Dianne Jacob, Will Write For Food

Useful Tips, Interviews, and Stories to Inspire Food Writers and Bloggers

Writing

Links are the New Currency

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chain-1There’s a new idea in publishing: link, don’t pay. If a company wants your online content, they just link to it. That way, it’s argued, even though you don’t get a check for supplying editorial, you get a bump in traffic.

And isn’t that what we all want? More traffic?

Well yes. More traffic makes us feel superior when we see rising numbers of unique visitors. It leads to more income from ads, and potentially, more links. But more traffic alone doesn’t pay the mortgage.

One of my students mentioned talking to the Meredith Corporation about providing content to a new site. They want to download the entire content of her blog, and all they’ll give her is a link. She was struggling with whether to agree. Is it worth it? Why would anyone go to her blog if it’s all on Meredith’s site?

The New York Times launched a Bay Area website, and listed several excellent food blogs in its Eating & Drinking blogroll. Everybody wins, it seems, except for the freelancer who could have created original content. The paper lowered its budget, the bloggers are honored and thrilled [Read more…] about Links are the New Currency

Who is the Best Food Writer Today?

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images-1While looking through my book, Will Write for Food, over the weekend, I was struck by the writers I quoted just a few years ago, all newspaper and magazine writers and cookbook authors. Certainly they were the big names in print food writing.

But that was then and this is now. So now I’m going around asking: “Who is the ultimate food writer today?”

On a cemetery walk with blogger and cookbook author Romney Steele, we decided it’s not a simple answer, depending on how you define success and food writing. Later she named cookbook authors Jane and Michael Stern, John T. Edge, and Deborah Madison; then  bestselling author Michael Pollan and Tom Philpott for food politics and science. Are these last two truly food writers?

What about from a commercial perspective? The only cookbooks I’ve seen on bestseller lists lately are Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child (sorry, she’s dead) and  Julie & Julia by Julie Powell. I’m disqualifying cookbooks by celebrities and celebrity chefs who would not call themselves food writers, like Rachel Ray and Paula Deen, and Hungry Girl author Lisa Lillien. Does this mean Julie Powell is America’s most successful food writer?

Yesterday, over herbal chai tea with food writer Tara Weaver, I posed the question. Commercially speaking, she offered New York Times writer Mark Bittman as a candidate, a newspaperman who has also mastered the cookbook bestseller lists and blogging.

But she’d rather look at success through the writing. This is where the conversation turned to bloggers, to her friends at Orangette and Gluten-Free Girl, beautiful writers like herself. Tara says she does most of her reading online today, not in books. Are bloggers the best food writers?

I’m still thinking about the answer. I’m interested in knowing what you think. Who gets your vote, and why?

The Pioneer Woman and Her Intimate Voice

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pdubLast Saturday I was a panelist on a BlogHer Food panel about voice and identity. Audience members were particularly interested in how personal they should be in their posts. It’s a good question, figuring out what to reveal, what only to imply, and what not to say.

Or at least that’s what I thought it was about. To process my thoughts, I looked at the writing of our panel’s biggest celebrity, Ree Drummond of The Pioneer Woman Cooks. She has 13 million annual visitors, according to the Los Angeles Times.

While on our panel, Ree said she writes “like I’m talking to my sister or my best friend.” Now, I don’t know about you, but you can be pretty personal with those kinds of people. But I couldn’t find much intimate content at all when I examined her cooking blog. [Read more…] about The Pioneer Woman and Her Intimate Voice

The Writer's Voice: What Is It?

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imagesIn preparation for the panel I’m on at BlogHer Food 09 in San Francisco tomorrow, I thought I’d say a few words about voice.

Why is voice important? It’s because you have a personality that  comes through in  your writing. You might express your unique self through level of language, the length of your sentences, the way you approach a subject. You’ll know when it feels right when you read back your work. It will sound like you and feel comfortable. Without voice, your writing will be bland, and you won’t come through as an individual.

Can you describe your voice? It’s an elusive thing.  Ask a friend to describe it to you. Here are a few adjectives that might apply:

  • knowledgeable
  • friendly
  • honest
  • self-deprecating
  • companionable
  • poetic
  • confessional
  • obsessive
  • high-energy.

Think about voice as a philosophy about what you want to get across in your blog. Here are some examples:

  • If I can make this, you can make this
  • Girls just want to have fun
  • I’m going to get this right if I have to do it 100 times.

The best answer to creating a strong voice is just to keep writing, to let your voice develop and deepen over time. Take this advice from A Writer’s Coach: The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work, a book [Read more…] about The Writer's Voice: What Is It?

A New Take on Food Memoir

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Time for an embarrassing confession: I stopped reading food memoirs. After leafing through dozens in the past few years I found they cover the same territory: nostalgic stories about growing up around food; cooking challenges; and/or  escapist travels and idyllic stays in Italy and France. There’s a similarity to the authors as well. They’re mostly white, middle-class women.

images-1Now, since I am a white, middle-class woman, I can’t say  the themes are unattractive. I was just bored. Enter Novella Carpenter. I heard her read from her food memoir, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, at a Berkeley church. Now here’s a white woman  who does the hard work of raising animals that I won’t do (including growing 350-pound pigs  in an abandoned lot), in a part of Oakland that’s not gentrified enough for people like me. I thought she was a little insane, but I couldn’t get enough. She was hilarious, cranky, sweet, intellectual and humble in a hip, white trash kind of way. I don’t know any food writers who swear easily, mention chin hair, or dumpster dive to feed their pigs, for example.

But along with that foreignness, she fit in to where we middle-class white women are at. Right now it’s so cool to raise a few chickens,  can your own produce from a vegetable garden, and wonder where your food comes from a la Michael Pollan. And when it came time to process one of her pigs, she ends up in a trendy Cal-Ital restaurant learning how to break down its carcass from a former Chez Panisse chef. Then she makes prosciutto and other cured meats, right back to the Eurocentric themes so dear to food writers and foodies.

Even when she writes about eating, it’s not the usual reverie. When her boyfriend tastes her home-raised braised saddle of rabbit, she writes: “‘This is better than chicken,’ he said, smacking his lips and slicing off another piece of juicy meat. Then, be still my heart, he gave me a sloppy kiss before stuffing more rabbit into his mouth.”  How refreshingly politically incorrect.

After her reading, her professor, Michael Pollan beamed as he asked her questions. She was an older student at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Imagine getting support and advice from one of the most revered food writers of our day. I tried not to be too jealous. Mostly, I couldn’t wait to read the book.

imagesI reserved my copy online at the Oakland Public Library. Only 45 people ahead of me. When my turn came, I read Farm City straight through, fascinated by the sacrifices she made to raise her own food in the hippest kind of way, quoting Wendell Berry and all.

I’m planning to take a tour of her farm during Oakland’s Eat Real festival weekend at the end of this month. She has foolishly agreed to give a tour to the public, and has no idea how many middle class white women like me plan to show up.

Food and Wine Writing on a Smart Phone

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A woman scans the wine aisle at a grocery store, overwhelmed by the selection. She’s looking for a  wine to go with the  chicken her husband will grill for friends this weekend. Then she remembers: she has the information at her fingertips. She whips out her smart phone (an iPhone, iPod Touch or BlackBerry in this case) and finds the exact recommendations: for red wine, Bonarda; for white, dry Zinfandel or Chenin Blanc.

Natalie Maclean made $2.99 when this target reader bought her smart phone application, the Mobile Drinks Matcher.

“The two trends that are exploding in popularity now: interest in food and wine, and the convenience of mobile apps,” says Natalie. “ As a wine-loving geek, I love finding ways for new technology to help us savor all of life’s pleasures, wherever we are.”

How many more target readers will spend $2.99 for this repurposed content? Natalie made a big investment (she won’t say how much) and hopes to find out. After spending eight years developing a searchable database of food and wine pairings for her website, the multiple award-winning writer spent three months with a software developer, creating a database of  380,000 mobile wine and food pairing applications for her Mobile Drinks Matcher. While anyone can look up the information on her website, she wanted a remote application for  liquor stores and restaurants.

Here’s what’s different from people searching her website from their computers and finding the exact same information: She gets paid. Isn’t that nice? Unusual, even.

Of course she has to recover her investment of several thousand dollars at least. It’s going to take a lot of $2.99 purchases. But the trend is increasing. People look up info while on the go.

What food writing do you own that might be repurposed this way?

Update: Hey, I scooped the New York Times. On Agust 3, Gadgetwise reviewed three more apps.