Teacher Tweets Naked Pictures and Drugs; Placed on Leave

(Original story at the Denver Post here.)

What is so funny about naked pictures and drugs? Beats me. Maybe they were drunk or high when they created the Twitter account, which tells you even more about the teacher’s private life than we want to know.

Cherry Creek schools puts Overland teacher on leave for Twitter posts

By Blair Shiff

POSTED:   01/29/2013 12:41:44 PM MST

UPDATED:   01/30/2013 03:50:35 AM MST

AURORA — Cherry Creek School District put a teacher on administrative leave Tuesday after 9News discovered a Twitter page containing half-naked photos of her and a claim of possessing marijuana on school grounds.

The station started asking questions about the now-deleted CarlyCrunkBear (@crunk_bear) Twitter account after getting a tip from a viewer Monday.

In a brief interview, Carly McKinney, a 23-year-old math teacher at Overland High School, admitted that she created the account with a friend. The Twitter page included provocative photos along with many posts about using drugs.

One post said, “Naked. Wet. Stoned.” Another indicated the poster was high while grading papers. An additional post said, “Watching a drug bust go down in the parking lot. It’s funny cuz I have weed in my car in the staff parking lot.”

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Barista Keeps Snarky Blog; Fired

(Original story at the Seattle Times here.)

It was supposed to be a funny blog, but for some reason his boss didn’t see it that way. I wonder how his identity was made known. I definitely wouldn’t reveal my identity if I kept a less serious blog or wrote politically-incorrect content.

Originally published February 11, 2013 at 9:07 PM

Bitter Barista loses job over snarky blog about customers, boss

Matt Watson lost his job at a Georgetown coffee shop, after being outed as The Bitter Barista blogger. His boss didn’t appreciate the snarky comments about himself or the customers, even if was meant as satire.

By Erik Lacitis

Seattle Times staff reporter

Meet Matt Watson, 30, who just lost his job at All City Coffee in Georgetown that he had for 2½ years. That’s what happens when you’ve becomethe Bitter Barista, start blogging snarky stuff about your customers, and it goes viral.

For example:

“If you remind me four times that you’ve ordered decaf, guess what you won’t be getting … ”

“I would remember your usual drink if you were a more memorable person.”

“What a coincidence! You have a gluten allergy, and I don’t care that you have a gluten allergy!”

“You can say ‘2% milk’ all damn day. You’re getting whole milk.”

And, you don’t just blog about customers, but your boss:

“I like to use a lot of big words when I tweet, that way if my boss ever finds my twitter account, he won’t understand any of it.”

According to market researchers, the NPD Group, there were an astounding 1,640 coffee shops in the Puget Sound area in 2011, ranking us the No. 1 coffee region in the country.

In the birthplace of Starbucks, and in one of the most Internet-connected cities in the country, it seems appropriate that there’d be a blog about the relationship between customer and server.

It is Starbucks, after all, that in the last three decades helped coin the term “barista” as common usage for coffee servers. In Italy, the description is applied to someone working behind a bar, serving not just coffee but also alcoholic drinks.

Watson says that his blog was satire and that he was just accentuating “the 5 percent who I guess make our job more difficult and don’t treat us as human beings. I had a good personal relationship with 95 percent of customers.” He says he thought very highly of his boss, Seth Levy.

The thing about baristas, he says, is “that person is probably an artist, overqualified, people with pretty much college education across the board.”

And here they are, working for minimum wage plus tips, which for Watson totaled about $15 an hour for a job that for him started at 6 in the morning.

A New Jersey native, he says he got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and came to Seattle in 2005 because “I followed a girl.”

He’s now married to a different woman, and they live in a Capitol Hill apartment.

The barista job, Watson says, was to help make ends meet while he pursued a career as a hip hop artist going by the name “Spekulation.” That’s what he means about baristas being artistic types.

Watson went live two weeks ago with the Bitter Barista blog. Soon it began getting a couple thousand hits a day.

In it, he doesn’t mention All City Coffee, or his real name. But he did mention in his Spekulation tweets what he was doing.

It wasn’t hard for two other young coffee guys, Zachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman, of Portland, to figure it all out. They run a website called Sprudge.com that advertises itself as “your daily source of coffee news, rumor, innuendo and intrigue.”

Yes, the barista world is a small, gossipy world.

On Thursday, Carlsen and Michelman outed Watson, writing, “There’s a lot of anger in this blog, and while we love the well-worn barista cliché, it should be the stuff of mild parody, not an all-out assault on whomever walks through the door of your cafe.”

Watson knew he was in trouble.

He emailed Levy, “Hey man, I’m guessing … you’re not too excited about the Internet happenings today … The very few customers … who have seen the website, are huge fans. And since the article was posted this afternoon, the ‘likes’ on my site have gone up 15%. This isn’t bad press, it’s actually really good press … especially given your customer base and the type of neighborhood that Georgetown has become … I’m just saying … it could turn out to be a fun something that gives the place a little spike in publicity.”

Levy didn’t quite see it that way.

He says, “He was writing about his boss during business hours. I represent the business, the customers and the staff. I can’t endorse what he was saying, whether humorous or not. It puts me in a difficult position, where if I don’t respond that means I endorse what he’s saying.”

And so Watson was out of a job.

But maybe not for long.

Watson says he’s had several offers from other coffeehouses.

And, he says, he hopes to put together a Bitter Barista coffee-table book.

Meanwhile, one of his latest posts is, “My next project is gonna be called Bittersweet Barista. It’ll be the same as before, but with a plethora of kitten pictures.”

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Waitress Posts Receipt Online; Fired

(Original story at Yahoo! News here.)

This is a typical story of an employee who complains about her customer on social media and got fired. What is unusual about the story is that the customer was the subject of the complaint was identified and “exposed,” causing her great embarrassment.

Applebee’s fires waitress who posted receipt from pastor complaining about auto-tip

By Dylan Stableford, Yahoo! News – Thu, Jan 31, 2013

An Applebee’s waitress who posted a receipt with a note from a pastor complaining about the automatic gratuity added to the bill on the Internet was fired on Wednesday after the pastor complained to her manager.

Chelsea Welch, the waitress, wrote in an email to Yahoo News that the pastor (who has since been identified as Alois Bell) told Welch’s manager at the St. Louis-area Applebee’s that the ensuing firestorm had “ruined” her reputation.

“I give God 10%,” Bell wrote on the receipt, scratching out the automatic tip and scribbling in an emphatic “0″ where the additional tip would be. “Why do you get 18?” (There were more than eight people in Bell’s party, triggering the auto-tip.)

Welch, who snapped a photo of the bill from a fellow server and uploaded to Reddit, defended her right to post the receipt. “I thought the note was insulting, but also comical,” she told Consumerist.com. “And I thought other users would find it entertaining.”

Bell, a pastor at Truth in the World Deliverance Ministries Church, was not amused, and she called Welch’s manager to complain.

“[It was] a lapse in my character and judgment,” Bell told the Smoking Gun, adding she did not expect her easily recognizable signature would be, as her friend informed her, “all over Yahoo. You went viral!”

“My heart is really broken,” Bell added. “I’ve brought embarrassment to my church and ministry.”

A spokesman for Applebee’s said it apologized to Bell for violating her “right to privacy” and confirmed that Welch “is no longer employed by the franchise.”

Welch was surprised that Applebee’s fired her, “especially because there was nothing specific in the employee handbook admonishing this behavior.”

“I had no intention of starting a witch hunt or hurting anyone. I just wanted to share a picture I found interesting,” she said. “I come home exhausted, sore, burnt, dirty and blistered on a good day. And after all that, I can be fired for ‘embarrassing’ someone who directly insults their server on religious grounds.”

Welch also isn’t buying Bell’s embarrassment. “If this person wrote the note, obviously they wanted it seen by someone,” she said. “I’ve been stiffed on tips before, but this is the first time I’ve seen the Big Man used as reasoning.”

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Sports Columnist Leaves After 31 Years; Blames Online Commenters

(Original story at Seattle Weekly here.)

The lesson to be learned here is: if you want to contribute to a medium that provides or promotes interactivity between content producers and readers/followers, evolve a thick hide. Don’t let negative comments get you down.

Steve Kelley, Seattle Times Sports Columnist, Leaving ‘to do Something Else’ After 31 Years

By Rick Anderson Fri., Jan. 4 2013 at 12:28 PM

Forty years and thousands of games later, Steve Kelley went to another sporting event last night. He loved it. But, 40 years and millions of words later, he then had to write about it. And there’s the rub. “The idea of writing newspaper stuff doesn’t thrill me anymore,” he says.No one in Royal Brougham Pavilion – named for one of America’s longest-serving sportswriters - knew that Kelley was writing one of his final columns yesterday. Unlike Brougham, who died on the job at age 84, Kelley thinks the thrill is gone at 63. He tells us he’ll leave his Seattle Times column behind at the end of this month.

How did his departure come about, we asked him this morning. “Well, I got into a fight with my boss and hit him over the head with one of our Pulitzers,” Kelley said.

Joke. He was just trying to pump up the story a bit, the truth being awfully prosaic. He says he simply told Times Executive Editor Dave Boardman, “I just kind of want to disappear. Thirty-one years here, 40 years as a sportswriter, I just want to do something else.”

The repetition of sporting events had something to do with it – the loopy Groundhog Dayeffect of look-alike games and legions of coaches and players droning on about “execution” and “taking them one game at a time.”

“I find myself at a lot more games thinking ‘I’ve written this story 411 times now. Isn’t that enough?’” says Kelley, who came to the Times in 1982 from The Oregonian, with earlier newspaper stops in Olympia, Centralia, and Pennsylvania. “It’s more and more a challenge to find a different way to write it.”

But also give some credit to his detractors – anyone who writes for a living has them – for driving him out.

“The reader comments section, it’s a free-for-all,” Kelley says. “The level of discourse has become so inane and nasty. And it’s not just at the Times, it’s ESPN, everywhere – people, anonymous people, take shots at the story, writers, each other. Whatever you’ve achieved in that story gets drowned out by this chorus of idiots.”

Like a lot of career newspaper writers, Kelley doesn’t have a lot in the bank. But his wife, who works fulltime, backed his decision to semi-retire – he’ll continue as a volunteer coach at Shorewood High and teaching writing to Seattle 4th graders. He also has a book and some film ideas he’s working on.

His farewell column is set for January 31 or thereabouts. Kelley wrote an unintentional preview of such a column in a piece he did for The Great Book of Seattle Sports Lists,recounting moments with Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax and Michael Jordan, to name a few, noting:

I’m old, and the only advantage I can see in my 60th year is that, as sports fan and sportswriter, I was lucky to have witnessed many great moments and almost all of the great modern athletes.Yet, “If I have a choice, I won’t write a farewell column,” he said today. A friend of his from the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote a heartfelt goodbye, and got strafed by readers, a.k.a. the idiot chorus. Kelley would likely recall similar deep sentiments, such as the memorable time that then-Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren – after hearing Kelley complain about having a bad day with his grade-school writing class – offered to drop in for a chat with them.

“Fifty kids in a circle, with Mike sitting in a big rocking chair, talking about sports and life. He was unbelievable. Of all the great events I’ve covered, that’s the one I remember most,” says Kelley. “I’d rather just walk away with that memory untarnished.”

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Miss Seattle Whines About Weather and “Annoying People,” Criticized

(Original story at ABC News here.)

Apparently, Miss Seattle didn’t learn the lesson from Oprah Winfrey’s tweet. Better stick to sharing links rather than feelings on Twitter!

Mar 7, 2012 12:54pm

Miss Seattle Insists She Doesn’t Hate Seattle After Twitter Rant

The new Miss Seattle has had her crown for less than a week and is already apologizing for a Twitter rant about Seattle’s incessant rain and says she didn’t mean it when she carped about the city’s “annoying people.”

Jean-Sun Hannah Ahn was crowned Miss Seattle 2012 on Saturday night and since then tweets that the 22-year-old posted criticizing the city’s rain and its residents were unearthed by a local reporter, sparking outcry online.

In December Ahn tweeted: “Ew, I’m seriously hating Seattle right now.” She went on: “Take me back to az! Ugh can’t stand cold rainy Seattle and the annoying people.”

Ahn apologized for the tweets and explained to the local radio station that she had just moved from Phoenix back to Seattle and was still acclimating to the weather.

“I think I was just kind of in that down mode and it was a period…it was a culture shock to be back in Seattle,” Ahn, a Seattle native, told KIRO-FM.

“I apologize for the negative connotations towards the city of Seattle and its people or any other postings when I wasn’t in a positive place. Those tweets by no means reflect my actual opinions or views, I was simply having ‘one of those days’ and sincerely apologize to anyone who took those statements offensively.”

Ahn, also a former Miss Phoenix, posted the controversial tweets from her old account @MissPhoenix 2010 on Dec. 10, 2011. Since her win, she has taken down the tweets and changed her account to @MissSeattle2012.

Miss Seattle is far from the first who has gotten in hot water for venting about her lives on Twitter. But Ahn, who will compete in the Miss Washington pageant this summer, has learned a valuable lesson of the Twittersphere.

“I will vent to someone that I will call my friends or text them if I’m feeling down or want to complain about something,” she said.

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Engineer Exaggerates About Streetcar Project; Sued

(Original story at the New York Times here.)

And we thought the First Amendment protected our right to free speech. Looks like we can add “lying in political campaigns in Ohio” to the list of exceptions to the right of freedom of speech.

Was That Twitter Blast False, or Just Honest Hyperbole?

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: March 5, 2012

WASHINGTON — Mark W. Miller did not think Cincinnati should be spending money on a streetcar project, and he said so on Twitter. He urged his hundreds of followers to vote against the project, which was on the local ballot last November.

Here was a typical Twitter message: “15% of Cincinnati’s Fire Dept browned out today to help pay for a streetcar boondoggle. If you think it’s a waste of money, VOTE YES on 48.”

Mr. Miller, 46, a mechanical engineer, said he expected a debate. What he got instead was a legal action from supporters of the streetcar project under an Ohio law that forbids false statements in political campaigns.

In the end, Mr. Miller’s effort did not come to much: voters rejected the effort to stop the project, and the election commission dismissed the complaint against him. But he said he had learned a bitter lesson.

“I’ve got to second-guess myself every time I sit down in front of a computer,” he said. “Maybe I should moderate my stance, so I don’t get involved in an expensive action.”

Last month, at a Supreme Court argument over a federal law that makes it a crime to lie about military honors, Justice Elena Kagan asked about laws like the one that had ensnared Mr. Miller. “There are more of them than I thought that there would be,” she said, though she did not say which ones she had in mind.

It turns out there are at least 17 states that forbid some kinds of false campaign speech, according to a pending Supreme Court petition in a case involving a Minnesota law. The lower courts are split about whether such laws are constitutional.

At the argument last month, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who was defending the federal law banning lies about medals, said the broader state laws are harder to square with the First Amendment because they “are going to pose a particular risk of chill.”

Mr. Miller said he feels the same way. His group, the Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes, or Coast, sued the Ohio Election Commission, which hears complaints under the Ohio law, in federal court in November. The lawsuit seeks to have the law declared unconstitutional. “The very existence of this entity is chilling to free speech,” Mr. Miller said of the commission.

In court, the commission, represented by the office of Ohio’s attorney general, Michael DeWine, asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit on procedural grounds.

But Mr. DeWine, a Republican and a former United States senator, filed his own brief, one that was at odds with that of his office. He acknowledged a duty to defend his state’s laws, and he said he had fulfilled that duty by instructing lawyers on his staff to represent the commission. But he said he himself could not stay silent.

“What really was the final straw for me,” he said in an interview, “is looking at what can happen with social media, with private citizens who all they want to do it express their point of view. It’s a town hall. It’s a public square, really.”

According to Mr. DeWine’s brief, the election commission has found violations of the state’s false-statements law more than 110 times since 2001. Such a finding is typically the end of the matter, but prosecutions are possible. “In a worst-case scenario,” Mr. DeWine said, “there is a six-month jail sentence.”

“In my opinion,” he added, “the law as it is applied and as it is written is blatantly unconstitutional.”

The election commission’s brief relegated the First Amendment to a footnote that cited decisions upholding the Ohio law. In 1991, for instance, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said that “false speech, even political speech, does not merit constitutional protection if the speaker knows of the falsehood or recklessly disregards the truth.”

In 2007, by contrast, the Washington Supreme Court struck down a similar state law.

“The notion that the government, rather than the people, may be the final arbiter of truth in political debate is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment,” Justice James M. Johnson wrote.

The case about Mr. Miller’s Twitter messages is before Judge Michael R. Barrett of Federal District Court in Cincinnati, and he is expected to decide shortly whether the lawsuit can proceed.

Is it possible that some of Mr. Miller’s messages were false in drawing a connection between spending on streetcars and Fire Department “brown outs”? The complaint filed with the election commission said that streetcars and firefighters were covered by discrete sources of financing. Perhaps an accountant could sort it out.

Or perhaps the better question is who should decide truth or falsity in a democracy.

In 2009, at the second argument in the Citizens United case, Elena Kagan, who was then solicitor general, assured the justices that the government would not try to ban books about political candidates because the Federal Election Commission had never tried to do so.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. bristled when he heard that. “We don’t put our First Amendment rights in the hands of F.E.C. bureaucrats,” he said.

Mr. Miller said he had thought about who should decide which side is right in a political campaign.

“That’s the voters’ job,” he said.

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Homeland Security Monitors Policy Debates on Social Media!

(Original story at the New York Times here.)

For those of you who are worried about Big Brother spying on you, your worst fears have unfortunately come true!

Homeland Analysts Told to Monitor Policy Debates in Social Media

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: February 22, 2012

WASHINGTON — Analysts for a Department of Homeland Securityprogram that monitors social networks like Twitter and Facebook have been instructed to produce reports on policy debates related to the department, a newly disclosed manual shows.

The manual, a 2011 reference guide for analysts working with the department’s Media Monitoring Capability program, raises questions about recent claims by Homeland Security officials who portrayed the program as limited to gathering information that would help gain operational awareness about attacks, disasters or other emerging problems.

Last month, a previous disclosure of documents related to the program showed that in 2009, when it was being designed, officials contemplated having reports produced about “public reaction to major governmental proposals with homeland security implications.”

But the department said it never put that category into practice when the program began in 2010. Officials repeated that portrayal in testimony last week before an oversight hearing by a House Homeland Security subcommittee.

“I am not aware of any information we have gathered on government proposals,” testified Richard Chavez, the director of the office that oversees the National Operations Center, which runs the program.

Still, the 2011 manual, which was disclosed this week as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, lists a series of categories that constitute an “item of interest” warranting a report. One category is discussion on social media networks of “policy directives, debates and implementations related to DHS.”

It is not clear whether the department has produced such reports. Matthew Chandler, a department spokesman, said Wednesday that in practice the program had been limited to “social media monitoring for situational awareness only.”

He also said the department would review the reference guide and related materials to make sure they “clearly and accurately convey the parameters and intention of the program.”

Ginger McCall of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group that filed the lawsuit and obtained the document, argued that the manual shows that the monitoring may have gone beyond its limited portrayal by department officials.

“The D.H.S. continues to monitor the Internet for criticism of the government,” she said. “This suspicionless, overbroad monitoring quells legitimate First Amendment activity and exceeds the agency’s legal authority.”

A federal statute cited by officials last week as the legal basis for the program gives the National Operations Center the authority “to provide situational awareness” for officials “in the event of a natural disaster, act of terrorism or other man-made disaster” and to “ensure that critical terrorism and disaster-related information reaches government decision makers.”

Officials have stressed that the program does not collect personally identifying information, like the names or Twitter account handles of the people making comments, and that it does not monitor, review or collect First Amendment-protected speech.

Still, the program also monitors articles and broadcasts by traditional media outlets. The 2011 manual says that analysts, in addition to flagging information related to matters like terrorism and natural disasters, should also identify “media reports that reflect adversely on D.H.S. and response activities” and collect “both positive and negative reports” on department components as well organizations outside of the department.

The manual includes keywords that analysts should search for. A list of agencies in the keyword section includes not only those in the department dealing with matters likeimmigration and emergency management, but also the Central Intelligence Agency, several law enforcement agencies in the Justice Department, the Red Cross and the United Nations.

At the hearing last week, lawmakers of both parties said it made sense for the department to use the Internet to gather information about emerging events, but they voiced concerns that if it went further than that, the program might chill people’s freedom of speech and willingness to express dissent online.

“Other private individuals reading your Facebook status updates is different than the Department of Homeland Security reading them, analyzing them and possibly disseminating and collecting them for future purposes,” said the chairman of the subcommittee, Representative Patrick Meehan of Pennsylvania.

Mary Ellen Callahan, the department’s chief privacy director, testified that the program was interested only in events within the department’s mission — like disasters, attacks or continuing operational problems. As an example, she cited a situation in which people post to Twitter about an unusually long line at a particular airport checkpoint.

She also played down the use of keyword searches the program uses for articles and postings on social networks, portraying them as simply related to disasters — “you know, flood, tornado and things like that.”

The 2011 manual contains a fuller list. Many keywords are closely related to various disasters. But a handful are potentially more sweeping, like China, cops, hacking, illegal immigrants, Iran, Iraq, marijuana, organized crime, police, pork and radicals.

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