When Your Blog Blows Up   

Rachel Mosteller was 24 years old and 28 weeks pregnant in 2004 when her blog blew up in her face.

Mosteller was a feature writer for the Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina. Her blog, The Sarcastic Journalist, was an anonymous stew of newsroom grievances and coworker characterizations.

"I was treating it like I was talking to my best friend [at] the coffee shop," Mosteller says, "naïve to think that nothing was going to happen and nobody was going to find it."

Not only did someone find it and identify Mosteller as the author, that someone also notified her supervisors, who soon hauled her into an editor's office. "There were all the bosses, and there was HR, and basically it was, 'We found your Web site. You're fired. Get out,' " Mosteller says. "They were visibly very angry with me."

Mosteller was angry with herself too. The blog was a horrible mistake, she says, and she deserved what she got.

Not that it was easy: The soon-to-be-mother's health insurance was through the paper. "I think you can guess what F-word I used," she says.

Mosteller and her husband had to sell their house and move back to hometown Houston. Mosteller's future as a journalist looked bleak. "My husband, my family and I were just like, 'I guess you're going to do something else now, because you burned that bridge.' "

Fortunately, that wasn't the case. Her blog, converted into a journal where relatives could read about her family (thesimplefamily.com), brought a freelancing opportunity with American Baby Magazine, for a story on "blogging through birth." Not long after, Ladies Home Journal came knocking.

Mosteller now freelances for major papers including the New York Times and USA Today, she says, and is happy to have put the worst mistake of her career behind her: "It was a horrible feeling, and it's a feeling that I never want to experience again."