Fred Vogelstein at Wired shared his own thoughts on his blog about being the subject of an internal Microsoft memo:

As journalistic windfalls go this is about as good as it gets. There I was writing a story about how Microsoft is on the cutting edge of using the Internet to become more transparent, and there in front of me are the briefing documents they are using to manage the story. The timing was so fortuitous that I wondered whether it was intentional. When I told Microsoft about it, they convincingly told me it was not.

But after I was done reading all 5,500 words I no longer felt elated at the prospect of an interesting scoop. I felt downright peculiar. I’ve been a journalist for more than 20 years and always assumed that the people I interview do as much homework on me as I do on them. So the existence of a document like this didn’t surprise me. But that still didn’t make it any easier to read lines like, “It takes him a bit to get his point across so try to be patient.” I know my long-windedness drives my wife nuts occasionally. I didn’t know it had become an issue for Microsoft’s pr machine too…

Should I be flattered that they worked so hard, or should I be embarrassed at being co-opted by their spin machine? I’d like to think I would have written the same story no matter what. But now, through the miracle of transparency, you, the reader, get to decide that too.

Here’s the story Vogelstein wound up publishing, if you’re curious.

[Thanks to Todd Bishop at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for Vogelstein's blog info.]

Transparency is a popular buzzword and a valuable concept in public relations and in the news these days. This New York Times story reminded me this week just how transparent all our technology and connectedness has made nearly all of us, virtually overnight:

In February, during the course of reporting on a video blogging initiative at Microsoft called Channel 9, Fred Vogelstein inadvertently received a 13-page, 5,500-word internal memo from Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, a firm that represents Microsoft. The document, which was meant to prepare Microsoft executives for interviews, contained frank details, including some less-than-flattering observations (“Fred’s stories tend to be a bit sensational, though he would consider them to be balanced and fair”), scripted responses to questions and a strong-arm list of the points the agency expected to see in the piece.

It only made matters worse that the original Wired story was intended to focus on Microsoft’s corporate transparency in allowing its employees to blog about their work.

Noting that the article Mr. Vogelstein wrote was about a Microsoft project that permits employees to blog about the company’s corporate doings — a concept called “radical transparency” — Mr. Shaw said, “In a lot of ways, it was irresistible to Wired to bring attention to it. To show it as the polar opposite of the transparency piece they were working on.”

Mr. Vogelstein said in a telephone interview that the memo, which made its way into an e-mail message about appointment scheduling, gave him a weird sense of voyeurism.

“We all want to know what everybody thinks about us, but I think most of us, if we found out, would be sorry,” he said. “Some of the stuff I was totally fine with, but I objected to being called ‘tricky’ and I thought, ‘Wow — they really think that?’ ”

I would argue that there is radical transparency in our culture now, but not the kind engendered by Microsoft’s blogging initiative (which sounds like an admirable idea, for what it’s worth). This reminds me of advice I’ve heard around the office from time to time, usually when writing a news release: “Don’t write it unless you’d be comfortable seeing it on the front page of the newspaper.” Or in the next issue of Wired magazine.

The thing is, I’d expect that most of us have emails or private documents we’d rather not arrive in the harsh light of public view. The challenge, I think, is to remember that the next time we’re sitting in front of the keyboard.

[Thanks to Bulldog Reporter for pointing out this news.]