My Blog Ate My Career

A cautionary and humorous tale about social media and social networking and what I like to call Digital DNA.

If this were Facebook, my status update might read this way: "Linda is . . . terrified that her reckless blogging and social networking has rendered her utterly, irrevocably unemployable." In another life, I was a CNN head writer and senior producer.

These days, Google my name, and in a few clickety clicks, you'll find a sorry list of intimate grotesqueries I've catalogued about myself for all the world to read. I would like to work again full time. And if I were applying to be, say, Flava Flav's girlfriend or an unhinged Real Housewife on Bravo, I might well prove qualified.

But would I blame a proper boss in this brutal job market for ignoring me because of my online shenanigans? No. The fact is: I wouldn't hire me either. Further, I'm not sure I'd let me in the PTA, or even near my kid. An employer typically looks for someone trustworthy, helpful, courteous. My attributes, etched forever in the digital record, read like a perversion of the Boy Scout Law.

Disloyal I compared some unnamed news anchors I had worked for to my toddler -- discussing their flatulence, their bald spots, their screaming red-faced tantrums -- and declared my toddler more mature. Read more here