About 10 years ago at the height of the early day-trading frenzy, a colleague of mine on a sister publication inserted himself into a day-trader chat group rant about a story his paper wrote. (If you're from CMP's Electronics Group, you know to whom I'm referring). He did so rather aggressively, and it blew up in his face. They piled on him for days. Mercilessly and personally. And he battled back. He left his job not long thereafter.

In pre-internet days the line was “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

In digital times, it's pick your words carefully and never pick a fight with someone who has a popular blog with the ability to spread things virally in moments.

This lesson seems not to be understood widely.

Nicholas Carson of Valleywag calls out a flak who sent him a draft press release. This isn't the first flak-smacking. Chris Anderson published a blacklist in October. There are blogs that publicly humiliate flaks and their mistakes. It's all very 21st century...to bitch-slap someone publicly rather than handle the situation like an adult, but then again technology overwhelms us and we tend to lash out.

But then again, some of the mistakes are really bad, as Carson's post indicates. What's worse is throwing gasoline on the fire by responding.
These kinds of things wreck careers, as my former colleague found out a decade ago.

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