I know that's unrelated, but I agree with you, so there isn't much else for me to say.  

Let's say this wasn't an email. Rather just actual mail typed out onto a real piece of paper.

If it was actual mail, would the recipient be justified in complaining about Conlin's response? Or not?

Not that either party acted in the right, as Jeff says in the title, but I'm thinking Conlin is "more" in the wrong.

As for the E-mails, you sounded like you were getting into morals. The legal aspect of it was brought up and is correct: I have the legal right to post any E-mail I receive. Once they click "Send," I essentially get all intellectual rights to the contents of that E-mail. As to whether or not that is right, I guess that's up to each individual. You are not wrong for believing that my actions hinge on immoral, and I am not wrong for believing the opposite. So it goes with moral relativism.

Perhaps you're more far-sighted than I am, and this could be the trend among journalists in the future.

However, do all journalists say that the recipient(s) of their message deserve(s) to be silenced or killed, as Conlin implied with this Hitler comments? I think most journalists are able to communicate rationally and maturely to their E-mails, and if not, shame on them.

For a journalist, sports fans -- and even more so sports communities -- are your customer.  You can't talk to the customer like that and expect them to not tell their friends.

Is being the idiot who should have known better really an adequate explanation for horrible judgment?

But really, what he said wasn't that horrific, he clearly says the only good thing about Hitler's time on earth, he wasn't being pro-Hitler. For someone to be offended by anything other then his rudeness is just an over reaction on their part. Social censorship through political correctness once again going too far

/off-topic comment

Sure the columnist should've known better, and maybe he's a poor writer (I'm not going to the article's link either btw) but as Jeff said, posting what the other party thought was private correspondance in public is classless, period.

If you think my posting of our E-mail correspondence was wrong, you have every right to believe that.

Legally, I have every right to post our E-mail correspondence. Once he hits "Send," he loses all rights to the contents of his E-mail. The only way I wouldn't have rights to the contents is if I access the E-mail message without his permission (i.e. hacking into his E-mail account or something).

I was not practically in the wrong. To some, I was subjectively in the wrong, but there's no correct assumption on that front.

Newspapers, in turn, are in part a kind of public trust, and not just any sort of private enterprise. If they have any ethics they act on a certain standard of thoughtful engagement with their community. If they (or their writers) start spewing garbage at their readers in correspondence, there is no reason to believe that is a private matter.

In other words, at the papers I worked at Conlin's ass would be fired by now -- not just because of the Hitler garbage, but also because he should understand that you get no private, protected communications with readers. Anything you write to a reader, you should be willing to have published.

And from Graham's perspective, if newspapers (or their writers) start treating readers with gross disrespect, the reader should make that public. Even as an ex-reporter I have no problem with that idea.

Finally, let me give you a comparison. I'm a public school teacher. If I wrote something similar to the parent of a student, would it be wrong for that parent to make that correspondence public? I don't think so. It would be foolish of me to expect otherwise.

Moreover, since when is something you email to somebody subject to the expectation of confidentiality by default?  Especially if you're emailing from an address from an organization with a  public voice?

It's one thing if a friend betrays the confidence of a personal email from another friend, because the relationship implies a certain level of confidence.    But a columnist to a reader?  There's no confidence, even an implicit one, to betray.

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Once you write something down, anyone can read it.
There is absolutely nothing that prevents me from reposting any letter, email, tty transcript, etc as I see fit, as the recipient. These arguments are not about morality at all but instead prudence as it exists for any public figure (see my part about branding below to get a better idea of how I view public figurehood).

I don't write down anything that could come back to haunt me. In online forums, I am anonymous, and therefore don't care what I write. I can write acording to how anonymous I am in that forum. Me and my (myspace or whatever)page are for certain people to see, and I keep them private for that reason. If I were a Jeff or Conlin or Crash, I am not just that person, I am also brand LL or that newspaper or whatever blog he's from.

I guess I'll put it in the way I know best. I was once employed by a call center. In that capacity, I was XXXX Company, taking calls. You, Crash, Conlin, and any other person working under a "brand" are that brand, in all correspondence relating to that brand.

If he made some assholish (but not overtly offensive, which this was not) remark in a public forum anonymously (or by stating he was not speaking in his capacity of XXXX Company journalist), and somehow it came out, the newspaper could say that it was on his time, and that he distanced himself from that brand. That's life when you work in a public capacity.

I just think you don't realize this because brand LL isn't big enough in your eyes to protect. You could ask the owner of SB (for example) how he feels on the subject, and I bet you would get an answer a lot in line with what I'm trying to say.

Jeff, you said that when a reader emails you, you are informal, yet polite (or something like that). But would you write a person something like "Stalin was the best thing to ever happen to Russia, and I'd follow him if he were alive today"? I don't think you would even make a Utah Miner joke to some random reader you hadn't "met" before (by postings or otherwise).

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Correspondence and public figures is all about trust. He writes a dick joke to his friend, he trusts the friend won't reprint it, either by implicitly trusing him, or by asking him not to reprint things he says. You can't have that sort of trust with some person that emailed you out of the blue to criticize you. Or at least, not if you have any common sense.
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I don't believe any of this will change your mind about the morality, but I would argue that morality only comes into play when there is trust. If there is no trust, you have to use prudence as a public figure. Crash was talking to Conlin in Conlin's capacity as reporter for Newspaper X. Conlin made comments that he really shouldn't have in the capacity of his job. Crash posted them, as is his perogative, in the (supposed) intrest of showing him to be the asshole he was. Had Crash emailed Conlin personally, or either wrote that they wanted to take it to personal email, they would not be acting as surrogates of their brand, and that email being posted (if it would have been) would have had a much less dramatic effect.

In short, public figures, especially those that represent a brand, cannot simply say whatever they want, as a matter of prudence, not morality. You are looking at it from a personal perspective, but I think if you saw it from a LL as a business perspective, you'd see that you do actually censor yourself quite a bit in your capacity as "head of LL".

Making a Hitler reference does not make one an anti-semite.

Conlin's an ass, and a lousy columnist who probably doesn't warrant employment, but nothing he did here made that more true than it already was.

Crashburn Alley was totally in the wrong, here.

That said, note that many public figures explicitly state in their email signature that their remarks are not for redistribution.  Will Carroll does this.

what happens when Crash opens his inbox. Why publish the emails (which, for the record, is in itself a copyright violation)?

No, it's not a copyright violation. He forfeits any rights to the E-mail message once he clicks "Send."

I have asked, in person, many people involved either with law (lawyers) or law enforcement (cops) and none of them said I was legally in the wrong in any way.

In fact, even if I had promised Conlin I wouldn't post our correspondence, I STILL have the right to post them.

Some of the legality of this stems from the USA PATRIOT Act, but I'm not sure how much.

"What is the purpose of sharing something that you know wasn't intended as such?"

A) You assume that the E-mail wasn't intended to be publicized.

B) You assume that I understood that the E-mail wasn't intended to be publicized.

C) As an employee representing his employer, Conlin has to ASSUME that the E-mail will be PUBLIC, not PRIVATE.

"I understand that Crash was insulted, but if you're holding something that you know was meant as a personal correspondence and nothing more,"

You're assuming, incorrectly.

"how do you then present it to the world without feeling the slightest bit dirty?"

It wasn't a private E-mail and I was never in the wrong.

Conlin's E-mail was listed right underneath his article on his employer's website.

http://www.philly.com/dailynews/sports/20071121_Bill_Conlin___Rollins_winning_numbers.html

Therefore, it is NOT a personal E-mail regardless of whether or not he uses it for personal reasons. That is a PROFESSIONAL E-mail account.

Secondly, columnists are public figures and have to accept that the way they behave in communication with their readers is subject to public scrutiny. For this reason I disagree with the notion that the e-mails sent by Conlin are "private" communications. Rather, I think it was not wrong by crash to publish these excerpts. And Conlin's expectations about whether the e-mails would be published does not matter for this reason in my view.

Since college hockey isn't the most popular sport around here in Colorado (that's left to the broncos and the rockies when they make the playoffs), Chambers doesn't get many inches in the daily paper. Therefore, to provide more coverage, he has a blog on the Post's site.

I guess where I'm getting at is in some respects, I hope bloggers do start getting more respect by the mainstream journalistic media if only because those journalists (are forced to?) have blogs of their own.

Well that, and I'm a journalist myself as well as a friend of Jeff who thinks he does a good job. :-p