If you follow any major bloggers or vloggers on Twitter, you may have seen a flurry of tweets about an article written by Francesca Hornak for The Sunday Times Style entitled '24 Hours With... A Beauty Vlogger'. Part of The ST Style's relatively new series, this installment focused on the imagined life of a beauty vlogger, and included Starbucks, fairy lights and fitness-obsessed boyfriend cliches. Needless to say, this did not go down well in the blogging community.
A full-time blogger is often met with a look of doubt, or even an eye roll from time to time, when asked his or her profession. It's 'narcissistic', it's 'not a real job', it's 'lazy', say the masses, thanks to a superficial image perpetuated by traditional media. Take Zoella, the UK's most popular lifestyle blogger, as an example: on social media, her life seems a whirlwind of fairy cakes, pugs and top knots. It would be easy to think that that's all there is to her. But, just like models, actors, artists, singers and everyone who works in the creative industry, there is far more to the blogging profession than meets the eye.
You could say the same things about journalists. I have been a journalist for over five years and, to some of my friends, my life appears exciting and glamorous: I tell them about the celebrities that attended the party I went to last weekend, the makeup that landed on my desk before it was even on the shelves, and the time I got driven around the French Riviera in a vintage Porsche. I also tell them about the immense stress of never ending deadlines, the 4.30am starts and 11pm finishes, and the pressure of being constantly on the look out for the next story - but no one ever seems to remember those bits.
It's so easy for those who do not work in the creative industries to judge those that do. Because our jobs are unlikely to involve number crunching, heavy lifting or solving world hunger, our lives are often satirised. Which is exactly what Francesca Hornak was doing when she wrote '24 Hours With... A Beauty Vlogger', which details fictional vlogger Glitterbugeroo Instagramming her new pup's poop, much to the disgust of her boyfriend. She then goes on to illustrate the vlogger filming a video with outtakes, her thoughts on a sour encounter with another vlogger at a press event, and her somewhat trivialised struggles with anxiety and trolling.
For those of you with a Times subscription (one which I refuse to pay for as The Times can't give me anything more than what I can get online for free), here's the original feature: 24 Hours With... A Beauty Vlogger.
Francesca's work has appeared in The ST, The Guardian, Marie Clare and Stylist, among other national titles. Her Sunday Times Style column, History Of The World In 100 Modern Objects, ran for two years and, although it was never one of my favourites (I'm a Camilla Long fan through and through), it provided a different perspective on the way we see the objects around us. Inevitably, the column lead to a book deal, and Francesca remains a columnist at one of the nation's favourite fashion weeklies.
With her credentials available via a simple Google, it's clear to see that Francesca is an accomplished journalist, who has no doubt worked hard to get where she is. So why would she make fun of a group of people who are taking the same journey and trying to replicate that success?
Lily Pebbles, London-based beauty and lifestyle vlogger, had that same question when she criticised the feature in a recent tweet:
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