Sali Hughes #7 Yes I threatened and yes I lie, but can I interest you in beauty pie?

Status
Thread locked. We start a new thread when they have over 1000 posts, click the blue button to see all threads for this topic and find the latest open thread.
1
With regards to the Pool going under, Sali mentions it in her video. Apparently she herself was left in the lurch and is owed £7k *indignant face* Righty ho then. Even if that’s true she has a very healthy income and is wearing a Rolex worth tens of thousands and a jumper worth over a hundred in that video. Her self awareness is non-existent! 7k is a lot of money but it’s hardly going to be the amount that sends her bankrupt or homeless as it could well do for less wealthy and well-connected writers.

I actually find that awful video so interesting (even though I found it hard to get through without literally shouting LIAR! like I’d lost my damn mind) because the examples she uses (the Pool, Botox, her husband being fugly and her fancying Giles Coren) are the things that have obviously bothered her the most. Her husband IS attractive, she doesn’t fancy GC and she is as much a victim of the Pool’s demise as less famous and less well off writers. SO THERE! It says it all really.
 
Yay, new thread! (title is so good!)

How are things, skiddos? I haven't been posting much because sometimes life gets in the way but I have been reading you and the wit here is second to none, really. Top work, side beefs!

Re The Pool, I remember Stuart Heritage (and his wife to a lesser extent) going absolutely ballistic on Twitter when everything went tits up. Apparently his wife was owed circa 7k too. Someone replied to him saying something along the lines, "Oh, think about the poor ladies who lost their business", and he said "Well, if they were such incompetent arseholes maybe they should never have opened a business in the first place"
 
So when SH was furious whilst on a writer’s retreat, was it because of the lost £7k or the way her mate LL was treated after The Pool folded? It must be very difficult to navigate a friendship when doing business together. The number of influencers who are intertwined in a similar way is staggering to my innocent eye. Sometimes it really does feel like a complex web of connections in which a number of them are related to each other.

I followed The Pool for a few months but then got bored with the sanctimonious white- middle class cool Central London vibe going on it. The account of the way they have run this business is truly shocking.
 
A couple of months before The Pool finally closed, I went to a panel event for the release of their new book. While I'd vaguely followed The Pool and read some of the articles, I didn't know toooo much about it so I was really surprised to learn earlier this year that only 2 months after this book launch the whole site had folded.

Both Sam Baker and Sali were on this panel and I remember there was a question in the Q&A part about how you make a website like The Pool successful in a difficult online market like there is currently and I remember SB looking so awkward and uncomfortable at this, I really wish that I remember what she said, I think she'd just acknowledged that they'd found it hard.

Sali really came to The Pool's defense though and said that The Pool didn't pay as well as other places she wrote for but she really believed in what they stood for and appreciated the space she was given to write what she wanted which she didn't get elsewhere so she was willing to put up with it. It definitely didn't sound sympathetic to those people who couldn't afford not to get paid! More just telling them to deal with it.

Originalnuttah said:
I followed The Pool for a few months but then got bored with the sanctimonious white- middle class cool Central London vibe going on it. The account of the way they have run this business is truly shocking.
Click to expand...
I hated the book they released for this reason. There was so much about being a mother and a lot of just complaining about how expensive it was to live in Central London. Oh boohoo, I've had to move a significant distance from my family and friends because I can't afford to live near London in the expensive area my family live. I don't really want to hear how broke you are living in one of the most expensive areas of the country!
 
By talking about how much she is owed but wasn’t going to take from the fundraiser, was a crafty move because it allowed SH to play both victim and hero.

No one could ask her why she wasn’t holding her mates accountable because SH is the victim here, owed £7k dontchya know. She has as much to be upset about as anyone!

As a kind gesture (hero) she wouldn’t take anything from the fund, leaving it the freelancers who were more dependent on the income.

And by frequent mentions of the £7k she is owed, but is unwilling to go in on her mates SB and LL, she’s essentially helping protect their reputations and indebting them to her - she’ll probably recoup far more than she’s owed in future work/favours.

Everyone owed money only received about 20% of what they were owed from the fund so it’s hardly a massive gesture, but something she could make a massive deal about on principle.

Also worth noting all the freelancers said The Pool paid really well compared to their other publications so it just goes to show how good her Guardian gig is.
 
When we start our beauty collective we can also include some fake woke word salads.

I don’t mind not being paid for it since I don’t think my musings on my own thoughts and feelings about life will really add any value to anyone’s day.

I’m very interested in the value of content. I’ve heard SH say a few times that nobody wants to pay for content anymore like it’s an outrageous affront to her and her kindly gifted opinions. But something we all have to understand is that a career is not a career if nobody wants to pay you for what you offer. It reminds me of X Factor contestants with the blinkered logic: ‘yeah I think I’ll win because I want it so much more than everyone else! 110%!’

It’s great to want things and to have drive. But it’s only a hobby if your want doesn’t translate to something someone else wants enough to pay money for it.

You wouldn’t hear a cleaner saying ‘nobody wants to pay to have their toilets scrubbed anymore!’ Because there is a clear value attached to that.

Writing about beauty products is not something with an inherent, clear value which remains even as society changes. It’s an illusory, slippery career which might soon be irrelevant. Why anyone would pay for content which is encouraging them to spend their hard earned money on things which ultimately add very little value to their existence? You can’t retire a year early by smearing creme de la mer on your cheeks. That’s the real question I think, why would you expect someone to pay to read veiled adverts? It’s just so delusional to me.

When i read about the child slave labour and associated deaths when mining for, for example, mica, I am disgusted by any claims of woke-ness. We are none of us very woke.

An expose of the beauty industry which took months to investigate? That I would pay proper money for.
 
Originalnuttah said:
So when SH was furious whilst on a writer’s retreat, was it because of the lost £7k or the way her mate LL was treated after The Pool folded? It must be very difficult to navigate a friendship when doing business together. The number of influencers who are intertwined in a similar way is staggering to my innocent eye. Sometimes it really does feel like a complex web of connections in which a number of them are related to each other.

I followed The Pool for a few months but then got bored with the sanctimonious white- middle class cool Central London vibe going on it. The account of the way they have run this business is truly shocking.
Click to expand...
How was she treated? I recall LL coming away from the debacle relatively unscathed. Up to when it closed earlier this year she was owed £40K according to this - https://www.12ft.io/https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jan/30/the-pool-womens-site-co-founded-by-lauren-laverne-in-crisis-talks - which is a lot of money, of course, but perhaps not that big an amount with someone with several lucrative income streams as she has.
 
People wanted her to account for its demise but she had left already and it had nothing to do with her.
 
I'm so naive. I genuinely had no idea The Pool was actually a business with its own offices. I assumed someone was sort of running it on a laptop somewhere as a vanity project and people like SH donated the occasional article.
Stupid question coming up - how was it expected to make money? Advertising? If so someone should've pointed out they needed to expand their target audience. I'm probably slightly who it was aimed at yet felt completely excluded and alienated most of the time. I absolutely hated the 'we're all in this together and all think the same way' attitude eg 'Women We Love'. So bloody smug.
 
Sorry if this has already been posted but how the hell can editors not have any idea that their publication is going through a shitstorm like what happened to the Pool?
 
Re The Pool, I’m a member of some media FB groups and heard rumblings the site was in trouble last summer. Sam Baker and Lauren Laverne resigned as company directors last August (rats, sinking ships comes to mind), screenshot from Companies House records attached (LL’s married name is Fisher BTW). Last October a journalist posted that she was waiting months for payment and other writers replied saying they were experiencing the same thing. So for months the site commissioned writers who the higher ups knew they couldn’t pay. Which is fraud in my eyes. The reason why so many people don’t speak out (like Robyn Wilder Heritage) is because the media is cliquey and small and you can’t run the risk of pissing potential editors off or marking yourself out as a troublemaker
 

Attachments

  • 037301CA-1C8C-4F41-99E3-1DAC8EE8DFB9.jpeg
    037301CA-1C8C-4F41-99E3-1DAC8EE8DFB9.jpeg
    57.7 KB · Views: 505
Old fart said:
Re The Pool, I’m a member of some media FB groups and heard rumblings the site was in trouble last summer. Sam Baker and Lauren Laverne resigned as company directors last August (rats, sinking ships comes to mind), screenshot from Companies House records attached (LL’s married name is Fisher BTW). Last October a journalist posted that she was waiting months for payment and other writers replied saying they were experiencing the same thing. So for months the site commissioned writers who the higher ups knew they couldn’t pay. Which is fraud in my eyes. The reason why so many people don’t speak out (like Robyn Wilder Heritage) is because the media is cliquey and small and you can’t run the risk of pissing potential editors off or marking yourself out as a troublemaker
Click to expand...

It’s all shocking and not enough has been made of it. I remember when a freelancer (can’t recall who) reluctantly spoke out on twitter about non-payment and SB happily dropped newly-appointed Cate Sevilla in it, vaguely insinuating it was due to poor processes but now Cate was in position it would all get sorted. The nerve.

Poor Cate - afaik she had no idea and I can’t imagine anyone would take that job if the facts were even hinted at, let alone known.
 
Status
Thread locked. We start a new thread when they have over 1000 posts, click the blue button to see all threads for this topic and find the latest open thread.
Back
Top