A ‘vulgar’ comment from a man on the St Louis-Post’s Dispatch website, STLtoday.com, resulted in him resigning from his job.
Kurt Greenbaum, online news director and director of social media at the paper, explains how he twice deleted the comment.
“[I then] noticed in the WordPress e-mail that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school. So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the e-mail, though I wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do with the meager information it included,” explains Greenbaum.
“About six hours later, I heard from the school’s headmaster. The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.”
But as the site Awful Marketing asks, is this a violation of trust or a newspaper’s privacy policy?