After an odd episode earlier this morning, it seems Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund returned to Bloggers’ Corner later this afternoon, this time knowing full well that the unoccupied computers left on the tables were private property, belonging to the bloggers. He hopped on another open laptop, again without asking permission from its owner, and took about a half hour to file a story, even as the blogger whose computer he’d commandeered stood waiting.

The chap whose computer Fund co-opted the second time, seen in a photo in this post waiting for the Famous Journalist to return his property, has started a drive to buy John Fund a Blackberry.

Amusingly, Fund left several browsers open the second time arround, including one he’d used to access his email, and another he’d used to access the Dow Jones servers, neither of which he’d bothered to log off from.

I think it’s a little silly to frame this in “bloggers vs. the mainstream media” terms. And it’s a far cry from scandalous.

But it is rude. And Fund ought to get a little heat for the arrogant “do you know who I am” attitude. It’s hard to imagine that Fund would, say, wander into the press room of an event like this and start popping open applications on another journalist’s computer.

For half an hour.

Twice.

After getting flak for doing it the first time.

Maybe I’m wrong.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 19th, 2005 at 7:07 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.