From Sacto, Northern Cal: Slice In The Sacramento Bee

Posted by Adam Kuban, January 19, 2005 at 12:17 PM

Last night, Slice was talking about Sacramento with our HR director, H. Smith. Ms. Smith mentioned that her brother lives in Sacto, is a loyal Slice reader, and has been recommending the site to friends out that way. Could he be partly responsible, then, for the brief mention we received today in a sidebar to a story on food blogs in the Sacramento Bee*? Who knows?

What we do know is that it's a nice story, by Mike Dunne, about the groundswell of food blogs out there and how they're changing the way grub is shared and thought about. Particularly interesting to us was a passage about how food blogs are affecting the traditional restaurant review. As Pete Snyder, founder and CEO of New Media Strategies, a web-trend consultancy, said, blogs are

"throwing the balance of power in the restaurant industry off kilter." Up to now, restaurateurs in any one city had to be concerned with only a few restaurant critics, whom they sometimes could recognize and provide with sharpened service. Now, however, anyone with a Web site can be a stealthy restaurant critic.

"Chefs and restaurateurs can't possibly have all their bases covered all the time, so foodies have a better chance (than a recognized critic) of seeing flaws," Snyder says.

Also interesting to us was that a few food bloggers have gotten book deals as a result of their sites:

At this point, most food bloggers look to be happy with expressing themselves and with getting periodic recognition from their peers, but several also are aware that commercial possibilities could arise with their site's very next visit.

[Rebecca] Blood [of Rebecca's Pocket] recalls being approached "out of the blue" by a publisher who ultimately signed her to the contract that led to "The Weblog Handbook." In the summer of 2002, Julie Powell, a New York "government drone by day, renegade "foodie" by night," began a blog on her attempt to cook the 536 recipes in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" over the ensuing year; the Julie/Julia project also landed her a book deal. Reports of other bloggers morphing into published authors are increasing, scuttling at least for the moment speculation that the rise of blogs could jeopardize traditional print media.

Heh. If anybody wants to offer Slice a book deal, we wouldn't turn our nose up at that pie.

But seriously, the story is a good read, and it's chock-full of links to some great blogs, such as A Full Belly, The Food Section, The Accidental Hedonist, and Becks & Posh.

Oh, and speaking of our HR director—you didn't know we had one, did you?—she was helping Slice editor & publisher Adam K. recruit a bureau chief for our upcoming Tokyo office. More on that later.

Big ups to the Sacbee copy editor who wrote the headline for this story. It appeared in that publication as "Finger Clickin' Good." Heh.

* Along with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the SLC Deseret News, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, one of our favorite newspaper names.

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