Food Bloggers on Newspaper Payrolls: Do Readers Suffer?

It was April, 2006, and a Seattle Times article about online food writers felt obliged to begin with an explanation of what blogs were all about. We've come a long, long way.

This week, an essay by a food blogger who writes as TheGastroGnome ("She Eats and Tells"), contends that Seattle foodies are ill-served by print journalism. Nancy Leson at the Times no longer writes specifically for the paper, she reprints posts to her blog, All You Can Eat. (News flash: Sue McCown has been laid off by Starbucks!) Ditto Rebekah Denn, Devouring Seattle at the Pee Eye. (News flash: the Obama-Rama, an hour before Seattlest's virtually identical post). Denn actually blogs in addition to her regular (print) duties. Meanwhile, interns fill up Seattle Weekly's blog, Voracious. She barely mentions the Stranger (where, as it happens, the chief restaurant reviewer, Bethany Jean Clement, was recently named managing editor).

Gnomey (as the GastroGnome is called by a friend in the comments) gets a couple of things wrong. Leslie Kelly, the freelance restaurant critic for the Pee Eye, has no roots in Memphis; that's not the reason for her provincialism. (She grew up in Bremerton.) Her husband, John Nelson, was working for the Memphis Commercial Appeal when he was recruited to be the Pee Eye's assistant managing editor.

Nor is she entirely right about the Stranger's approach to food. Sure, running a hookah bar review in the restaurant section was silly, but this week's food page is a terrific roundup of lower-priced alternatives to expensive restaurants. That's something a single blogger can't do: assign half a dozen writers to different aspects of a complex topic.

The power of blogging is the willingness to share one's knowledge. Bishop knows about Hidmo's Eritrean (not Ethiopian) buffet lunch and wonders why writer Kristin Dizon didn't mention it in her review of Habesha. Some reporters google compulsively before they start typing, others don't. (Urbanspoon lists 24 African restaurants, by the way.) But online reviews, whether by unpaid bloggers, corporate PR departments or salaried newsies, last forever.

Bemoaning the passage of a substantial local food section, subsidized by grocery advertising, misses the point. News of trendy, cutting-edge stuff has always been in professional journals and glossy magazines subsidized by equipment manufacturers and advertisers of luxury goods. And those editors, these days, get their cutting-edge news from the folks closest to the ground: bloggers.

So the result of "required blogging" means that short-staffed newspapers produce less original material (fewer original articles, less original research) for their Wednesday food pages and more original ("anecdotal") blog entries throughout the week. The advertiser-supported newspaper food section (Safeway! QFC! Albertson's!) is a shadow of its former self, replaced by eyeball-supported blogs (drug stores! cars! politicians!).

We think that's a good thing, although we drool with envy when we realize that Leson and Denn get paid (salary, expenses) to do what we do for peanuts.