Have you read the article that the New York Times ran on beauty bloggers today? It's scathing and horrible. They basically make beauty bloggers out to be nothing more than swag-crazy product whores who just can't wait to hit up their publicists for free products. While this may be true of a small number of bloggers, I really can't imagine this makes up the whole.
The blogs I read every day -- of which there are a great number -- all are run by people who do this solely out of their love for products. We all buy many of the products that we write about, which I think makes us more credible than many magazines who have to answer to advertisers. Yes, we do receive free products -- I'm not going to say we don't. But my stance has always been to try the product and only write about it if I truly love it and have something good to say about it.
I consider myself a true beauty junkie ... I get so excited over new products, lines, launches, concepts, you name it. I spend hours upon hours researching products that I think could make for good posts, trolling endless beauty sites and blogs to see what my readers might love. For most of us, this is not our full-time job but a hobby that has grown to take up most of our free time. I most certainly am not paid to write this blog! But that doesn't matter since, at the end of the day, writing about beauty makes me happy.
I hope that you, my loyal readers and fellow beauty chicks, all know just how thrilled I am to write for you.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Beauty Bloggers Seething Over NY Times Article
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Thanks for posting and defending beauty bloggers everywhere! It's unfortunate that this article ended up being so lopsided in its portrayal of bloggers.
ReplyDeleteTo start: I really love your blog - and don't read the ones you linked.
ReplyDeleteThat said, as a former journalist/magazine editor, I *assumed* everyone knew that many beauty blogs shill for free products. When someone is "paid" (gifts or otherwise) to write about a product, then their tone and voice changes (I should know - most magazines keep advertising/editorial separate - some don't - like where I worked, but almost nowhere has the writer doing advertising/promotion). I would much rather a blogger say something like, "FunBeautyCompany sent me a new doo-whacky" to try."
Further, the "shill" is pretty obvious when almost every blog carries a review of the same product in about the same week or same span of two or three weeks. However, I still take the recommendations - I trust bloggers not to lie about products (or, as they said in the article, to blog only the good ones).
You're right, we're product junkies and that's what keeps us going! I pretty much said the same thing in my post - we wouldn't be doing this if we didn't love it.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for sharing this.
ReplyDelete