In mid-June 2012, Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Barrett Tryon posted an LA Times story about the pending sale of the Orange County Register on his personal Facebook page. Carmen Boles, the Gazette’s content director, told him this violated Freedom Communications’ social media policy. Tryon refused to remove the post. He told Jim Romenesko he expected to be fired. The case became a small landmark on how newspapers tried to control reporters’ social-media presence — and how the National Labor Relations Act undercut them.
Then
The Freedom Communications social-media policy at the heart of the case forbade Gazette employees from sharing competitive news outlets’ content on personal social accounts — even when, as here, the LA Times story was about Freedom’s own business. Tryon’s Facebook post was just a link to a public news story, written from his personal account on his own time.
The Poynter analysis that the original FishbowlLA pickup linked to identified the substantive legal problem: the National Labor Relations Act protects “concerted activity” by employees discussing workplace conditions, and the NLRB had been increasingly aggressive in 2011-2012 about ruling against employer social-media policies that overreached on those grounds. A reporter sharing a story about his own employer’s pending sale was almost textbook protected concerted activity.
Tryon went into his 11:30 a.m. meeting with management expecting to be fired. The original FBLA piece anticipated that if Freedom Communications did fire him, the NLRB or a related labor case would be the next step.
Now
Barrett Tryon was, in fact, fired by Freedom Communications shortly after that meeting. He filed an NLRB complaint, and in February 2013 the NLRB issued a ruling against Freedom Communications, finding that the social-media policy had violated federal labor law and that the firing had been improper. Freedom Communications was ordered to reinstate Tryon with back pay and to rescind the policy. The case became one of the most-cited NLRB social-media rulings of the era and is regularly taught in employment-law and journalism-school curricula.
Tryon was reinstated and continued in journalism in subsequent years, with reporting work at multiple regional newspapers and in digital news organizations. Freedom Communications itself went through bankruptcy in 2015 and was acquired by Tribune Publishing in 2016 — the Orange County Register, the company’s flagship, became part of the Southern California News Group portfolio. The Colorado Springs Gazette was sold separately and continues to publish under new ownership.
Jim Romenesko, whose pickup of the original story drove the broader media coverage, continued as one of the central media-industry news aggregators throughout the 2010s before stepping back from full-time daily blogging. The kind of news-media-criticism beat that he had pioneered — independent, link-driven, focused on internal-industry power dynamics — has largely migrated to newsletter operators like the Status newsletter and to academic media-criticism work. The labor-law principle the Tryon case established — that personal social-media activity by a journalist sharing public news cannot be a fireable offense — has held.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: June 2012 snapshot