A lesson about community journalism and blogging

The news director of a public radio station in western Alaska is out of a job after local residents discovered she had a blog that began last fall in part, "I love living in a place where I can be treated as a respectable personage simply by dint of being sober, employed and totally uninterested in having sex with relatives or children." Another referred to residents of Dillingham, population 2,400, "passing drunk women around like poorly rolled joints."

Eileen Goode "figured she was mainly writing for herself and her friends back in New England," reports Kyle Hopkins of the Anchorage Daily News. But she should have known that the searchable nature of the Internet would eventually bring the blog Chilly Hell to her neighbors' attention and endanger her job at KDLG, owned by the local school district.

Goode told Hopkins that the station manager told her last Friday afternoon that he wanted her off the job. "Over the weekend, a man pushed her in a ditch, but later apologized, Goode said. A local bar refused to serve her. On Monday morning, she resigned," Hopkins reports. Goode told him, "The first rule of living in a small town is, No. 1, be polite. And I wasn't polite." (Read more)