St. Louis Editor Outs Commentator Who Then Loses Job

St. Louis Post Dispatch website editor Kurt Greenbaum outed a commentator on his blog earlier this month. The commentator subsequently lost his job. Greenbaum says, "I sleep fine at night," but many regard him to be a self-righteous 'rat'.

Perhaps it could only happen on a 'Friday the Thirteenth.' On Friday, November 13, Greenbaum asked readers to comment on, “What's the strangest food you've ever eaten? And did you like it?”. The standard roll call of predictable monkey brains, mundane calamari, and the standard bugs and worms appeared. One reader on stltoday.com, thinking outside the box, replied with a reference to the female anatomy. Greenbaum outlined to the Riverfront Times online what he then did:

I deleted it, but noticed in the WordPress e-mail alert that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school.... About six hours later, I heard from the school's headmaster...The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.

While it may seem straightforward to Greenbaum, Jacqui Cheng writing on arstechnica.com sees it otherwise. She sees it as immature, 'Ha. ha, someone posted naughty words and I got him fired!' She also questions the broader implications of the 'outing' of a commentator:

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 commentators, the Post-Dispatch has proven that it will reveal that info with little prodding.

In the comment forum of the original post Greenbaum continues to defend his action:

I'm not regulating someone's thought. He can think whatever he wants. I'm moderating our boards. Follow our guidelines and this won't be a problem for any of you. Remember, I said it was a school, right? It could have been a student. I didn't know who it was. I just thought the school might like to know about it.

The most interesting and insightful interpretation of the situation was noted by a commentator named Karen, "Of all the comments that you guys choose to 'narc on,' for lack of a better term, you chose one that was actually kind of funny.... Vulgar, yes, but nowhere near as offensive as some of the racist stuff I’ve seen on here." The funniest aspect of the incident was provided by Greenbaum in a blog he posted yesterday. Unless, Greenbaum is using 'Bushisms' it seems 'it' is discussion and Greenbaum is pledging to extirpate it:

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.

For those of you still in the dark, the 'naughty' word was pussy.