L.A. Times Filters Net Access In Newsroom

Reporters working in the L.A. Times have informed me that Internet access in their newsrooms is filtered, although we haven’t determined what program they’re using. In the L.A. bureau, reporters can’t access sites like Playboy.com and are also blocked from accessing Peacefire.org, and I had to give a reporter the address of a Circumventor site so that he could get to our home page. In the San Francisco bureau, the filtering is apparently less restrictive, since Peacefire.org and Playboy.com are accessible, but the more hardcore Penthouse.com is not.

It’s the first time I’ve heard of blocking software being used in the newsroom of a major newspaper, so I wanted to tell the reporters on this list, ” except that, you know what would be, like, really funny, is that we should keep it secret from the idealistic young high school newspaper reporter who is dreaming of the day she’ll escape from the censorious clutches of her school, and get a job as a real reporter for the L.A. Times.

Anyway, Internet access at work is not a First Amendment or a minors’ rights issue, but I’ve always figured that if your employer wants to filter Internet access to prevent employees from getting distracted, that means they’re not measuring output very well. (If you could measure output accurately, you could just require people to stay at a certain productivity level, rather than trying to control their distractions.) So a newsroom seems like a strange place to use censorware because I’d always thought they were pretty tough about tracking productivity in a newsroom, “yesterday is history, what have you got for me today?”

Then there’s the liability issue. A woman sues the company because a man was looking at a porn site when she walked past, and she didn’t believe his excuse that it was for a news story he was working on. But then there was the unanimous ruling by the California Supreme Court that a former “Friends” writer couldn’t sue Warner Brothers for creating a hostile work environment where writers discussed sex all the time, because that was a necessary part of the job. Presumably that would apply to a newsroom where uncensored Internet access could be seen as a necessary part of the job as well.

I am tempted to post something on Peacefire.org urging the L.A. Times staff to take a stand on this, but of course they wouldn’t be able to read it.

[Bennett Haselton of Peacefire.org]

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