Veteran reporter loses her job for checking her email

Almost 13 years after starting at Eugene’s local daily paper, The Register-Guard, reporter Serena Markstrom Nugent was fired while on pregnancy disability leave from the paper where she had worked since college. Another employee cleaned out Markstrom Nugent’s desk for her, and she was told she could pick up her belongings in the reception area. “It felt like getting punched in the stomach,” Markstrom Nugent says. 

A veteran reporter who’d worked nearly a decade at the daily newspaper in Eugene, Ore., was fired from her job last week after up-aboves discovered  she’d checked her work email while taking time for maternity leave. The Eugene Weekly reports that Serena Markstrom Nugent, an entertainment reporter at The Register-Guard since she graduated from college, was told that another employee would be cleaning out her desk and that she could come collect her items in the office’s reception area because. That was because, as Eugene Newspaper Guild co-president Randi Bjornstad reports, “she had checked her email while on leave and had deleted one or more emails, which the company considered destruction of property.”