The notion that everyone is entitled to cooperative anonymity is a message board meme, not an actual norm of society. It has never been the case that journalists have honored a right to public pseudonymity. I am allergic to the argument that, because something is a norm on HN or Reddit, that norm binds on the rest of the world. HN and Reddit are in a variety of ways fucked up places that operate on principles not necessarily compatible with civil society --- nor is that HN's job!
There are comparable norms on HN that you can imagine someone trying to infect the real world with. For instance: on HN, it violates a norm to pull in things someone has said on other sites (like Twitter or Reddit) as a way of impeaching their authority in a discussion here. That norm makes sense on HN; the collaborative discussion we are having here doesn't work if people flagrantly violate it. But that's a downright dysfunctional norm to import into ordinary life, where the things people say in different places are profoundly relevant to their reputation and credibility.
In multiple very real ways, "journalism" is about doxing, the way medicine is about pharmaceuticals, or woodworking is about joinery.
> It has never been the case that journalists have honored a right to public pseudonymity.
Even if this is true, that doesn't make it right.
> ordinary life, where the things people say in different places are profoundly relevant to their reputation and credibility
That depends on why you are interested in their reputation and credibility. I'm not saying there are never cases where it's justified to reveal things the person would rather not reveal. But "we're writing a story and we have a policy" is not enough justification (even if the policy is consistently understood by all the newspaper's employees, which it doesn't seem like it was in this case). There needs to be an actual reason why people have a right to know details about a person that that person would rather keep private, and it has to be a strong enough reason to outweigh that person's choices.
In this case, we're talking about someone's blog, and the whole point of a blog is that it stands or falls by what is written there and what is referenced there, and personal details about the writer that aren't included are irrelevant. So it seems like this is an obvious case where a choice to remain anonymous should be respected.
No, it doesn't depend on why. You hear this all the time on message boards; for instance, it's at times been an article of faith around here that reference checks aren't OK, unless they're directed specifically to people candidates provide as references. But that's not how reputation works in reality! In reality, people can share unfavorable information about you for their own reasons and, as long as that information isn't false, there really isn't much you can do about it. Nor should you be able to! You can't coerce random people into not sharing true things about you.
You italicize "blog", like there's some important norm of "blogging" that was violated here, but Alexander wrote that blog for years under his own name, and, as I said upthread, some of his better-known pieces originally bore that name. I get that he had a bad experience when employers came across it, and can totally understand why he'd want to undo the decision to publish his name. But that doesn't mean he can.
God help me if I ever try to, like, run for village trustee where I live, and someone thinks to look my name up on this site. Can I reasonably ask the Chicago Tribune to forget about my real name, and use some different one instead? If not, where's the line between me and Alexander?
Ultimately, I think the NYT made the right decision here: that Alexander simply isn't important enough to publish a profile under these fraught circumstances. But the next person in this situation might not fit that fact pattern; they might actually be important, not just a "blogger", and it'll be important that nobody in the NYT buys into this message board kabuki dance about how we have to cooperate to maintain a psuedonymity anybody who can reach Google can puncture.
To be clear, the norm I am describing has nothing to do with "message boards" or even with the Internet. It has to do with the stated justification for journalists publishing information about people that they would rather keep secret. That justification is "the public's right to know". That has always been the stated justification, for as long as there have been journalists. And in cases where that justification did not apply, journalists were supposed to not publish that kind of information. That is not something that Internet message boards invented.
Alexander's point is basically that the mere fact of him writing a blog, even a blog that got popular, did not mean the public had a right to know personal information about him that he chose to keep secret. (Yes, I know it wasn't actually secret, but it was still, as he notes in the article, quite a bit more secret than it would have been once published in the NYT. More on that below.) I agree with him.
> it's at times been an article of faith around here that reference checks aren't OK, unless they're directed specifically to people candidates provide as references
I agree there is no such "rule" in reality, but this has nothing whatever to do with journalism or journalistic norms, which is what is involved in Alexander's case, so it's irrelevant to this discussion.
> In reality, people can share unfavorable information about you for their own reasons and, as long as that information isn't false, there really isn't much you can do about it. Nor should you be able to! You can't coerce random people into not sharing true things about you.
In terms of what people can do, yes, you are absolutely right. People can do these things, and there isn't much one can do to stop them.
But that in no way means they should do these things just because they can.
> You italicize "blog", like there's some important norm of "blogging" that was violated here
No, I italicized "blog" to make the point that it's not a big deal. It's just stuff that someone wrote about stuff that interested him. It's not nuclear weapons secrets or diplomatic communications or official pronouncements whose provenance needs to be verified. In short, it wasn't the kind of thing where "the public's right to know" was even involved.
> Alexander wrote that blog for years under his own name
No, he wrote a different blog, which, as he explains explicitly in the article (and as you note), he took down when he realized that having it under his own name was causing issues. The blog of his that the NYT wanted to write about was not the one he wrote under his own name, and had no visible connection with that older blog of his; what's more, the NYT article had nothing to do with that older blog of his, and as far as I can tell, the NYT wasn't even aware of it. So the fact of its existence is irrelevant to any judgment about what the NYT did.
> where's the line between me and Alexander?
Simple: Alexander wasn't running for office. Or doing anything else that would imply "the public's right to know". He was just writing stuff.
> The notion that everyone is entitled to cooperative anonymity is a message board meme, not an actual norm of society ... I am allergic to the argument that, because something is a norm on HN or Reddit, that norm binds on the rest of the world.
Well, luckily, neither Scott nor any of the ancestor comments uses "it's a norm on message boards" as the sole justification for their position. Or, indeed, as justification at all, from what I can see—that seems to be an argument you brought in.
Instead, they talk about the expected negative impacts of name-publishing: death threats, loss of professional opportunities (citing examples of what's happened to other people and to Scott himself in his earlier career), etc., while also saying there's no positive impact to name-publishing. In other words, they argue for the norm on its own merits.
The NYT is free to say "Yeah, we'll cheerfully do this unnecessary net-negative-impact thing for no good reason we've been able to articulate", but they should suffer reputational costs for that. Even if—or especially if—that thing is standard operating procedure for them.
When you begin to publish opinions prolifically, you have to consider that it could result in things like a loss of professional opportunities. You might decide to go ahead and use a pseudonym, but there's no right or expectation in the real world that your works must not be attributed to you.
You can blame the NYT but Scott's basic problem is that he published a bunch of stuff on his blog that could interfere with his practice as a psychiatrist. When you have multiple sources of significant income it's not abnormal for conflicts of interest to arise. It's not really a journalist's responsibility to protect them. The rule that they identify the WHO in their story is a good one.
It could be a norm in journalism that trans people are referred to by their birth names.
In fact, it used to be. It was a bad norm, we changed it.
I don't think this should be an unprincipled exception, that journalists should casually refer to people in ways they don't want to be referred to, unless they happen to be trans.
I think it should be the rule. Because not doing that makes you an asshole. And journalists shouldn't be assholes.
Sure, but this wasn't about calling Lana Wachowski "Lana" instead of "Larry", but rather about disclosing that Lana was formerly known as Larry, which is something the NYT still does.
And, of course, not all norm changes are bad. But I'm suspicious of norms imported from message boards, especially if they have the effect of depriving people of information. Better, in a situation like Alexander's, that the article simply not get written --- which is what happened.
Presumably the NYT would be referencing "Larry Wachowski" for some deliberate purpose, like tying into previous work or detailing some aspect of being trans. Bringing up the past is unavoidable if its an integral part of the story.
This situation is more like reporting on someone who transitioned long ago, didn't do anything of note before then, doesn't broadcast trans as part of their public identity, and yet NYT still felt the need to inform everyone that they used to be a man. We'd rightly question their motives for that unkindness.
One of the most popular beauty vlogger (NikkieTutorials) is trans. She became the most popular before that was publicly known about a year ago.
Would it have been ok for a newspaper to write about "One the most popular beauty vlogger" and then add somewhere in the article: "oh some other factoid she was able to keep hidden all these years: she's trans!"?
> The notion that everyone is entitled to cooperative anonymity is a message board meme, not an actual norm of society.
Is the notion of "right-to-anonymity-on-the-internet" about as old as "the internet is a common thing in human life"? I assume it predates HN and Reddit, but unsure when it started.
> It has never been the case that journalists have honored a right to public pseudonymity.
I imagine this could be answered empirically by finding articles -and the reaction to said articles- that revealed the true identity of a similarly situated pen-name writer. But I'll take your word for it.
Maybe I just come from a different part of the Internet than you do --- the parts I came from involved a little bit more X.25 --- but where I came from, "doxxing" people was a sport, not a transgression. I think this norm really does come from 2000s-era message boards.
There are comparable norms on HN that you can imagine someone trying to infect the real world with. For instance: on HN, it violates a norm to pull in things someone has said on other sites (like Twitter or Reddit) as a way of impeaching their authority in a discussion here. That norm makes sense on HN; the collaborative discussion we are having here doesn't work if people flagrantly violate it. But that's a downright dysfunctional norm to import into ordinary life, where the things people say in different places are profoundly relevant to their reputation and credibility.
In multiple very real ways, "journalism" is about doxing, the way medicine is about pharmaceuticals, or woodworking is about joinery.