How Reddit fits into Conde’s future wasn’t obvious when the deal was done in 2006 and it’s less so now, what with Reddit asking for money from its community. It’s sad to see a site with such a strong community reduced to groveling for more funds to hire enough engineers to basically keep the site up and add some features. There are lessons here for those who still look at big traffic figures — and with 280 million views a month, Reddit pulls a ton — and assume that audience alone will prop up a business.

Here are a few things a ton of traffic won’t fix:

1. No revenue. Ok, This is a bit chicken-and eggy. In most cases, audience is the first step towards making a content outfit some money, but without any scratch a mature site like Reddit isn’t going to be a favorite of corporate overlords. That’s essentially Reddit’s explanation of what’s going on and it seems straightforward. As the Ning saga recently demonstrated, the days of tossing around big numbers of uniqiue visitors or page views as though they themselves indicated the health of a business have come and gone. Less simple is who to blame or where to go from here.

2. No clear path to real revenue. I’m not a regular Reddit user and I may be missing something, but it seems that the main way the site makes money is a little ad unit tucked into the right rail. This morning, it featured a house ad soliciting advertising. That’s unacceptable for an operation with the consumer traction Reddit has — even just from the advertising perspective. As a heavily-trafficked platform whose main laborers are its readers, Reddit should scale. Helping it do so, you would think, should have been job number-one for Conde.

3. Non-strategic owners that don’t get your business. As mentioned, Conde does print and Conde does luxury. It has done digital rather grudgingly. Some of its magazines’ digital hubs have gotten big, but it was hard even back in 2006 to imagine how Reddit would be profitably integrated into the portfolio, given what it does.

4. Non-strategic owners ill-suited for a bad economic times. The recession pounded Conde Nast, leading it to close Portfolio before it had a chance to get off the ground and Gourmet (which it’s now reviving in iPad form). Estimates like Newsweek’s put 2009 ad decline as high as $1 billion. Conde probably just doesn’t have the money to pump into Reddit.

5. Big corporate organizational structure. How a newly-acquired company fits into portfolio like Conde Nast’s isn’t going to be determined by sheer audience size. Revenue and profitability — and the kind of audience — will determine that. Reddit, as important as it may be in certain corners of the online world, is a small fish at a company the size of Conde and every additional resource added will come only with the promise of return.

So why am I not excited about “The Social Network,” the forthcoming fil-um about the shady-to-the-max early days of the social network?

Probably because the most recent trailer, the second so far, makes it looks like the movie will be an uber-serious, talky-to-a-fault snoozefest investigation into whether Mark Zuckerberg snatched the idea for Facebook from its original founders. I’m envsioning “Zodiac,” another Fincher effort, also uber-serious and talky but not necessarily too long, adapted for a maybe-maybe not-maybe-ok probably theft of intellectual property.

The trailer, while nicely produced, feels off tonally.

This is about some lol-ling Harvard geek engaging in dormroom corporate espionage. When you think about it, an observant R.A. might have been able to keep Facebook’s origins on the straight and narrow. I’m not playing down the severity of IP crimes. Billions were at stake, even if the post-adolescent players didn’t know it at the time. But I’m not sure the subject matter warrants the somberness. The events chronicled in “Zodiac” were slightly more serious. Facebook? Those people had their faces blown off.

I’m not sure what kind of movie I’d make about Facebook, but I think I’d go the black comedy route and add some fantasy elements. Think “Dr. Strangelove” meets “Tron,” the 1980s Disney sci-fi movie in which crag-free Jeff Bridges was sucked into a video game. Why Tron? I think its visual sensibility would help in explaining the social graph.

Another idea: Have you seen “Pirates of Silicon Valley”? I never really thought I’d find myself recommending a Noah Wylie-Anthony Michael Hall vehicle that aired on TNT, but I think it dulls down the edges of the Bill Gates-Steve Jobs rivalry without losing the sense of conflict. It’s a kitschy and fun movie that isn’t over-serious. Which is where I think a movie about Facebook should be.

“In the old GM, we said you need to call us or you need to write us a letter. That’s not treating them how they want to be treated. In the new GM, we’re going to be where our customers want us to be.”

Too bad that doesn’t extend to what customers want to call your most famous products.

GM’s decision to strip the ever so popular nickname “Chevy” from its communications in favor of the proper “Chevrolet” is one of the most boneheaded corporate moves not committed by BP I’ve seen in a while. In breaking the news today, The New York Times does a great job of teasing out all the ways in which this is idiotic–not that the matter needs too much teasing. The Times got a memo from Alan Batey, VP for Chevrolet sales and service and Jim Campbell, VP of marketing:

“We’d ask that whether you’re talking to a dealer, reviewing dealer advertising, or speaking with friends and family, that you communicate our brand as Chevrolet moving forward When you look at the most recognized brands throughout the world, such as Coke or Apple for instance, one of the things they all focus on is the consistency of their branding.”

Duly noted in the times piece is that Coke is short for Coca-Cola and that Apple products like the iPod or iPad routinely stand in for the corporate brand. That said, it’s not necessary to delve into why this is a dumb move. It is worth looking at what this says about the chasm between the use of social media as a marketing practice and the creation of a culture that is built on truly listening to consumers.

Right now, it seems every company has a social media team that spends all their time Tweeting and Facebooking and blogging. But far too many of those companies are still making top-down decisions that don’t take into consumer preference. They see social media channels in much the same way they see traditional ones: as one-way delivery mechanism for corporate messaging. They miss the fact that these platforms are readymade listening posts where they can learn from consumers.

The fact that we’re still having this conversation is astounding. Perplexing. All the more so in Chevy’s case, which is so exaggerated and quixotic in trying to undo a deep-seated consumer habit for no reason other than some antiquated scrap of marketing research. It’s sure to stand as the New Coke for social media.

How this sort of decision-making unfurled is unclear. The Times piece links it to Chevy’s– that’s right, CHEVY’S — recent change out of its ad agency. Its new shop, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, is one of the more enlightened around and it’s difficult to believe its folks recommended this course of action. If they did, it suggests that ad agencies are still struggling with that the whole listening thing and are perhaps relying too much on old-line branding philosophies that are overly concerned with fallacious notions like brand consistency.

It also suggests some organizational shortcomings at GM — which I know is a shocking suggestion. GM’s corporate ethos should either get in line with its marketing approach, or it should do away with all the big talk about humanizing the company. What, for example, must Chris Barger, GM’s head of social media be thinking right now? And what does a social media team exist for if it can’t put the breaks on culture-blind, deaf and dumb moves like these? Let’s turn to Twitter, where so far he’s had a couple comments on the matter.

Asked “Chevrolet or Chevy?” his reply was simple.

“Chevrolet. :-)”

Then a bit later:

“@ThoroughbredFRD @annalisabluhm You have my permission to keep calling it #Chevy. ;-)”

I’m sure a little whiskey and rye sounds good right about now.

Which is why we need to get all Betty White on BP’s ass.

If the Facebook-supported effort to get the 88-year-old Golden Girls star a hosting gig on Saturday Night Live can collect more than half a million fans, surely the devastation of a large chunk of the Gulf of Mexico can spark more cultural outrage. (Let’s not even get into the whole @shitmydadsays sitcom for CBS.) As rallying points go, the best hope at this point might just be @BPGlobalPR, the satirical Twitter feed that over the last couple weeks started bouncing around in the social-media echo chamber before the mainstream media began to latch on. It’s like the DB Cooper of brand hijacks, so far accumulating more than 130,000 followers and creating a bit of a legend around the anonymous feed.

Here’s a sample:

And another:

These tweets have been good enough—and the situation they refer to absurd enough—to have fooled some readers into thinking the tweets were coming from actual BP officials. We still don’t know much about its author, other than that he hates BP, PR and, especially, BP PR, that he goes by the name Leroy Stick, and that he knows a bit about how to, uh, stick the knife into a corporation and twist it—over and over again. In addition to a sharp pen, he also has some editorial smarts, as he makes clear in this interview with Advertising Age: “[T]his has been a collaborative effort. I have a group of hilarious writers pitching me hundreds of jokes a week. I still write a lot of them, but I’m also an editor in chief/gatekeeper.”

So here’s what should happen: SNL should come out of its summer snooze for a Very Special Episode penned—or at least overseen—by Mr. Stick. I don’t pretend to know what the exact form of the show should be, but I do have some thoughts: It should have an improv-y feel and air during prime time. And perhaps there should be a telethon component with donations going to the cleanup.

This would obviously be a win-win-win.

First, it would raise awareness, help to gin up a bit of anger, and raise some funds.

Second, it would give Leroy Stick some hard-earned recognition and expose humor to the still large swatch of the media-consuming populace that doesn’t use Twitter.

Finally, it would give SNL some much-needed juice. It’s no secret the show could use some fresh thinking and writing. And the wisdom of the crowds has been good to SNL so far: The Betty White episode gave the show its best ratings in nearly two years. In addition to giving it a chance to be funny, a Stick script would make it hyper-relevant in a year in which there is no presidential election. And I can’t remember the last time that happened.

One of my key concerns about the full RSS feed is that it is used by web scrapers to steal our content, which not only means they derive entirely unjustified benefit from our editors’ efforts but also leads to duplicate content that can hurt SEO efforts. On this front, the anecdotal evidence suggests that truncating the feed helped. In the earlier months of this year we had identified anywhere from 2-6 scrapers stealing all our content, but during May when we were truncating the feed we found no new examples. One of the perpetrators we’d already identified continued scraping the content, but was now getting just the abbreviated stories.

Of course the most common complaint from publishers about full RSS feeds is that subscribers get all the content in their readers, don’t click through to the site, and therefore aren’t monetized in any meaningful way. In the case of ATL, truncating the feed definitely increased the number of people clicking through to the site. Visits from our full feed were about 4% of our total traffic before we truncated it, but jumped to about 7% of total traffic in the month of the truncation trial. In our case this translated to something in the region of an additional 100,000 impressions, which isn’t going to make us rich, but would be worth more dollars and cents than we could make running ads in the RSS feed.

So those are the positives from our point of view — less scraping and an uptick in traffic to the site from the feed.

There were negatives too, however. Importantly just over 100 people took the time to complain to us about the truncated feed. While publishing isn’t a business where you can please all of the people all of the time, or let a few nasty notes get to you, a hundred complaints for a b2b site is not to be taken lightly, especially when you consider that some of those people are likely among our most loyal and influential consumers. We lost RSS followers too, with about 4% unsubscribing in the month following truncation. There was also a reduction in referral traffic from other sites and social media last month. This could be a coincidence — perhaps there was simply less link- or share-worthy content in May — but it could also be a result of not getting all our content in the hands of some of the most loyal followers.

In the end, however, the chief reason we’ll now restore the full feed for ATL, is that the whole idea of trying to force people into certain media consumption habits seems futile in an era when technology has enabled people to consume whatever they want, however they want it. If pushing a few thousand more visits to ATL every week with a truncated feed is the best idea we’ve got for monetizing our content then we’re probably pretty screwed anyway, so we’ll likely be better served focusing our energies on coming up with more compelling content and platforms (newsletters, mobile apps) and so on, than in further aggravating RSS subscribers.

Now for that humble pie. I don’t regret testing the truncated feed. The ability to test and quickly change digital content platforms is one of the key things that make them so much better than the distribution methods that came before. But I really should have given more advanced notice to the ATL community that we planned to make this change. It’s not that it would’ve changed the outcome since the biggest fans of the full feed would still have told me I was an idiot. But it would’ve been the polite thing to do, rather than foisting it on them and putting up a post explaining the move a couple of hours later. For that, I sincerely apologize — you deserved more consideration. I appreciate the patience of the 96% of you who stuck with the feed for the month, and I hope you are pleased to see the full feed return.

Weeks of getting pounded in the media over your company’s approach to privacy had amounted to nothing more a particularly pesky meme that, finally, seems to have run out of steam. Quit Facebook Day came and went, with just over 34,000 announcing their decisions to sign off of the social network. That represents .0000755556 of Facebook’s total user base of 450 million. Surely many more have deactivated their accounts recently, albeit without any public declaration, and it’s a bit arbitrary to call the game for Facebook just because a gimmicky event didn’t result in a user hemorrhage of MySpaceian proportions. But it’s pretty certain that Zuckerberg and company, despite some dubious decision-making and awful PR, have faced down their biggest challenge and won.

If you’re a online marketer or agency or publisher, it should be equally obvious from all this hubbub that privacy is not a groundswell issue, at least not in regard to digital media. Betty White on Saturday Night Live. Bieber. Oil Spills. Those are all phenomena that rile people up. Privacy, so abstract and malleable, isn’t and, I think, it’s an issue that’s not as important to people as many would believe. As a result, the companies we all rely on aren’t held to as high a standard as maybe they should be — and hence for years have abused the power that comes from having so much of our information. Basically, you’re not a member if the Fortune 500 if you haven’t loosed a significant number of credit card or social security numbers into the world.

But that doesn’t mean privacy isn’t an issue.

The conclusion of the Facebook saga should be both a source of solace and a brisk reminder of the responsibility digital media and marketing complex has to its consumers. Along with the flaccid regulatory environment around privacy issues, the arc of story tells me that the market for customer data and preference will be a self-regulating, self-policing one, not unlike the financial markets in recent years–though, hopefully with better results. This is just reinforced by the relative softness of a proposed bill by Rep. Rick Boucher that would mandate that ad networks notify consumers that they’re being targeted and allow them to opt out. Much to the dismay of privacy watchdogs, there’s little evidence of any appetite in Congress to really crack down on ad targeting, as Europe has done.

To be sure, there will be plenty of room for commercial platforms that make ads better and more effective and customer acquisition and e-commerce more efficient. Basic targeting now is still pretty miserable, as the ad slop that comes across my Facebook page constantly reminds me. I’m happy to have better commercial options that are relevant to my profile, and I think others would agree. Let’s face it, you’re gonna get an ad one way or the other, why not make it a relevant one? But there will also be “innovations” — if I may use Wall Street’s shading on the term — that go too far simply because they can. To some degree, it will be on the online media business to, in contrast to their financial cousins, use good judgment and not contribute to their own demise.

A good place to start is with disclosure and consumer control, including easy opt-out, as the Boucher draft proposal mandates. There’s no reason consumers shouldn’t have both clear information about targeting techniques and where information is being shared and the ability to elude them. This may sound pie-in-the-sky, but it’s what Facebook learned this month, only after a long and presumably painful backlash. There’s no reason to repeat its mistakes.

What follows is an imaginary conversation based on actual quotes from a video account and the op-ed.

Mark Zuckerberg: Six years ago, we built Facebook around a few simple ideas.

Carol Bartz: There’s no single strategy at Yahoo.

Zuckerberg: People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world. These are still our core principles today.

Bartz: Yahoo is a company that is very, very strong in content. It’s moving towards the web of one…. People come to check the things they like. You can just get it together… Yahoo is one site people always stop at.

Zuckerberg: Facebook has been growing quickly. It has become a community of more than 400 million people in just a few years.

Bartz: If that’s all you’ve got, you better quit now.

Zuckerberg: The challenge is how a network like ours facilitates sharing and innovation, offers control and choice, and makes this experience easy for everyone.

Bartz: It’s a great trick to have. I’d like that trick too, along with the social graph.

Zuckerberg: It’s a challenge to keep that many people satisfied over time, so we move quickly to serve that community with new ways to connect with the social Web and each other. Sometimes we move too fast — and after listening to recent concerns, we’re responding.

Bartz: You guys are bad.

Zuckerberg: The challenge is how a network like ours facilitates sharing and innovation, offers control and choice, and makes this experience easy for everyone. These are issues we think about all the time. Whenever we make a change, we try to apply the lessons we’ve learned along the way. The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information.

Bartz: I was trying to decide if I should fly to Europe with the volcano cloud. I checked in with the Yahoo front page and there was an AP report that was 17 hours old. What the hell am I going to do with 17-hour-old volcano information? I need real-time Twitter-like feeds.

Zuckerberg: Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.

Bartz: Is that wrong?

Zuckerberg: We have heard the feedback.

Bartz: We put up commenting over the last few months. We have a million comments a day now. We had 85,000 comments on day one at Yahoo News.

Zuckerberg: There needs to be a simpler way to control your information. In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use. We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services. We are working hard to make these changes available as soon as possible. We hope you’ll be pleased with the result of our work and, as always, we’ll be eager to get your feedback.

Bartz: By the way, I’ve never had a bong in my life if that means anything to you.

Zuckerberg: We have also heard that some people don’t understand how their personal information is used and worry that it is shared in ways they don’t want.

Bartz: Is that appropriate?

Zuckerberg: I’d like to clear that up now. Many people choose to make some of their information visible to everyone so people they know can find them on Facebook. We already offer controls to limit the visibility of that information and we intend to make them even stronger.

Bartz: We have 32,000 variations on our front page module. We serve a million of those a day. It’s all customized. Our click-through rate went up twice since we started customizing this.

Zuckerberg: Here are the principles under which Facebook operates: You have control over how your information is shared.

Bartz: I don’t know if anybody owns anything anymore… I would love to own it. Shit. Why not?

Zuckerberg: We do not share your personal information with people or services you don’t want.

Bartz: We’re on 37 million of the 82 million mobile devices in the US. We have half the US market. People don’t think that’s true, but it is.

Zuckerberg: We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.

Bartz: We serve 10 billion ads a day, keeping up our whole advertising business is a huge technical effort.

Zuckerberg: We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.

Bartz: Because you’re odd.

Zuckerberg: We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.

Bartz: I’d love to be Queen Poobah of the world — but I’m not.

Zuckerberg: Facebook has evolved from a simple dorm-room project to a global social network connecting millions of people.

Bartz: I’ve been at this company 16 months. I’m supposed to have an iPad and iPod. It probably takes a long time to convince yourself what to do. I don’t want to hear any crap about something magical the fine people of Yahoo are supposed to do in this time. So fuck off.

Zuckerberg: We will keep building, we will keep listening and we will continue to have a dialogue with everyone who cares enough about Facebook to share their ideas.

Bartz: We are way over. End on a high.

Zuckerberg: And we will keep focused on achieving our mission of giving people the power to share and making the world more open and connected.

Bartz: Who did that laugh?

Since Facebook rolled out yet another round of changes to its privacy settings earlier this year, the platform has been the subject of fierce criticism from an especially noisy core of early tech adopters. They’ve been hammering at Facebook’s arrogance on their blogs and in interviews and some internet celebrities, like Google’s Matt Cutts and Engadget founder Peter Rojas, have left the platform altogether. Quitting has become a sort of meme in and of itself, aided by the same buzz factor that has made Facebook a global hit in the first place.

It was good PR on the part of Facebook’s antagonists to mark the calendar, but, for all the attention May 31 has received, I’m pretty certain the day will come and go without much impact to a company that, with more than 400 million users, has become one of the most important websites in the world. All anecdotal research tells me that Facebook simply has too much scale and too much utility to be turned into some digital ghost town overnight. Sometime in the past year or two, it suddenly started to feel as though everyone was there — or at least enough people from all the major stages of one’s life — were using the network, ensuring its use as a a souped-up, constantly updating personal directory, if nothing else.

This weekend, a fifty-something aunt of mine who created a Facebook account this year told me a story of connecting with a close friend she lost contact with eight years ago. The talk with my aunt, who is unapologetic about using it — heavily — despite her age, was one of four conversations over the weekend about Facebook. Not one had anything to do with privacy or with quitting.

It’s a different situation when you talk to people who are heavily invested in social media. More than 12,000 people responded to a poll on the site Mashable, basically an enthusiast site for social media. 28% said they plan to quit, while 44% are staying. These people, of course, are more plugged into things like online privacy issues and it’s likely quitting will be a considered move. For some, the decision will impact their personal image and their business. But beyond that crowd, big pockets of Facebook resistance are hard to find. I stumbled across a similar poll on a fan site for Green Day that summed up the reaction to singer Billie Joe Armstrong’s Tweet that dared people to quit the social network. I would have guessed that the folks who hang out on Green Day Authority would be highly likely to follow the lead of Billie Joe, but, alas, only 41% of the respondents said they had deactivated their accounts.

Cultural sensibilities will of course play a role in this. Americans may be joiners at heart, but, I’m pretty sure, Canadians will quit in droves. Some of the sharpest and most effective actions against Facebook have come from our neighbors to the north. In 2009, Ottawa became the first government to put pressure on Facebook to adhere to its national privacy laws. In current affairs, the organizers of Quit Facebook Day are a pair of Toronto-based developers. And an online poll by the Globe and Mail, which presumably is mainly answered by Canadians, indicated strong resistance. Answering the question of whether they planned to quit, 9% said yes, 28% they were thinking about it. Only 9% said they were staying, while 45% said they weren’t members. Despite the media attention Quit Facebook Day has received, only 2,720 have committed to the cause as of this morning.

With those kinds of numbers, it’s unlikely we’ll see much of a dent in Facebook’s numbers. Not only is the backlash not large enough, but there is still no real alternative to Facebook for folks who have become used to having their personal social web sprawling before them just a few keystrokes away. Look at the example of MySpace. One of the key factors in its decline, alongside disastrously messy page layouts, spam and other usability issues, was the existence of a replacement to suck up all its users’ time: Facebook. Right now, Facebook doesn’t have the challenge of a real competitor–or successor. Twitter might have been a good bet, but it’s turned out to be complementary, not competitive. It’s telling that the best hope for a more friendly uber-network at this point is an open-source and “privacy aware” project by a quartet of NYU students with more than $170,000 in grassroots funding from whom the Facebook-hating world has yet to see a line of code.

There have, however, been a few standout pieces of reportage and analysis of late, a few of which we’ve assembled below for your convenience.

Craig Mod on the iPad. Confused as to what impact the iPad, the technological innovation of the year, will have on the printed word? Then you should consult Craig Mod, a book designer/developer/writer/photographer who was inspired by the introduction of the Apple device to write one of the most insightful and useful bits of media theory I’ve seen of late.

Mod identifies a distinction between formless and definite types of content. Formless content includes paperback books and other texts that have the same meaning regardless of the container. As such, they’re just as happy on a Kindle or iPhone as they are on paper. Definite content, on the other hand, derives its meaning from the form in which it’s presented, meaning that it could either be in paper form (say, a photo-heavy book) or on a multimedia device like the iPad. Writes Mod, “Formless content goes digital. Definite content gets divided between the iPad and printing.”

That’s Mod’s single set of rules, a welcome moment of icy-cold clarity in a period of intense chaos and confusion.

Business Insider’s Investigation of Mark Zuckerberg. Way too long and accompanied by way too much back-patting, Nicholas Carlson’s probe of the Zuckerberg’s dodgy behavior during Facebook’s early days is still worth reading for the colorful details about the wunderkind mogul. Some of those deets, especially Zuckerberg’s hacking of the Harvard Crimson, foreshadowed the privacy storm Facebook is now enduring.

Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” Rant Against Apple. For years now, we’ve relied on Stewart to say aloud what mainstream media types are thinking but too afraid to utter. He didn’t let us down in the wake of Gizmodo’s possibly illicit purchase of the next generation of the iPhone. While his remarks were sparked by the criminal investigation into the scoop, the general sentiment could be applied to other aspects of Apple public acts: Its war on Flash, its control of the media, its arrogance about communicating with investors. Said Stewart, “It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one. But now you guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitos.”

Felix Salmon’s “Blogonomics: On Monetizing Readers.” The Reuters financial blogger didn’t get everything right in his war of words with Business Insider’s Henry Blodget over the most sensible model for online journalism. But in a page view-obsessed age of link-baiting, slideshow-ambushing and content farming when quality is often sacrificed for quantity, Salmon’s was a much-needed source of reason. Also necessary was his send-up of digital publishing’s most desperate — and user-unfriendly — revenue grabs : “Reading a blog entry in a web browser shouldn’t turn into a game of Frogger where you have to make sure not to mouse over any word which has been underlined twice, for fear that it will open up an intrusive pop-up video ad.” (Breaking Media’s view on the issue can be found here.)

This issue hit home just last week when a Harvard law student became famous on the web. Or infamous, rather.  After a conversation with a few friends last November about affirmative action, she raised the possibility that race may be a genetic determinant for intelligence. Unwisely, she made this suggestion via email.

When she had a falling out with one of those friends, that friend-turned-enemy disseminated her old email, including her name, campus group affiliations and the fact that she would be starting a federal clerkship in the fall. It quickly went viral, spreading through the Harvard Law community and among Black Law Student Associations at several top law schools, many of whose members sent it along to us at Above the Law. (Fuller back story on this here.)

If nothing else, it was certainly a lesson in being careful about what you say in emails.

What was of interest to us when we broke the story was the reaction on Harvard’s campus, the propriety of disseminating a private email, and the response from recipients of the email — some of whom suggested that her clerkship be taken from her. Engaged by those issues, we chose not to include the student’s name and instead called her by a pseudonym — “Crimson DNA.” Her identity did not seem integral to the story, and our policy, as we’ve stated before, is to maintain the anonymity of law students. We only name names if (a) the name is already mentioned in a public record (like a police report), OR (b) the name is already mentioned in a mainstream media outlet.

However, because her name was attached to the original emails, all those to whom the email had circulated already knew her identity. With a little investigating, Gawker, which has a much larger audience than us, found out who she was and revealed her identity. I asked the author of that post how she justified the outing. Maureen O’Connor responded:

The story has taken a life of its own and Stephanie’s identity is no secret — this story is being talked about on campuses all over the country. If we shielded her identity, we’d be treating her differently than the subjects of other stories. It seems like the word “outing” only comes up when the subject is a person that an upper-middle-class, educated blogger would consider a peer.

Gawker took her identity to a whole new audience, off of campuses and into the mainstream. After Gawker named the student–without the knowing the context of the email or talking to the student– the Boston Globe picked it up. By outing her, Gawker essentially labeled her as a racist. Orin Kerr, a law professor and writer at the Volokh Conspiracy, highlights the inappropriateness of judging someone based on a single forwarded personal email.

I wonder instead about the appropriateness of making someone a public, named figure based on that single personal email, given that its author has still not made a public statement. In the age of digital footprints, blogs have a great power to influence a person’s reputation. Google has become an integral part of our interaction with others. Newsworthy events, however ephemeral in the minds of news media, live on in the search results pages of the participants into perpetuity. Bloggers and journalists alike should take that responsibility very seriously. How do we decide when someone should be “outed”? The name of this student never seemed essential to this story in my mind. More interesting was that a member of the Harvard Law School community would send an email like this.

Daniel Solove, a law professor at George Washington University, tackled this in his prescient 2007 book, “The Future of Reputation” and actually suggested that the law needs to evolve to address privacy issues in the digital age. He also says that bloggerly norms need to change:

Currently, bloggers are much less restrained than the mainstream media in what they write about. The mainstream media have established ethical guidelines (albeit loose ones) to protect people’s privacy, but the norms of the blogosphere are still in their infancy… Ethical codes for journalists sprang up in the early twentieth century. These codes urged that gossip about the private lives of public figures should not get front page attention, that reputations should not “be torn down lightly,” that attacks on a person’s reputation should not be published before the person had the opportunity to be heard, and that “a newspaper should not invade the private rights or feelings without sure warrant of public right as distinguished from public curiosity…”

[T]he mainstream media have developed at least some norms of self-restraint in order to protect privacy. While the norms need shaping and strengthening, they are at least partially developed. The blogosphere has less well-developed norms, and it needs to establish a code of ethics.

As the consumption of news increasingly moves to blogs–and indeed some blogs command as much traffic and influence as traditional news sources–we bloggers do need to think about a code of ethics. Naming a young law student based on a private email that she wrote is a news decision that I would label unethical.