Via The New York Times, a article by Claire Cain Miller: The Layoffs Will Be Blogged. Excerpt:
Elon Musk, chief executive of the electric-car company Tesla Motors in San Carlos, Calif., said that he had no choice other than to blog about the Oct. 15 layoffs at the closely watched company - even though some employees had not yet been told they were losing their jobs.
Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip blog owned by Gawker Media, had already published the news, and it was being picked up by traditional media reporters, Mr. Musk said.
“We had to say something to prevent articles being written that were not accurate.”
Blogging about staff cuts is particularly prevalent in Silicon Valley, where tech gossip sites pounce on every rumor and Web-savvy employees broadcast their every thought on personal blogs and Twitter feeds.
Start-up companies in particular seem to the feel pressure to break bad news on their own blogs so that they can better control the message.
Unlike more traditional firms, many of today’s Web companies were built on the mission of creating transparency for users. Executives have lived that mission, blogging about company successes. Now that bad times are coming, some of them feel the need to make that public, too. A blog post also comes across as more heartfelt than a press release with canned quotations.
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