Yesterday was a dark day for AVUSA, previously known as Johnnic Communications. The same company that promotes blogging heavily in The Times has fired Llewellyn Kriel, a sub-editor for the Sowetan newspaper for blogging about the company on Thought Leader. I know a few people at the company who might think, as I do, that the decision to fire Kriel was a little harsh, especially since he’d published a type of apology. Don’t get me wrong, this post is not a rant or a moralistic condemnation – the situation is too complex for that type of reduction.

What this situation highlights is the strategic complexities of Media 2.0 as a set of publishing principles, and the risks corporates now face when every irritated employee could potentially have a voice on the web that will be indexed by Google in perpetuity. What it does is raise several important questions about the role of the journalist in the media company. On paper Kriel must have violated several confidentiality clauses in his contract if one ignores his argument that what he was saying was already on public record but, looking at things slightly differently, what Kriel said would have faded away had he been disciplined subtly and constructively. As always in these things, I suspect there is more to this than meets they eye but, nevertheless, Kriel will become a sort of martyr for the cause.

What happens in one of the largest media companies in the country should be considered as the public interest. AVUSA defended the rights of the Sunday Times to trash the Minister of Health using stolen medical records, yet the standard seems to be different when it comes to looking inwards. The fact is that every corporate body has its skeletons and few are exempt from the possibility of public embarrassment, especially with the massive growth of personal publishing that has come about over the past few years.

It strikes me as ironic, however, that Kriel was not co-opted into the fold of AVUSA bloggers and resorted to blogging on a competitor platform. This may say more about his mindset than the company’s though, and possibly a clue as to the direction his disciplinary hearing took.

Kriel is, for obvious reasons, unhappy:

“Here is an organisation whose entire existence is premised on freedom of expression. It’s an organisation that continually calls on private and public institutions to account for their behaviour. Yet, they don’t want to be measured by that yardstick.

However one decides to balance freedom of expression with a company’s right to protect itself, firing Kriel is going to make AVUSA look bad. I assume the possible implications of firing him, in terms of public perception, were weighed up against simply giving him a warning and asking him to direct his blogging attention elsewhere and the decision was made despite the risk of negative publicity. I also assume this will prompt an addition to the company employment contract that specifically names blogging about the company as a form of breach of confidentiality, even though this should be obvious.

Kriel himself is a sub-editor with a few decades of experience and this is a sad way to end his tenure at the Sowetan. I wish him luck and I hope this doesn’t become a trend.