Serious Eater by Ed Levine & J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

Author:Ed Levine & J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

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We had no recipe developers on staff, so I used my contacts to contract with gifted recipe developers who had already been discovered by the blogosphere. There were posts from Dorie Greenspan, whom I had met when she was a guest on New York Eats, the regional cable TV show I did with Jeffrey Steingarten and Susie Essman. Dorie has written many wonderful baking books, and she has managed to figure out a way to spend half the year in New York and the other half in Paris. Nice work, Dorie.

When some early food bloggers discovered Dorie’s recipes, they started a cook-along blog in 2007 called Tuesdays with Dorie. Within one minute of listening to her talk about fruit tarts on our show, I knew Dorie was a serious eater at heart and a very serious baker in practice.

We posted cartoon recipes from the brilliant cartoonist Larry Gonick. From his recipe “Simple Chocolate Sauce”: “Continue beating as it cools until your arm gets tired. Then it is done.”

Recipes weren’t my jam or Serious Eats’, and I was convinced after doing a little research that I didn’t need them. I did initially investigate various ways of publishing recipes, but I concluded at that point that I would never be able to compete with Epicurious, the leading recipe database at the time. That conclusion was, as my son Will used to say to me all the time when he was five, “wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Every day was an editorial improvisation. Though we took our subject matter seriously, we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. “It’s just food,” I would remind everyone every morning. “It is most assuredly not nuclear disarmament or rocket science.”

Similarly, we were still experimenting with the format and style that would get us to financial stability. I still hadn’t given up the video ghost. In January of 2007 I wrote a memo outlining our video strategy: “We should post at least one new video every day.” That, of course, proved to be totally unrealistic cost- or production-wise. Those facts didn’t stop us from having daily arguments about the wisdom of video versus texts and photos on blogs. Meg’s argument: “Text and photos are cheap and fast to produce, and it’s what people expect to see on a blog.” My response: “Advertisers are paying far more to run commercials before, during, or after a short-form video.”

Meg knew, just as I did, that advertisers buy eyeballs, aka ad impressions, by the thousands. The metric they use is CPM, or cost per thousand. She also knew advertisers were at that moment paying twenty- to forty-dollar CPMs for video impressions, compared to a ten-dollar CPM for a static ad. But Meg, as usual, had the last word: “You can’t get enough video views to make it worthwhile to an advertiser to buy. The bottom line is in 2007 people don’t come to Serious Eats—or any other blog, for that matter—to watch videos.” (My, how times have changed in 2019. These days every advertiser wants video impressions.

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