Olivia Nuzzi origin story

11 years ago today I woke up to find myself on the cover of the Daily News and had what was then the weirdest day of my life and what now may not even rank in the top 10 weirdest days of my life I thought I was so smart and Savvy negotiating with the paper a condition of my writing the story they couldn't use my photo the editor agreed years later I learned they had a meeting among the staff the day before publication where they weighed How likely I would be to sue if they violated the terms They concluded I wouldn't because it would good for me in the end it was ultimately at the time I thought my life was over it looked like I sold my story to a tabloid not like I wrote a story for a newspaper and the implication of my photo pasted next to wieners was well not ideal I spent my day buying every copy of the paper that I could find on the upper west side hoping that nobody would see it people definitely saw it and what ensued was a 72-hour news cycle that was completely psychotic and impossible to Fathom now respectable people called me misogynistic names news Vans parked outside my parents house I had invitations to appear on TV all over the world there were weird think pieces about me I was in the Sunday New York Times I said nothing I didn't want to be a tabloid personality I wanted to be a writer and something had gone comically wrong LOL mostly the Press got so many little details about my identity and my motives and behavior wrong I learned how common it is for people to make minor logical leaps that twist a fact about a person into a falsehood how careless people can be in minor but meaningful ways about the lives of other people that they write about and how those people must live with the consequences for digital eternity and how mostly it wasn't about malice people didn't set out to get things wrong they just weren't thinking of the human beings they were writing about as human beings they were thinking about them as content but this was the most valuable lesson I could ever learn and I was lucky enough to learn it at the very start of my career writing about other people most writers don't get written about much especially not when they're just starting out I get written about a lot which is fortunate on the one hand in an industry that uncomfortably is partly about sustaining attention but it's weird and it inserts a strange Dynamic into my work in general that I'll probably spend the rest of my writing career trying to understand but overall I think it's made me a better journalist than I would be without that dynamic because I can understand a little the unusual experience that most of my subjects are dealing with just by virtue of being subjects at all it also taught me that nothing lasts forever that you can abide anything if you can stay calm and think deliberately about what you want to do and what you should do just as quickly as the Tabloid twister sucked me into its whirl it spit me into total silence the hounding from TV Bookers and reporters and pundits stopped it felt like all at once it was over as strange as it had started most crises at least in this profession are like that the mob moves on people forget it's why you can always reinvent yourself in America okay