Original link to city site

Report on investigation into City of Bozeman hiring practices

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There was a lot of static on the line, so to speak, but if you stuck with it for a few minutes, a reader probably could have got some good up-to-the-minute news about the explosion — something that the local media (apart from the radio stations) could not provide. Neither the local newspaper nor the local television stations broke their regular publishing schedules for the explosion. Had there been no radio or Twitter, no one would have known what was going on down there.

I’ve written about this before, but a new article published in Nieman Reports has brought up the subject again. Courtney Lowery, a wrtier at the online-only operation NewWest.net wrote the article from Nieman and graciously quoted my blog. (I had a nice phone interview with her a few months ago, but that didn’t make it into the article. An mp3 of that interview is attached to this post.)

In her article, Lowery tells us that New West, even as an online-only outlet, has stumbled in learning how to use social networks as part of its journalism. The day of the explosion, she says, taught them a lot about how powerful social media was and how it could interact with mainstream media. She hits the nail on the head when she says that the real power of social media “is found in its ability to meaningful conversation with users.”

Lowery goes on to point out something that became a concern for me after the initial excitement of the explosion had died down and after I’d had some time to reflect:

The Bozeman explosion served as a perfect example of how social media and mass media can lean on each other to create a new form of journalism. Throughout the coverage, I observed a fascinating symbiotic relationship forming. On-site observers used Twitter to cover the event in a way that we, as a small newsroom, could not. On the other hand, only a handful of people, especially in remote Montana, even knew at the time what Twitter was. So as good as the coverage was on Twitter, for the average Montanan, it was inaccessible until news organizations started using the information and pushing it to the broader public.

As far as cities in Montana go, Bozeman is one of the most wired. People have smart phones and wi-fi access is nearly ubiquitous. Yet the circle of people tweeting from Bozeman was relatively small. A few technorati handled it all, and we must remember that this was back before Oprah decided to make Twitter a household name. Few people had even heard of the service, so most of those tweets went out into the ether. A lot of potential news value bled off into cyberspace.

Another thing worth noting is that most of the tweeting was done by amateurs or enthusiasts, not by professional reporters. Granted, there aren’t a heck of a lot of reporters in a city the size of Bozeman, and most of them were busy on the ground, covering the explosion the old fashioned way. Still, there was only a narrow connection between all the work that was going on on Twitter and the work that the mainstreamers were doing. At the end of the day, the mainstream media caught up, but I can’t help wondering how much more useful Twitter could have been if there had been more interaction with the pros.

So what’s the lesson? The lesson is that social media is a powerful yet not-fully-understood tool. Many of the local media outlets have adopted it in some form or another and with varying degrees of conviction. I’ve just been hired to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle to facilitate just that kind of community building at the newspaper.

So the future of social networking news looks bright, at least as part of the journalism process. It will be a few years yet before the Web has penetrated so deeply into the lives of Montanans that social network reporting makes much of a difference to the common reader.

Interview with Courtney Lowery from New West

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The Bozeman Police Department is saying that Anderson was not asked to quit. Police Chief Mark Tymrak said at a press conference Thursday that it was “a decision on Mr. Anderson’s part.”

Tymrak went on:

It’s a real unfortunate ending to a once-promising career... I also think his actions of resigning of his own volition speak volumes about the type of person he is. He didn’t just do it for himself. He did it for the men and women of the Bozeman Police Department and for the city as a whole.

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City Manager Chris Kukulski announced the resignation at the city’s weekly press conference. He said Anderson resigned because he felt leaving was in the best interest of the city and the police department. This comes after Anderson publicly apologized in mid-August.

In an earlier meeting with reporters, police officials said the department is working on a policy to govern officers and their social networking profiles.

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That morning, local Twitter users went crazy online, sharing minute-by-minute updates from downtown and everywhere else. The hashtag I created a few minutes after the blast — #bozexplod — became a trending topic on Twitter for a good portion of the day.

A lot of local entrepreneurs and Web hipsters tried to make something of the nascent online “community” that formed that day, and I even wrote a couple of blog posts extolling the virtues of Twitter as a source of news in a crisis.

In the months since, the explosion site has been cleaned up and readied for new construction, and the Twitter fervor in Bozeman has died down somewhat — replaced by an out-and-out fiasco involving the city’s social networking screening of job applicants.

The online community that so many wanted to make so much of back in March has proven fleeting. It was a quirk of time and space that made Twitter work so well that day. As it turned out, Twitter wasn’t as big a deal to Bozeman as we all thought while the fires were still burning.

(Oh, and my fascination with Twitter has waned considerably since. That’s something I should probably write more about at some point.)

The point of mentioning all this is because there’s been some news about the explosion. Northwestern Energy has announced the results of an internal investigation into the explosion. The company’s investigators have determined that the company was not negligent — their evidence suggests that “external forces” caused the gas leak that led to the explosion.

This is not the end of it. Lots of other agencies are still investigating on their own, and many insurance claims are still outstanding, much to the ire of downtown business owners affected by the explosion.

At any rate, I thought the news merited a brief look back at March and the Twitter orgy.

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Deputy Police Chief Marty Kent:

“We recognize how fragile and important the public trust is ... We had an officer who made a poor decision. I hope the public will not paint the entire agency with the same brush as they have this officer.”

Robert Vanuka, vice president of the Bozeman Police Protective Association:

“This incident has brought discredit and embarrassment to all employees of the Bozeman Police Protective Association, the Bozeman Police Department as well as the City of Bozeman ... The actions of just one officer can weaken public confidence and cast suspicion upon our police department as a whole ... We do not condone this officer’s behavior and it is not representative of” the department.

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The lawsuit names several police officer defendants, including Cody Anderson, the officer White says came into his home without knocking or identifying himself. (Audio of White’s initial interview with police, ~7 min.)

Police ended up arresting White for obstructing and resisting arrest. White’s lawsuit claims that police violated his civil and constitutional rights, were negligent, wrongfully arrested him and caused him emotional distress. Listen to the audio and read the Chronicle story for the details.

The facts of the arrest aside, there’s another kink in the story. The officer, Anderson, has a Facebook profile. On the profile, Anderson apparently posted several paragraphs related to his job as a police officer that complained about “stupid” people and boasted that Anderson liked “messing with people.”

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle printed two paragraphs from Anderson’s profile, which the paper got from White’s lawsuit.

“I think there should be a law saying police can take people to jail for being stupid. Ask a cop a question like, ‘Don’t you have anything better to do?’ and you get a free ride in a cop car. If I had something better to do, I would be off doing that, and not messing with you. Speaking of messing with people ... I like messing with people. Just being in a patrol car looking at people while parked at a red light is fun. Make eye contact, squint your eyes like you know what they just did and watch them squirm and avoid all further eye contact. It makes my day fun.

“I’m always amazed at what people will tell a police officer. I think people assume we are like priests and it is all in confidence. It’s not. We go back to the office and talk about everything we saw and heard. Then we laugh at people. Usually it is all on audio as well so we listen to stupid things over and over. If we are lucky, it happened in front of a patrol car with its camera on. Then we get to watch it over and over.”

On Monday, Anderson told the Chronicle that “anybody who knows me knows it was a joke” and that “taken out of context, it looks bad.” It certainly does, especially when you’re being sued for your behavior on the job.

My favorite part is that Anderson told the Chronicle that he thought his Facebook profile was only visible to his friends and that “his comments were a joke intended only for them.”

The department told the newspaper that Anderson has been reprimanded and that his postings do not reflect the way the department as a whole feels about the public.

I tried to find Anderson’s page. A search for “Cody Anderson” found three matches in the Bozeman network. Two of the matches had protected their profiles, but their friends lists were still viewable. One of the profiles, which had a profile photo showing a slim, bald man in a suit, had a friends list that contained names I know to be connected to the Bozeman Police Department. This is probably our guy.

Seems like he learned how to make his profile private after all — though I can’t rule out the possibility that it’s been private this whole time and that White or his lawyers found some way around that. I can’t say for sure.

What I can say is this: It doesn’t matter how White’s lawyers got a hold of the paragraphs from Anderson’s profile. They have them, and now they are even more public than they were before. Anderson was as stupid as the people he complains about in the rant if he thought that posting anything to the Web was completely protected or completely private.

His posts show a lack of professional judgement, especially since he’s a peace officer. If he wants to complain about his job, he should not do it online — even on a closed network like Facebook.

Will the Facebook pages help White win his lawsuit? Who knows. But it sure doesn’t make Anderson look good. That’s for sure.

I’m left with a couple questions at the end: Who thought to go searching for Anderson’s Facebook profile? Was it White, who looked up the officer after the fact? Was it his lawyers digging for dirt? Is checking Facebook going to be a common part of filing lawsuits from now on?

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“While an employer can (and likely should during the course of a background check) view an applicant’s public profile on online sites, demanding access to information that applicant has set to private — to be viewed only by selected friends and family — crosses the line,” the statement said.

Staff members from the ACLU of Montana were interviewed by the Bozeman Daily Chronicle and the Associated Press in the days after the story first broke in mid-June. Both of those interviews are referenced in my media coverage summary post.

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If you’re planning to apply for a job with the city of Bozeman, Mont., prepare to clean up your profiles before you sign that application. As part of Bozeman’s background-checking protocol, the city requires applicants to turn over the user names and passwords for all of their social networking sites. Those not willing to comply need not apply. Could this be a harbinger of things to come for other municipalities and private corporations?

Mind you, the policy was eliminated on June 20, more than a month ago.

The fact that word of this policy is still spreading around the Internet is a testament to the staying power of ideas online — and to the reality that many of those ideas can be out of line with the truth. Still, I suppose this is an indication that, for some people at least, Bozeman has become a symbol of new media policy gone awry. If people can learn from that, I guess it’s a good thing — not good for the city’s reputation, but good in general.

I should note one more thing about the Pasadena article. I don’t know whether this was written by a real reporter at the paper or whether the paper is even a “newspaper,” with reporters, editors, etc. At the bottom of the article, the reporter is identified as the founder of a debt-free living Web site. Maybe she’s a regular contributor to the paper; maybe this article was borrowed from an online repository of free content. I don’t know.

Can anyone familiar with the paper clarify?

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Near the end of the talk, though, Sullivan said a few interesting things. Notably, he said that as angry e-mails began to flood the city’s inboxes, he learned a powerful lesson about the way the modern Internet works.

“It was fast,” he said. “What it taught me, certainly, is that the Internet is an incredible thing. If people all over the world can understand what’s going on in Bozeman within an hour, minutes, they were reading it. It’s an incredibly powerful ting. I kind of knew that before, but not in the way I know it now.”

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