Paper Palate

So, I was glancing at the LA Times online food section today and I saw that there was a story about food bloggers: “Have We Gone Blog Wild?”

Chuckling at the pun, (how I loved to write headlines like that, back in my newsroom days) I clicked on the link and started reading.

My grin soon faded.

Lo and behold, in the lead (that is the first paragraph, for those who do not speak journalism jargon) the writer, Avital Binshtock, lays an insult onto the food bloggers.

“When food blogging was new (about 15 minutes ago), it was fun to pore over the gastronomic musings at the Accidental Hedonist or I Was Just Really Very Hungry. In those days, reading about what someone ate for dinner or which food magazine they liked best was kind of amusing. But quicker than you could say blogosphere, the world of blogs-by-dedicated-foodies got crowded, repetitive, overly precious and just plain dull.”

Now, first of all, from the perspective of someone who used to work as both a copyeditor and a reporter, that is a bad way to start your feature. The lead is supposed to be the most important sentence in your story, the one that encapsulates the entire crux of what you are writing about.

What is this writer saying? In stating categorically that food blogs are “crowded, repetitive, overly precious and just plain dull,” he is not exactly giving the reader much incentive to read his story, one for which I expect some amount of time and research was expended. That lead is an authorial shot in the foot: basically the writer says, “Well, I think that most food blogs suck, but I had to write about them anyway, and so you should suffer along with me and read this article.”

Does the author then continue in this vein? Basically. Focusing in on highly specialized food blogs, the writer admits to fascination with reading about other people’s obsessions and manias about singular food items such as pizza or pho, but at the same time, wonders if the people who update their blogs daily actually have lives.

Is it necessary for paid, professional writers to continually insult the efforts of passionate bloggers? Don’t journalists, editors and anthologists get weary of feeling superior by comparing themselves to people who don’t get paid for their writing and finding the bloggers to be lacking?

Just recently in my own blog, I noted a pretty enormous change of opinion on food blogs and bloggers by the Best Food Writing Anthologies’ editor Holly Hughes. When she wrote the 2004 edition, she utterly dismissed food blogs and bloggers with an arrogant swipe of her pen; however, by 2005, she changed her tune.

On page xii, Hughes said, “After days and days of browsing through blogs, I can say that there’s a lot of sloppy writing out there, but there’s also some very good stuff, full of a refreshing curiousity and excitement about food. These people are writing about food–shopping for it, cooking it, eating it–because they love food.”

I think that some writers, journalists and editors are starting to get it.

Food blogs are here to stay, and they are not necessarily just a fringe phenominon. More than one book has been published by a food blogger (Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia) or group of bloggers (Digital Dish, edited by Owen Linderholm) , and at least one more book is expected from another food blogger (from Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini.)

Sure, there are some less than professional food blogs out there and sure, some of the writing is stale, and some of the photography is less than stunning. However, quite a few blogs do not even attempt to be or look professional; they are written by hobbyists who are simply expressing a personal passion. By the same token, there are some so-called professional magazines and newspapers which feature shallow writing, shoddy editing and inept photography.

But the truth is, there are really great food writers in the blogosphere, and some phenominal photographers. And we are not going to go away.

And frankly, some of us are trained professional writers. I, myself, am a freelance magazine writer, and I know of several other freelancers who also blog.

We don’t blog for the money, the glory or the fame. We do it because we love food, we love cooking it, researching it, photographing it, eating it, and writing about it.

And there are plenty of people out there on the Internet reading our work and getting a great deal of enjoyment and knowledge out of it.

That has to be more than a little intimidating to print journalists who are faced with falling circulation rates.

And I suppose, it is bound to make one a bit snarky.

In the end, however, insults from “professionals,” like Binshtock and the older one from Hughes, tell just as much about the writer as they do about the objects of their scorn.

And the message that the reader gets is is quite clear.

Journalists and editors can be just as petty as everyone else.

They are just lucky enough to be paid for it.