CNN Dooces One Of Its Producers

On Tuesday Chez Pazienza, a producer on CNN's American Morning, was dooced by his employer.

If you're a blogger, you probably recognize the word "dooced." The word is a neologism that sprung up on the Internet after Heather Armstrong was fired on February 26, 2002.

Heather had the singular distinction of being the first person ever fired for her blog. Dooce was the name of that blog and, according to the Urban Dictionary, it became the word used to describe being "fired from your job because of the contents of your weblog."

If you want to read Heather's story, go here.

Chez Pazienza had worked for CNN for four years and had been writing a blog called Deus Ex Malcontent since May, 2006. According to his post for yesterday here, he was fired because of that blog.

His friend, Terry Heaton, had a bit more to say on his own blog here:

Chez Pazienza, a producer at CNN assigned to American Morning, was unceremoniously fired from his job today — without severance — over the content of his popular and edgy blog, Deus Ex Malcontent (warning: adult language) . . . According to Chez, he was terminated for violating network policy by not running what he was writing through their vetting system.

This isn't the first time CNN has fired a blogger. Almost a year ago, according to the Huffington Post here, the Cable News Network fired an intern named Rachel for her "password-protected, closed-membership" blog in which she shared industry secrets like "Anderson [Cooper] apparently gets gift baskets all the time, and leaves them to the interns to enjoy."

I'm sure there's a lesson here.

As for me, I'm going to be especially careful from now on during the month from February 12 to March 5--the period during which all three bloggers were canned.