment paid for by taxpayers to carry out their political agendas. Finally the children were separated from an employee who lacked the skill sets to communicate appropriately in today’s challenge-filled world.
Well done, Kurt!

You may not have intended to sound like you were gloating, but you did. You may not have intended to reign in vulgarity, but because of what you’ve done I think you’ve only offended the readers who had trusted you. You may have not intended to “cast doubt” on your committal to the privacy policy, but you went further than that and violated it. Your self assuredness and ego only serve to indict you more. You may have had the best intentions, but we all know which road is paved with those.

Well, I mean hey, you just ruined someone’s life for exercising free speech on the Internet. I’m sure you’re happy his kids can go hungry because of your puritan, mightier than thou ego. Good show. I think you should resign, or better yet be fired for your Orwellian actions. To think that you couldn’t for one moment realize the repercussions that could be involved when you made tat phone call over a “word”. Resign and show that you have some honor or soul.

This is just appalling behavior on your part.

For someone called the “director of social media” you sure are behaving an awful lot like a 1950s school principal.

You say that you are “constantly frustrated by the difficulty of dealing with this kind of language”. Why not just delete the comment? Or automatically moderate out any particularly vulgar language.

I predict you won’t last long in this position.

Kurt, I can’t help but see the irony in this. You have managed to do something I didn’t think was possible. For the first time ever you’ve acheived an overwhelming consensus on a topic of discussion on STLToday.
Keep a stiff upper lip. Some politician will do something stupid over the weekend and everyone will forget about this.

Mr. Greenbaum, I think you would do well to google Anthony Comstock. He was a postmaster general in the 1860s who fought a moral crusade against obscenity. He often boasted publicly about having driven his enemies to suicide by removing their social standing, imprisoning them, and HAVING THEM FIRED FROM THEIR JOBS. I think there are some interesting parallels between this man and your recent behavior.

I told my partner what Greenbaum did and she nailed it: “He poisoned the Web.”

Until the Post Dispatch can take a page from the wider channels of news - NYT, WaPo, CNN, etc, I see no reason to support this website or the print version with my dollars or presence until “monitoring conversation” and “eliminating vulgarity” aren’t synonymous, simply because they can’t be. It’s simple enough to parse comments for swear words. The ability to parse each comment to ensure it doesn’t contain what you deem vulgar and what I deem vulgar is probably not possible.

The fact that you continue to perservere in your “but but but, I was right!” attitude is all the more depressing. You were motivated by the fact that the commenter’s place of employ was a school, implying that you were simply thinking of the children. Frankly sir, I’m more afraid of my son’s speech - and not just speech, but LIVELIHOOD being quashed by people like you. For shame.

Reading the above non-apology, some of the moderator comments and Kurt’s indefensible action, I get the impression that the moderators at this site really don’t believe in the concept of “social media,” and hold their readers in contempt. To a First Amendment purist (as you would hope a journalist would be), the way to fight disagreeable speech is with more speech. Posts are regularly removed from this site not because of vulgarity, but secondary to provocative expression of opinions. Kurt’s decision to sleuth, contact an employer, and then laugh about it afterwards is just the most extreme manifestion of the editorial boards contempt for its readership

You GROSSLY over-reacted, and this insulting follow-up is worse than the original offense, because you’ve had time to think about it, consult with others, and endure a firestorm of criticism from all over the Web, and still, you clearly have no clue about why what you did was so upsetting to 98% of the people who hear about it. You were wrong; admit it, apologize in person to the poster, and do all you can to get his job back, or get him another job. Anything less, and your career is over.

Mr. Greenbaum ~

Shame on you.

You are so high on your holier-than-thou-defensive horse that you simply cannot see how you are wrong, even though apparently the entire internet is telling you otherwise.

“Second, that I somehow violated our privacy policy.” SOMEHOW? Wow. You really don’t get it. You called up a school to complain about a comment, providing them with the information they need to find him, thereby outing the person, thereby getting them FIRED. Yes, you very very clearly violated your privacy policy.

You are hiding behind, “I didn’t get him fired, he resigned.” Let’s face facts here: He resigned in lieu of getting fired. You know it and I know it.

You were, in fact gleeful. That’s how I read and when I got really mad about this situation. Oh, and you yourself used a vulgarity, a slang term for Donkey) when calling him out on twitter. How do you reconcile that in your mind?

Most of the dust from the explosion has settled, the sirens are silent, and now we can survey the ruins. If Kurt resigns or is terminated, will anyone out there feel any better?

Gee, I hope not.

I think you were wrong Kurt! You cost a man his JOB because he said one word! On the INTERNET. You seriously could have just blocked the IP.

Shelley sez: “It is not up to us to form a mob and seek to get him fired… this needs to end before more people are harmed”

Who exactly are you referring to? The guy at the school? Greenbaum? Who’s
being harmed? Greenbaum appears to be experiencing a teachable moment, and
the only guy I see that was harmed here is the guy who lost his job.

Sorry Shelley, but nobody here has formed a “mob”. What a lot of us are doing
completely independently of each other is responding to Kurt Greenbaum’s despicable
actions that caused someone to lose their job, and I predict that it’s not going to
let up until Greenbaum responds to a lot of what people are pointing out here: That
journalists who solicit feedback from people and then betray them when they give feedback they don’t like aren’t journalists. An apology, resigning, acknowledging
that what he did was utterly unacceptable, something… something’s going to have to
come out of the guy that’s better than his above clueless “I see four things that I’m
being criticized for” analysis - which, by the way, reveals that he still doesn’t
seem to get the seriousness of a betrayal by a journalist. It really does go to
the heart of what the press stands for. His tweet is a cavalier “Oops, the fail
whale must be swimming”. Not sure how to interpret that - does he think he’s totally
in the right and thousands of people are in the wrong or what? Like I said, it’s
not going to “just end” until it has been completely digested and understood. In
terms of it being one of the crazier things we’ve ever eaten, we’re all still having
a hard time even chewing it.

A few recommendations:
- Revise your privacy policy to avoid future misunderstandings
- Since you didn’t intend any of this to happen, apologise (http://vollman.blogspot.com/2005/05/how-to-apologise.html)
- See if there’s something you can do to fix this for that man
- Use the free publicity this incident got you to promote something worthwhile

Quote: That means taking a measured approach to consider any and all steps — within our policies — to put a stop to it or eliminate it when we see it.

Given that you did not act with in your current set of policies what sort of assurance is that?

@ Ryan

The comments keep coming so I don’t think that the dust is settling yet. I don’t think many people will be happy if he were to lose his job. Unlike Kurt I don’t think many, if any, of us will be sending twitter messages denigrating him in the way he did when he got the person fired. I think an apology and restitution is what most people want. And an absolute assurance that it won’t happen again. My guess is that the apology won’t be forthcoming as it would be an admission of guilt and that a lawsuit is already in the works (probably to be settled without either party admitting any wrong doing.) Winning people’s trust back is going to be a lot harder, if not impossible though.

After looking at 100 or so “comments” that came after my last post, I just wonder how many are “friends” of the “anonymous poster” and later “resigned” school worker?

Parents, do you really want to support the “cause” of someone who posted an obscene comment from the public school who may be working alongisde of your children? Would you have held the school responsible if they had not searched out this person? What “allowances” are you willing to grant?

Your site, your rules. He violated them, not once but twice. People need to back off of that OVERREACT button they apparently are pounding like an eight armed spazoid.

Oh, hey, I notice that my comment contains no vulgarity, but still ends up getting deleted.

It’s like the whole paper is run by thin-skinned egomaniacs.

And they wonder why newspapers are going down the tube.

so…do you usually write articles about people you take action against for vulgar comments then?
or perhaps, was the fact that he lost his job as a result of your actions the qualifier that made story article worthy?

Ryan On The Euphonium - are you a colleague, friend or relative of Kurts? Seems you’re the only apologist for Kurts actions on this blog. Your question: If Kurt resigns or is terminated, will anyone out there feel any better?
When Kurt boasted gleefully in his headline to the story about how his actions had resulted in the termination (oops! resignation) of the school employee, this struck a cord with most of the posters to this blog. Obviously a large percentage felt empathy towards this man/woman that was forced to resign and felt that he/she did not deserve to lose his/her job. So now, after the dust has settled you want to accuse all who have responded to this story as being heartless mobsters bent on revenge. Obviously you have missed the whole point of this “teachable moment.”
It has to do with TRUST. Once you lose the trust of someone it’s nearly impossible to get it back. Kurt let his emotions get the best of him which led him to make a pretty serious error in judgement. This error cost this journalist and his newspaper the trust of many of their readers. This incident is what it is, so try to think a little deeper before you impugn the bloggers that have responded.

Responding to the comment above and others about the person who lost their job is some sort of predator or pedophile.

I take no issue with the SPD moderating their blog and setting usage standard. Likewise, I take no issue with the school enforcing their internet/blogging policy. However, it was their responsibility to police their employees, not the SPD and KG. I think KG went too far and his actions were evil and malicious.

However, to those who are acting like a serious threat to the children was uncovered and eliminated I say - you’re ridiculous.

This person made a crass joke. He used a crude word. We don’t know if he used these types of words in the presence of the students. How many people use this and other crude words? It’s quite common today. The “F” Bomb and other crude words are part of the lexicon, especially during rush hour. If you are going to set some sort of standard of employability over the use of crude words, then most of us should quit our jobs right now. Including Kurt and President Obama, both for the use of a certain word that could mean a male donkey.

In accordance with these new standards, an in depth investigation should take place at that school and every employee, student and parent should be forced to reveal what crude words they’ve ever used. Anyone found to use these types of words should be fired or expelled. Parents should have their contracts cancelled without refund. The school should be barred from doing business with any vendor who employs anyone who uses crude words. Better not take any chances.

After all, it’s for the children. We need to protect the children.

Right?

I’m not sure you can justify ruining someones life/career/income because they used a word you disagree with on your website.

Glad you reinforce the stereotype that newspapers are out of touch with the world. Makes it easy to not care that you’re all dying off.

Shame on you for doing what you did. You should extend an olive branch and try to find a job for this guy that you basically screwed over.

The one thing I’m noticing most of you “braniac” posters are missing - CLEARLY MISSING - is the fact that the guy WAS NOT FIRED. HE RESIGNED.

He did not get anyone fired. The guy, had information presented in front of him - and he resigned. You can’t blame Kurt for the guy losing his job - the guy quit.

I still think this is a load of crap. To begin with, this is a big website that millions of people probably read every day, correct? Why is there no censorship to keep people from posting profanity?

Seriously, that’s strike 1.

Strike 2, why is there no moderation on the comments? Sure, there may be a lot of comments…that’s what unpaid interns are for. Or at least require users to sign up for accounts.

Strike 3, calling the school and reporting the IP was just a massive jerk thing to do. The economy is in the toilet right now. It could have been some student being a jerk off, sure. It could have been an employing slacking off or maybe browsing on their lunch break. In either case, you went way too far and crossed a huge ethical line by deciding to report this.

The guy who posted his comment may have been in the wrong but with your topic you were just begging for some tom foolery.

Also some people have mentioned that the guy at the school resigned. Being that it’s a school which is a pretty big place of employment, they probably forced him to resign. That looks better for the next job than being fired.

Kurt, I hope you sleep well at night knowing there is one more person in the unemployment line and it’s your fault for not understanding the internet.

Greenbaum has some bookmarks saved on delicious. One of them is to the Society of Professional Journalists: Code of Ethics. His description of the bookmark is “Hard to go wrong with the code of ethics of SPJ. It pretty much spells out the ethical issues — and it keeps it short and to the point.”

Below are some relevant extracts.

Preamble
Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist’s credibility. Members of the Society share a dedication to ethical behavior and adopt this code to declare the Society’s principles and standards of practice.

Seek Truth and Report It
Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.

Journalists should:

— Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.
— Diligently seek out subjects of news stories to give them the opportunity to respond to allegations of wrongdoing.
…
— Make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.
….
— Tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience boldly, even when it is unpopular to do so.
— Examine their own cultural values and avoid imposing those values on others.
— Avoid stereotyping by race, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, geography, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance or social status.
— Support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.
— Give voice to the voiceless; official and unofficial sources of information can be equally valid.
— Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.
…

Minimize Harm
Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.

Journalists should:

— Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
— Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
— Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
— Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
— Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
— Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.

……

Be Accountable
Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other.

Journalists should:

— Clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct.
— Encourage the public to voice grievances against the news media.
— Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.
— Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.
— Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.

The SPJ Code of Ethics is voluntarily embraced by thousands of
writers, editors and other news professionals. The present version of
the code was adopted by the 1996 SPJ National Convention, after months
of study and debate among the Society’s members.

So:

Would Greenbaum care to explain his views on how he met the Code of Ethics he subscribes to in this case?

Is the inevitable deletion of this post in accordance with the code of ethics above, particularly the section on accountability.

Are he, and his management, aware that I am just an amateur bystander who happens to be outraged by his conduct in this matter but that professional lawyers and researchers can, and probably will, produce reams of similar relevant information?

cc: To file

There is a lot of vitriol here toward Mr. Greenbaum, maybe b/c of the almost triumphant tone of the announcement the the school employee resigned; and then using the fact as a cautionary tale to commenters.

Here’s my question: why isn’t this on the stltoday.com main page as most commented on story?

Why isn’t the newspaper addressing what actions will follow this mess.

This is news that is not being reported, and the lack of information is fueling the fire.

I’ve reached the conclusion this is just serving as a jumping-off point for a lot of people who’ve held a grudge against the P-D for a long time, because it mainly expresses liberal viewpoints on its Op-Ed page. Kurt is now being hastily pursued as a sacrificial lamb. Don’t like the P-D or its viewpoints? Well, grow a backbone and start your own newspaper/website.

Let’s all just keep in mind the facts here: this person worked at a school with children, and while at the job posted a vulgar term online in a public forum that clearly specifies its rules of conduct. It was removed and then the person reposted the comment — repeating his original stupid action. Also, this person reportedly resigned, he was not fired. This suggests he more than clearly realized he made a stupid mistake. Personally, if it were me, and I didn’t think I had made a mistake, I wouldn’t resign — they’d have to fire me. Besides, I’m sure Kurt thought more than likely this was a student who might learn an appropriate lesson here.

Kurt, I’m with you on this one. I don’t understand why everyone thinks it is OK to say something on a web site that they would not want attributed to them as the author of the comment. And then to post it a second time after it was deleted once for not following the guidelines much less common decency. I think everyone should be heard, but they should take ownership of their comments.

As far as you getting someone fired, that is a weak excuse. How could you know who was doing this from a school or what the end result would be? We have too many problems in schools today without employees posting such things from the school computer. We should expect higher standards for school employees while at work.

@RHarnack
I’d rather my kid taught by someone one with a sense of humor who can stand up and take responsibility for what (s)he did than a Mr Greenbaum. He has no integrity, laughed at the other person’s misfortune, tweeted an obscenity about them, betrayed his trust as a journalist, betrayed his employer and his readers and cannot take responsibility for his actions and apologize for them Now, who would YOU rather have teaching your kids?

You should not have contacted the school, simple as that.

Are you going to call my employed if I say something not your liking, too? What if I’d admit to being gay, would that be reason enough? Or if I talk about having a specific disease that you or someone else from Stltoday might have a bias against?

What’s the point of your privacy policy if you decide you’re not going to abide them. You have plenty of tools at your hands to handle trolls and juveniles, thousands of bloggers with less resources manage, too. And if it’s something realy serious, ask the police for help.

Also on Greenbaum’s delicious bookmarks is a link for “The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog” described as “Great tips for setting up your WP blog and for deciding which plugins to grab.” and linking to a Lifehacker guide.

Right on the first page of the guide is discussion about filtering spam posts and a link to the Akismet comments spam killer. The discussion of spam filtering specifically touches upon filtering specific words and variations of those words.

Therefore to claim that the only course open to him to prevent the posting of vulgar words of which he disapproved (c.f. references to cultural values in above post) was to use the IP to contact the school is suspect at best. Surely a basic knowledge of the tools of one’s trade is a requirement?

cc: To file

I might bring up the fact that it’s been suggested by several bloggers before that the P-D preclude people from posting comments if they don’t want to post under their real first and last names. I’d say this incident makes the case for such a policy. If an equivalent policy had been adopted, this unfortunate incident wouldn’t have happened in the first place. Surely this school worker wouldn’t have been so stupid as to post his comment under his actual name.

Greenbaum, I understand that you don’t approve of vulgarity or vulgar words on your blog, to the extent that you got someone fired for two (deleted) instances of a vulgar word on one of your blogs. A very commendable position for a man “passionate about your family and your faith”.

Therefore I have to ask you, what do you think would be suitable treatment for someone who posted the following online?

http://www.igreenbaum.com/2009/09/yes-bloggers-we-can-laugh-at-ourselves/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+igreenbaum+%28STL+Social+Media+Guy%29

cc: To file (incl. PDF page print and d/loaded video)

you’re an awful person. i hope you, and your employer get sued. i hope you lose your job. i also hope you get constantly harassed by the internet community at large.

justice.

Please explain this. How am I, as a reader supposed to trust that I can have my freedom to voice my opinion in this forum without having to worry about you sending information to people who would seek retribution against it?

Seriously? Your trying to defend yourself? Your actions make this paper as a whole look like tabloid journalism. AND you have the audacity to have ”Director of Social Media” behind your title? And to have links to ”Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism” and ”Society of Professional Journalists” Are you serious? Are you that ignorant to the fact that you have COMPLETELY undermined any sense of credibility you may have once had, and by extension the creditability of your colleges that work for this paper? You are so boastful, you even write ”Your trust is paramount….I regret that this episode MAY have cast doubt that” MAY HAVE?
Do you believe that your readers are that ignorant, unintelligent and naive? You may not believe you have violated the privacy policy as defined by your definition. But in the public arena not only did you violate it, your various and numerous responses in this papers blog, your personal blog, and your tweets, only reinforce the fact that your only aim was to boast about your perceived accomplishments. Not news reporting.
There were dozens of ways to stop this commenter from defacing your comments section. You chose the most ”tabloid” way of doing it, and have the audacity to sit here and defend your actions as if you were a true journalist. Judith Miller was a real journalist. If you had 1/100th of the cajones she has, you wouldnt find yourself facing this situation

When Og the biggest caveman in the cave decided to act badly against one of his cave women, no one did anything. This, because Og was the biggest caveman in the cave. Then the society decided to stop Og from being such a jerk. Og stopped being a jerk because everyone else decided to do something. Eventually we came up with police forces. As we know, they don’t do a whole hell of a lot to stop jerks either, but they are an option. Now that we have the internet, it is an option also.

After learning this guy gave Stltoday a fake e-mail address, it is a little hard to feel very sorry for him. He gave you know way in the most deceitful way to not be able to contact him for the sole purpose of hiding his identity from you. I am glad that you shared this because it becomes much more understandable and justified.

Under these circumstances he had extremely dirty hands and your hands are suddenly very clean. (lol). I just hate that something so stupid as this, although this person’s doing, cost him his job.

the commenter gave a fake email address? that’s the point of being anonymous, d.walker.

the post-disgrace’s privacy policy states: “We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in “Compliance with Legal Process” below.”

kurt greenbaum broke the privacy policy despite stating that trust was paramount. both he and the post-disgrace will be held accountable.

Despicable, Mr. Greenbaum.

Despicable.

Bob Rose, Deputy Managing Editor of the P-D, thinks that Kurt did the right thing. Video here: http://j.mp/8EEXoI

Hey Bob, Kurt stated that reader trust was paramount. He violated your privacy policy. Your paper has earned its nickname as The Post-Disgrace and can no longer be trusted. Since reader trust is no longer paramount, what is?

Actions must be taken. First, a boycott of the paper. In parallel, pressure must be placed on businesses that choose to advertise with the Post-Disgrace.

Stop digging a deeper hole and just admit you acted like a moron.

Sincerely,
The Internet

Holy crap! If the Deputy Managing Editor thinks there isn’t much of a problem then the P-D has bigger problems than just Greenbaum. (See: http://j.mp/8EEXoI ) Isn’t ANYONE at the P-D willing to step up and admit Greenbaum totally screwed up on this (since he won’t)?! Have you not noticed how obvious it is to just about everyone else? How can anyone there at the P-D with a shred of integrity stand to work for an organization like this?

All of you at stltoday and the P-D: turn in your press credentials immediately. You’re apparently a bunch of people just pretending to be journalists.

Just watched the video about this story on the KMOV website.

Paraphrasing Bob Rose about blog comments: Racism OK. Profanity? Absolutely not. Not on my watch.

Wait, what?

Mr. Greenbaum,

I recommend a good lawyer. A REAL good one.

I also recommend lengthy prayer sessions to your god in hopes that this man doesn’t take drastic measures after losing his livelihood. People have killed themselves over far less then the loss of their job. Trust me on this. You do NOT want this man’s blood on your hands. You think things are bad NOW…you have no idea how bad they could become if something like that happens. The guilt alone will kill you.

If prayer and a good lawyer don’t get you out of this mess of your own making, you still have another option. And I wouldn’t waste time waiting to see what happens before acting.

Find the man, apologize, then do whatever you can to help him get his job back. Then, maybe, BOTH of you can sleep at night. You don’t need anyone’s approval to do this, not from your boss, not your wife, nobody. You will probably never regain the trust of the public in a journalistic sense, but nobody will fault you for trying to make things right. Just fix it, OK?

Hell, you might even becomes friends with the man. Weirder things have happened.

Part of editing and managing is to be vigilant in your actions, not cry or explain a poor lapse in judgment. You, like the school employee, got in a fecal-throwing match, and sure, you removed him/her, but you’re still covered in crap.

You should resign, save the paper some face, and since you’re probably qualified you should be able to find a job elsewhere.

But you won’t, because you’re a….yeah.

So, Bob, in your interview video at KMOV, you seem to say that racism, being so subjective is allowed to stand on the SPD blog, but there is zero tolerance for profanity since we all know it to “black and white”.

What?

Not a bad idea. It’d be worth turning off ad blocking just so I could find out who does advertise with them and give them a call. Advertisers just love calls from unhappy people.

cc: To file

Mr. Greenbaum, It would “be easy” for your employer to release you due to the negative public opinion your actions have caused. Would you want them to take the easy path or consider their options more carefully?

You have expressed remorse for the result that came from the way you used your knowledge / power. If you are truly remorseful sir, I believe the proper method to show it is not to write another article, but rather to make it your personal mission to now use your knowledge / power to find this individual gainful employment.

It is now up to you to decide if you are willing to live up to the responsibilities that come along with having the power you have wielded.

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

You cost someone their job. Because of a relatively benign tongue-in-cheek comment. Karma’s after you.

Sincerely,
C. Ocks

Dear Kurt,
You are a jackass.
Are you going to have me fired now too? You used the same word on your twitter account.

This is still making national headlines, with thousands of people condemning what happened (and about 5 supporting it). I’m sure Kurt believes that if he just keeps quiet (after his idiotic responses to the first comments started appearing in the news articles about him) people will forget and move on, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Days later, this thread is still at the top of their recently active thread listing, and I saw yet another new national story about it this morning on Newser. I’m amazed that Kurt hasn’t had the balls to admit he was wrong yet.

What an error in judgement it was, Greenbaum, when you called that school.

“A teachable moment”? Indeed. You have been taught what happens to snitches. How does it feel to be the poster boy for snitches? When someone googles ’snitch’ in the future, that weaselly face of yours will appear?

You made someone lose their job. For what? What did that person do that was really so terrible?

Karma. What you dish out comes back around to you.

The KMOV interview indicates that Bob Rose, Deputy Managing Editor of the P-D, stands completely behind his pariah. He isn’t sure about divisive, racist posts — that’s a grey area to him. But profanity is always bad, even when used in a non-divisive, humorous context.

There is something clearly wrong with the P-D organization. First and foremost, they undermine their reader’s trust by breaking their own privacy policies. Not only that, but the P-D has a recent history of “journalists” attacking and alienating their own readership. Check out this blog post by Steve Gigerich only 10 days before Greenbaum-gate to get a feel of this culture gone wrong: http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/stl-jobwatch/uncategorized/2009/11/747/

Due to their combined arrogance, I hope that Kurt and the Post-Dispatch pay dearly in the impending lawsuit.

John -
I would that all my children and grandchildren are taught by teachers who are too busy teaching and focused on improving their skills, than someone who finds time at work to enter obscenities on blogs.

I have not bothered to read Kurt’s “tweets”, as I don’t read anyone’s “tweets”, because I do not have that kind of time or interest in such irrelevant activities.

However, it was the school IT person who chose to pursue the issue and the school administrator, not Kurt.

Kurt - even if you did not cost this person their job (and it clear to almost everyone you did) how could you find such joy in their loss and even gloat about it?

Another self-righteous journalist who is going to save us from all the bad vulgar things that people say on the web. Perhaps you should be blogging on a children’s site or maybe on your own church webpage where your version of “correctness” would be appreciated. I am not sure what is worse: that you had to “tattle” on the poster or that you had to gloat to the world about getting this person fired. (You can claim all you want about “resigning” but the reality is this person was given a choice between having their resume say they resigned or they were fired for bad conduct.)

It is funny how you won’t tolerate vulgarity as you see it but racist comments appear to be perfectly fine. Of course you being in journalism are just the sort of person we need to tell us what is vulgar. Way to use your powers for the betterment of the world. Perhaps you can start banning books or movies in your blogs so that the rest of us can be informed.

If you are so enlightened about how the world works, do like the rest of the normal forums and embrace the technology that will moderate your boards. Otherwise don’t be surprised when you ask juvenile questions if sometimes you get a juvenile responses!! I would tell you to quit your job but I don’t want another person on the system that I have to pay for. Besides, you know you would just crawl under another rock and start blogging to save us all.

I really, really hope you lose your job over this. You cost someone their job over this non-issue, and gloated over the result. I hope karma rewards you appropriately.

AT — RHarnack

Your original claim was that you would rather have Kurt teach your kids than the poster and I pointed out why I disagreed with you. Would I rather have the worlds greatest teacher for my kids but we live in the world that we live. If I had to choose between the two I would go with the one who has integrity and that is not Kurt. Further, if you have not bothered to familiarize yourself with all the facts by your own admission then maybe you would be better off keeping quiet till you do your research.

I have read every post and it’s about 90% against you Mr. Greenbaum. Thats a rather strong majority opinion. Imagine if 90% of people could agree about more important things. Your actions and the papers silence on this is enough to keep most readers away.

I am stating my desire to see your resignation. This is not an eye for an eye thought either. You seem to lack many qualities of a journalist.

I’m the opposite. Kurt should remain.

How noble of you to stick up for your brother, EJ.

Greenbaum,

I know your the “Social Media Guy” and all that, but I think in that position it is essential that you keep up with the times and the latest social media terms etc. Don’t you? I mean if you’re going to have any credibility in that position I’d think it would be de rigueur.

For reference, the term “teachable moment” is now passe and declasse (can’t be bothered to do the accents). The new generally accepted term on the internet is now a “Kurt Greenbaum” moment, easily verified by a couple of searches. I’m just wondering when the next evolution, a “St. Louis Post-Dispatch” moment is going to appear.

cc: To file (You know what this means)

It probably only seems as low as 90% because the handful of supporters he has keep posting over and over again. Isn’t that right, EJ Rotert? We know what you think. The first 40 posts clued us in. Unfortunately, 95% of the people who’ve read this story disagree with you.

Kurt,

You need to resign. Sorry, but what you did was unethical. You should have banned the IP address. When you take actions to cause people to lose their jobs you have crossed the line. That family’s hardship is now on your shoulders. Hope you can live with it.

This whole thing is just silly. You should have just erased the “vulgar” post and nobody would’ve lost a job, you wouldn’t have had to deal with all this and everyone would be much happier. That’s it. Case closed. The internet is a vulgar place sometimes and if you can’t handle someone making a remark like that then you should just throw your computer away and go be a farmer or a healthcare worker or get a job that actually means something to somebody. Not just these fluff pieces. Get over yourself.

Kurt, you state that one of the criticisms of you is that you “somehow violated [the Post-Dispatch's] privacy policy”.

Yes, you “somehow” violated it. You revealed to an employer that their IP address was the source of a comment containing a mildly-vulgar joke. You revealed the time and context of that comment.

Yes, the comment had been public. And yes, the employer does know its own IP address. However, it was YOUR action that allowed the employer to connect the two.

It is EXACTLY as if you told an employer that an anonymous source had spoken with you at 10:00 AM at the back door of their building at 1234 Main St., just before the source used his key card to enter the building. Yes, the employer knows its own address. Yes, the employer knows that everyone must use a key card to enter the building. And by providing the employer with the location and time of entry, you have allowed the employer to use key card records to identify the anonymous source.

This is clearly NOT ethical conduct.

May I add that your snarky use of the word “somehow” to describe your conduct is extremely irritating.

Dan… As a friend said to me: this school’s (or district’s) IT director should have been more on the ball. If he or she had, it would have never reached this level. The first comment would have been caught by the director and the employee contacted before it could be reposted. Kurt never would have had to deal with this. But it all goes back to who’s primarily at fault here, and that would be a grown man who is using work equipment to post a comment befitting a 15-year-old male in a public forum. And not once, but twice. What’s that old saying about the difference between ignorance and stupidity? If you don’t happen to know, you should look it up.

If you think this is going to die out soon, you might want to take a vacation. I’m halfway across the country and I’m just now hearing about this. Wow. Someone at the Post Dispatch needs to do some damage control. The first step almost certainly has to be eliminating this column.

It’s not that the world thinks posting vulgarity is ‘ok’ or that you were wrong to moderate. It’s the way you handled it with a heavy hand that makes you persona non grata.

Guess you showed him.

Does Bob Rose still think this is no big deal? Wonder if he speaks Italian. Yes Bob, your “Local Hero” is now an “International Hero”!

http://www.corriere.it/scienze_e_tecnologie/09_novembre_19/post-volgare-blog-licenziato_3a756dd4-d517-11de-a0b4-00144f02aabc.shtml

I’m sure someone at Lee Enterprises can speak Italian.

cc: To File (This could get to be a big email if it has to be sent)

Kurt,

I would like to add that I was surprised to find out it was you who did this. You actually are one of the more level-headed blog authors on this site. When I heard this happened, I thought for certain it was going to be a member of your editorial board who was responsible.

So now, it looks as if one irrational, emotional action led to your irrational, emotional action. And both actions cost people their jobs. That is a teachable moment.

EJ,

“As a friend said to me: this school’s (or district’s) IT director should have been more on the ball. If he or she had, it would have never reached this level. The first comment would have been caught by the director and the employee contacted before it could be reposted.”

If such accurate technology even existed, it would not be in the financial reach of a school to license/purchase it or employ staff to manage it, or do it manually. Finding computer threats in network traffic at or near line speed is spotty, at best, but deciding word context in spoken and written languages is more or less nascent. You don’t know anything about any of this, so avoid trying to talk about it.

“Kurt never would have had to deal with this.”

… if he had simple comment filters and posting policies configured that most of the Internet knows about, and knows how to set up. Heard of that “blogosphere” thing? Kurt should have. He’s a social media director.

“But it all goes back to who’s primarily at fault here”

You are assuming that there is any fault here at all on the part of the poster. Violating a ToS agreement is not a crime. Having “impure” thoughts is not a crime in practice, either, although I’m sure it’s still on the books in Missouri.

You have seriously interfered with someone’s life.

Now is definitely not the time for a newspaper to start playing
morality police with its readers. Your industry is staring into the
abyss and yet you seriously interfered with someone’s life and then
gloated about it. Mr. Greenbaum, it is time for you to resign now.
Your newspaper is a joke with you around. And believe me, word is
getting out that the Post-Dispatch is to be mocked, derided and
harassed as long as you stay. What’s next, you find out that I hold
unpopular political or religious views and then violate your site’s
privacy policy, track down my employer and get me fired?

Shame.

My entire office is talking about this. Seriously, there were much
simpler solutions to dealing with juvenile behavior. Get a clue
before you start fantasizing about being a vigilante. Shafting
someone just in time for the holidays is absolutely disgusting.

Shame on you.

I have this page bookmarked to check up on the newest comments. From now on, this is the only page I will ever visit on this website. For those of you that are truly disgusted with Kurt, show the Post how you really feel and join me.

There are other local sources of news and places to voice your opinion, try one!

Disappointed to see Bob Rose on KMOV stating, “The Post did everything right and did nothing wrong.”

They still don’t get it.

Mike, you talk about word getting out. And how! Have you done a Google News search on this lately? It is now a story in Italy, UK, Ireland, Germany, Russia, Australia and even Indonesia! Management need to do some crisis control on this, and quickly.

cc: To file

So now this blog entry is buried deep within the bowels of STLToday? I know, when things get tough it is best to bury the issue and act like it never happened.

Because of your actions Kurt, how is this guy going to find another job in St. Louis? His name hasn’t been released yet, but it will come out eventually. You not only may have cost a man his job, but his career, marriage and family life all could be the next dominos that fall. Follow his life closely and be thankful this week that you aren’t that guy.

The mission of the Post-Dispatch is simply to deliver the news. It is not to serve as moral inquisitors and tattletales. What’s next, you determine that I hold unpopular political or religious views, track down my employer and get me fired? It’s up to the school to ensure its staff and children act according to its own standards — not the paper. No matter the legality, their cavalier behavior just set a precedent and cost whatever trust the public had in them.

And if the paper cares so d@mn much about civility, they’d wouldn’t foster an environment that foments such racist, divisive, drivel. Instead, their actions indicate hypocrisy. Will advertisers want their brands to be displayed alongside this nonsense for much longer? Probably not if the public helps make them aware of it. So be proactive and fix it now. Establish mechanisms as described in http://stltomorrow.org.

Also, something must be awry with the culture at the Post-Dispatch. Another P-D journo attacked a commenter only 10 days or so before the Greenbaum incident. Again, just do your d@mn job and deliver the news — stop alienating your readership. See here: http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/stl-jobwatch/uncategorized/2009/11/747/all-comments/#comments

Very interesting RFT expose with the owner of http://kurtgreenbaum.com here: http://j.mp/89yy4Y

Somewhere, Joseph Pulitzer is rolling in his grave. The P-D’s founder was known as a champion for the common man. And now they got him fired.

his is too little, too late. Your job is not to “teach” anybody how to behave. Your job (or rather, the comment monitor’s job) is to quietly, consistently monitor and remove obscene comments. There is a very, very easy way to do this - have comments be moderated BEFORE they are posted.

Bottom Line: It is never okay to contact an employer or school in order to discipline somebody’s online actions. That is not your job. Your job ends with your website. It’s a little like the saying “my rights end where my fist hits your face.” You have the right to remove this person from commenting on your website (can you not do it by email?), from interacting with your website in any manner, and from simply posting vulgarities either by calm, consistent deletion or by requiring comments to be pre-screened. Your fist hit his face when you felt the need to babysit, teach, discipline or follow-up in any why his actions beyond the pull of your site. It doesn’t matter if he’d been a student, teacher, janitor, lunch lady or principal - you were in the wrong, and you need to apologize. Mostly, you need to regret this overstepping of the lines. What angers your readers is your utter lack of comprehension as to the gross misuse of your power concerning this matter.

Your actions were hasty, ill-conceived and arrogant. You say you couldn’t have known that the writer would resign when confronted by his employer as a result of your actions. Precisely, what WAS your intent if not something on that scale? You justify your conduct as providing a “teachable moment”. No one but you, the school administration and writer were in that “classroom” you constructed.

You have lost credibility for yourself and your newspaper.Ultimately, YOU are the looser but that is no consolation to the person you lashed out against who is no longer working as a result of your tactics. When did your actions have anything to do with journalism?

I am from Germany.

It is hard to believe what happens in the “free America”.

I wished, you would move on to deal with the real problems of the world.

regards

Soren

As an amateur writer I’ve certainly suffered the slings and arrows of readers that sunk to all manners of low. Simply put, you put your ego on the line when you write for others to read. Was what the man said crass? Yes. Did it deserve you playing internet nanny. No.

You need to quit whining and man up that what you did was exactly the actions of the word the man used. A real man doesn’t let things like that bother him.

I trust you’ll be having a word with David Carson for embedding an expletive laden video in this post: http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/pictures/video/2009/11/nikon-girl-music-video-other-staffers-at-the-pd-are-holding-out/

You did it because it was easy? I followed a link on another site and got your online resume. It has your phone number and home address. I could egg your house or tp your trees. I could drunk dial you at all times of night. Cause it would be easy. But I won’t because I know that just because it’s easy doesn’t make it right.

Last few sentences of your post - “My colleagues and I agree we are committed to working as hard as we can to foster and encourage discussion on STLtoday. That means taking a measured approach to consider any and all steps — within our policies — to put a stop to it or eliminate it when we see it.”

Are you so dense as to state that you ‘foster and encourage discussion’, and then claim in the next sentence that you will ‘take any and all steps — within our policies — to put a stop to it or eliminate it when we see it.’

Define your subject in the closing. The current juxtaposition does not help your cause.

I’m just wondering if you’ve bothered to “walk the idea around the newsroom” since. Do your colleagues side with you? Or have most of them said they wouldn’t have done that? How many of them are happy that the PD is becoming a laughingstock all over the world?

Shame on you, sir.

You most certainly did overreact. You didn’t reveal “private information” in much the same way President Clinton “never had sexual relations” with Ms Lewinsky. You’re hiding behind strict interpretations of words, rather than owning up to your error in judgement.

Oh, and to be safe, I’ll never post from work again. Actually, I won’t even read STLtoday from work again.

Just because the comments are pouring in (I suspect that you are just not posting them) don’t think that we have forgotten about your treachery.

Funny, when you go to the website of the Society of Professional Journalists and search for the name “Kurt Greenbaum”, guess what pops up?

The SPJ’s Code of Ethics. (http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp)

I hope that this means that the Society of Professional Journalists has received complaints of ethics violations by Kurt Greenbaum, who seems to me to have mis-stepped in many ways.

The professional journalists’ Code of Ethics states, among other things, that: “Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.”

It says that journalists should “show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage”; it admonishes that “pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance”.

It also says that a professional journalist would “admit mistakes and correct them promptly”. Not weasel and spin, as Mr. Greenbaum has in this article.

The case, Mr. Greenbaum, is NOT about “the Vulgar Comment and the School”. The case is about the Bad Joke and the Arrogant Journalist.

I eagerly await the real follow-up, the news about what the Society of Professional Journalists is going to do about this.