Julia Allison Baugher (born 1981)[1] is an American former columnist and online and television personality under the name Julia Allison. She has been described as an early influencer.
Baugher grew up in Wilmette, Illinois; her father, Peter Baugher, is a lawyer.[2] [3] She earned a degree in political science from Georgetown University in 2004 and a MPA from Harvard Kennedy School.[1]
While in college, Baugher worked for Mark Kirk, then a member of the House of Representatives from Illinois,[2] [4] and she subsequently covered the 2004 general election for Comcast.[4]
Baugher began her writing career in 2002 with a dating column in the Georgetown University student newspaper, called "Sex on the Hilltop" after the TV show Sex and the City. The column attracted national attention and she published articles in magazines such as Seventeen and Cosmopolitan.[5] After graduation, she moved to New York, where she became a weekly columnist for the free paper AM New York and auditioned for and appeared in pilots for reality TV shows.[5]
After rebranding herself as Julia Allison, in 2005 she started a blog, where she posted details of her daily life and dating, and pictures of her outfits. She promoted herself with links to her blog in comments on Gawker stories, and on its tip line, and in 2006 attended a Halloween party thrown by its founder and editor Nick Denton as a "condom fairy", in a dress made of condom packages.[5] In response, Gawker ran a harshly critical article about her.[5] [6] Allison asked for it to be taken down, but later responded with a rear photo on her blog captioned "Dearest Gawker, Kiss my ass." She and Gawker continued to exchange barbs; a Gawker editor later described her as "our Paris Hilton".[5] She was an early adopter of Tumblr in 2007, which she used for what she called "lifecasting", and was a regular at in-person Internet events; she was on the "prom committee" for the inaugural Webutante Ball in 2010.[5] In 2007 she became the dating columnist at Time Out New York.[4] She also wrote for Elle and was a tech columnist for Tribune Media Services.[7] Her fame led to a profile in the New York Times and a cover story in Wired, both in 2008, in addition to network television appearances.[5] [8] [9]
Allison carefully crafted her online identity, including staged photographs intended to appear impromptu,[10] and monetized it in ways now called being an influencer.[5] She formed a company called Non Society and pitched the idea of a collaborative living space for social media content producers, now called a collab house; Bravo filmed the pilot of a projected reality show, IT Girls.[5] She acquired corporate endorsement deals and co-starred in the ad for the Sony Vaio laptop, spoke at business conferences, and attended the annual World Economic Forum meeting and the White House Correspondents' Dinner.[5] In 2010, she moved to Los Angeles, where she co-starred in Miss Advised, a reality show that ran for one season on Bravo.[5]
Throughout her online career, Allison attracted negative coverage that condemned her as a publicity seeker.[5] [11] In 2011, she began sending legal requests for some such coverage to be taken down.[3] In 2012, she withdrew, erasing or making private most of her social media posts.[5] In 2018, she said she moved to San Francisco, worked on a book called Experiments in Happiness, and became a change activist.[12] she plans to pursue a master's degree at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.[5]
Allison previously wrote extensively about who she was dating, including Congressman Harold Ford Jr. when she was a college student.[5] [9] In 2010, she dated Jack McCain, a son of Senator John McCain.[3] In 2023, she became engaged to Noah Feldman, a professor of law at Harvard.[13]