John Hancock should have read the Constitution

As a journalist for more than a dozen years, I find it somewhat pleasing that I continue to be surprised by this business. It's often what keeps things interesting. But, this latest incident just oozes with irony, so I have to share.

Last week, I wrote what I thought was an interesting but fairly mundane story about how mega-insurance provider John Hancock had rolled out some cool resource management software in its Wealth Management Group. The software had helped the IT folks discover and then iron out blackouts and bottlenecks between their business applications and back-end storage systems, saving them between 40 and 80 man-hours a month spent on firefighting. While interviewing their incredibly nice IT guru, he made no bones about how the company's applications group had the distasteful habit of pointing the finger of blame at his infrastructure group for said problems. The new storage resource management software helped resolve the issue.

Today, I received a phone call from someone who claimed to be a lawyer with John Hancock asking me if I'd obtained a legal release to post a story about the company. "No," I said. I was then told by a rather zealous attorney that I must immediately take the story off our Web site. My reflex retort was, "No. That's not going to happen." She then asked me to transfer her to our legal counsel. Before I could transfer her (I don't normally keep our legal counsel's number on hand), she'd hung up.

Now if that's where this story ended, I probably wouldn't have bothered blogging this. But it goes on. The lawyer then called a colleague of mine, and repeated her demand, adding that I'd told her to "go to hell" before hanging up on her. My colleague -- a fellow editor who sits next to me -- knows me better than that. She transferred the lawyer over to our editor in chief, Don Tennant. The lawyer should have stuck with me; Don's no pushover. She repeated her demand, and she was soundly told "no" once again.

We're now waiting to receive what the lawyer described as a "cease and desist" order regarding the story.

Keep in mind that John Hancock Financial Services Inc.'s moniker is the famous oversized, first signature that graces the Declaration of Independence. Hancock was afforded that honor as the president of the second Continental Congress. In 1789, when the First Federal Congress was hotly debating amending the Constitution to include additional rights, Hancock, an anti-Federalist, fought Federalists such as Alexander Hamilton to keep those first 10 amendments -- which later became known as the Bill of Rights.

The first amendment in the Bill of Rights states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

This is all Journalism 101. So it surprised me that an attorney wouldn't know better.

The fact is that John Hancock's IT manager was informed that I was going to call, knew that I was going to quote him for a story and expressed no reservations. But John Hancock's legal department apparently feels it has the right to review every article that contains its name. Now consider if every time a journalist attempted to write a story about a corporation, the reporter had to first submit the story to that corporation's public relations or legal department to get the approval. You could imagine that truth would regularly be squelched. You, the public, would receive either sanitized news or no news at all. At the same time, you, the IT manager, are also being muzzled. And that's a crime as well because it's the free sharing of information between technologists that helps advance business systems' development. Trade publications are a conduit for that.

For those reasons the press is adamant about protecting the freedom of speech, and that's why I'm taking the time to write this blog -- even when it involves the matter of a simple technology story that didn't appear to have the potential to raise an eyebrow. Personally, I think Mr. Hancock would have taken any corporation to the proverbial woodshed for trying to subvert our freedom of speech. So, because John Hancock helped provide me with the right to, I'm doing the same.