I wouldn't say your baby is ugly, but your writing is pants. It was March, 2006 and it was the first time the broth boiled over as food bloggers of the world dished out buckets of bitchiness. Some 98% of it was aimed at one man, Pete Wells. The columnist wrote about foodblogs in Food & Wine Magazine. It featured the sentence,
Today, eating a cheese sandwich qualifies as a hot scoop for legions of bloggers.It ignited the grill that burnt hundreds of food bloggers. Embittered scribes launched a cheese sandwich day
The [blogs] that work, the ones who get the readers, are those who can also write well... [The ones] I can get to the end of a post without falling asleep on to my keyboard. In the blogosphere, as in the public prints, quality will out.like their babies
Certainly during the cheese sandwich debacle, there was a level of defensiveness among food bloggers that was totally out of proportion to the criticism. Further fueling this was an unwillingness on the part of some bloggers to take a good, long look at their own blogs. Not all food blogs are wonderful, not all are well written and most do not have amazing photography. Criticism, some criticism, a lot of criticism even, hurts.
This attitude is not helped whenever the foodblog awards come around and the now perennial whinging that "It's always the same blogs that win" - which is incorrect - is chorused with calls to disallow the "famous" blogs entry - much like you'd nick Michael Schumacher's car keys or snap Tiger Woods' clubs to keep them out of contention. The best food blogs win for a reason and those reasons are pretty much the ones Jay notes. Also, while the overwhelming majority of foodbloggers covet any praise that comes their way, few have any interest in becoming a blog book writing sensation or a magazine food writer for that matter. Their enjoyment is the community they find themselves in and the friends they make along the way.
Therefore, the keyboard quarrels of the food blog world starkly illustrate the media's changed landscape. The rows highlight differences in perception. Perception of what is public and what is kind-of-assumed-to-be private, but isn't really private at all. About what can be critiqued and about what cannot be critiqued.
It's hard, nay impossible, for a journalist to understand how a blogger, with a public facing blog, can sulk at objective criticism - or even ridicule - of something that resides in the public domain. As the old adage goes: "If you can't take the heat, make your blog private and password protect it". Social media, for want of a better descriptor, really is social, and people will talk. And inevitably, there will be some people who'll quite happily sentence your family's favourite lasagne recipe to 40 lashes and a spoonful of sarcasm. That's never fun to hear, alas it is inevitable.
