Some people pursue celebrity. Others stumble into it as they are rushing off to bridge club.

My 85-year-old mom, Marilyn Hagerty, a newspaper columnist, is in the latter category. When she wrote a review of the new Olive Garden restaurant in Grand Forks, N.D., last week, she wasn't expecting anyone other than her thousands of loyal readers in North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota to take note. She didn't worry about how her story would play on Gawker, partly because she had...