Thoughts on Two Dozen Years of Being Watched

I can’t remember the first time I got recognized in public. In the early years of my career, before print news really embraced the digital first atmosphere brewing, I was known by name but not face. And in those days, that was startling enough.

I’d receive letters in the mail to my office, emails to my work address and calls on my desk phone. Readers who followed my stories on crime, arrests, court cases and county fairs would want to share their thoughts on my writing, what I didn’t include, other stories they wanted to see me cover, and more. Sometimes, they would want to tell me what a scrounge I was, and what a terrible human I was. At the worse of times, they would tell me what they wanted to happen to me — it was never pleasant.

To work in media, you have to have a thick skin. It was true in 2001 — and it’s perhaps even more true today. Name recognition is a double edged sword, but one that I’ve accepted even when it got crazy.

Just before the pandemic, I wrote about grocery store pasta sauce jars that mimic canning jars not actually being appropriate for canning, according to experts. And yes, I quoted the experts. I never expected that some of the worst vitriol of my career would come from a story about canning.

In any case, expectation of privacy diminished rapidly over the years.

As my time in news wrapped up and my time in the digital space grew, one of the things that struck me was how much more invasive it was to be both seen and read. While the public continued to still debate my writing style, they were now talking about my weight, my clothes, my hair and even my voice.

More than anything, that was a point that made me really consider what I wanted to do in the media. I could do anything — print, online, video. But I didn’t have to do everything.

After filming a cooking video at Betty Crocker Studios, a few of the commenters criticized my “annoying” voice and said I wasn’t thin enough to be talking about healthy cooking. The criticisms were chilling and invasive. In writing, I was judged by the way I form sentences and connect with readers. But in video, everything was fair game. At 20-something I wasn’t sure I wanted to be exposed like that. It made me double down on writing, making video a small part of my career — not because I couldn’t take the criticisms, but because I didn’t want to.

That trio of pictures? That was me in 2008 when commenters said I was too overweight to talk about being healthy. When I look at that young woman now, I want to tell her that she’s perfect.

What those commenters didn’t know — or didn’t care to know — was that I had worked hard to lose a lot of baby weight after two very difficult pregnancies. They didn’t know that I was self-conscious that I no longer looked or felt like the pre-baby me. At times, I didn’t recognize myself. Moreover, like many people of my generation I was raised in diet culture, and that had done so much damage. As for my voice? It still makes me cringe to hear, though I know it’s loved by some.

I’ve been in this business long enough to know that my personal struggles don’t really matter to the people who want to watch and tear me apart. And, honestly, whatever.

When I returned to print media as an editor and a columnist, my children started getting recognized. On some level, I suspected it would happen someday, but it was still a startling thing when my daughter talked about adults at school asking her about things I wrote about in my columns. That was the difference between national media and local media — even though they had been in my writing and photos for years, local media made us all seen more. Years later, my son would come home from work at a grocery store telling me about all the people who remembered him from the column that had ended years before.

While I’d warned them it might come someday as my writing centered more and more about our home and lives, it was still a startling thing to reckon with. Fortunately, my kids were both fine with it — though they still are sometimes surprised to be greeted by name by strangers.

Still, that’s also why I pulled back ever so slightly from writing about my children in recent years. My lack of an expectation of privacy doesn’t need to be theirs too.

The common thread through my career has been writing. The written word is home for me, the place where I can exhale. It’s where my story began, and where it continues even as I still occasionally go on video or TV. And, to be honest, I learned to love television — going on The Nite Show with Danny Cashman in Maine was a highlight of my media career. But I’ve just never loved video as much as I love words.

These days, it’s fascinating to see that for as much has changed in the last 20-plus years, so much hasn’t. We are more connected than ever, but the world has gotten kinder and meaner all at once. You still need a thick skin to be in the public eye. What has changed is how both the public and the public figures respond to it. We don’t have to take it. We don’t want to.

What’s also fascinating is how little people understand about how the internet works, even now. In the early days of news moving online, we were flying blind — not knowing who was reading on the internet or if they were at all. Comments were the gauge of online success in the early aughts. But these days, we can learn a lot about our online audiences across platforms with a mere couple of clicks.

In a couple days, I will have plenty of data to know how long readers spent reading this blog post. The longer someone spends reading, the more successful it is. I will also be able to isolate that data to see who among them viewed other pages on this site, where they were coming from on the internet and geographically and even what devices they use. All of this technical knowledge helps us better speak to our audiences even when they are more silent than ever.

Hell, I even know which of you are using VPNs — not because it says so but because I’ve learned to read between the proverbial lines of the data.

And I guess that’s the biggest thing about being watched today: I get to watch back, using what I know of psychology (not a ton) and human behavior (a fair amount) to understand what’s resonating and why — and what’s making people obsess.

In a lot of ways, I think I am among the luckiest people out there. I grew up loving to write and have gotten to make an entire career of it. That’s the greatest gift — getting to do what I love and share it with the world. There’s no doubt that 15-year-old me, the girl who was figuring out who she was, would be in awe that my tenth book arrives in 2026 and that I am still being published in news, magazines and even online (ok, online wasn’t on my radar then). Who gets to do exactly what they said they would as a teenager?

So, yes, I have been watched for more than two decades. Yes, my expectations of privacy are way different than other people’s. But I wouldn’t trade this for anything.

Twenty-four years ago, as I made my way into the media industry, I shed my expectation of privacy bit by bit. And today, as I learn more about digital behavior every day, I grow more and more comfortable with the give and take of it all. After all, it’s watching the watchers that gives me so much to write about.

All of this is to say I see you too.