Part 3: “The Good, The Bad, & the Plain Weird,” Kenji Lopez-Alt of Serious Eats

Part 3 of my review of Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Talk, “I’ve Got a Test for That”: Notes from the Keynote to attendees of this year’s Food Blog South Conference (2013) continues below.  Here, Kenji defines the “Good, Bad, & Plain Weird” of writing and publishing for the Internet, pointing out that, oftentimes, these three features are the same.  —Helana

– “The Good, the Bad, and the Plain Weird” –

Part of being a food blogger (or, any blogger, really) means participating in a world where the medium still remains to be properly defined and standardized.  There’s a lot of conflicting advice, examples, and user ideas, but, fortunately, it’s fairly easy to locate the sort of “good, bad, and ugly” aspects of what we do.  

Pictured: one of Katie Sokoler’s photos of “cats in hats.”  Checkout her website for inspiring installation art (as well as these images of “cats in hats”) to see more of her work as a professional “fun maker.”

If the above image is any indication, blogging (at the end of the day) can be inherently strange.  Below, Kenji defines the good, bad, and “weird” aspects of blogging as surprisingly similar, if not identical, for a few reasons:

GOOD:

1 – Anyone can do it

2 – Millions of voices; tons of diversity

3 – Niche Writing (there’s literally a niche for everything from the “Ramen Rater” to “Cats in Hats” )

4 – It’s FREE

 BAD:

(often, the same as the good)

1 – Anyone can do it

2 – Millions of voices; tons of diversity

3 – Overlap on popular subjects, so “how do you fight the noise?”

4 – Monetizing can be extremely difficult

According to Kenji, these parallels have lead to

“hundred of thousands, if not millions of food blogs on the Internet, and the sad fact is that the vast majority of them are not good, and of the good ones, the vast majority are not financially viable.

It’s simple economics: When people give stuff away for free, they don’t make money from it.”

–Kenji Lopez-Alt

To go back to Kenji’s drawing in Part 1, there’s a reason why “high availability” intersects so surely with “low quality”: not because Internet writers are incapable of doing good work, but because the lack of financial incentive might prevent a writer from consistently spell or fact checking and doing more research when the ability to hit “publish” is right there.  

Since the vast majority of bloggers (and this is really just an educated guess on my part) are moonlighting as writers at night—as with the “Mommy Blogger” trend—there’s almost no one holding them accountable for perfecting quality content.  In fact, many bloggers turn up their noses to comments that point out their inaccuracy or recipe blips, and this is by no means the same writing supervision one would get from their Food Editor.

[And, might I add from personal experience, that when you do get into blogging, there’s this incredible desire to “catch up” with all of those writers before you.  Visit Simply Recipes, decide to start a food blog, then visit Simply Recipes again? Trust me, you’ll want to pump out 10 recipes a week just to keep up with the amount of content found on Elise Bauer’s website! It’s easy to mis-prioritize why our personal domains should have tons of content.  We don’t publish regularly (and a lot) just because it makes us look good, but because regular content is one of the few traceable ways we, as writers, can accurately narrate our larger experiences with food.  By managing to share this content with our communities in real time, we represent our lives as food writers honestly and create a body of work to return to in the future.  See Kenji’s notes on treating your blog “like a restaurant” in the next section (available tomorrow).]

Without pay, the simple truth of any blog will become, at some point, an issue of economics: “free work” runs the risk of = “crappy work” where no one, not even online, can really “get something for free.”  

But money isn’t everything.  

However, it does provide a great framework for why Christopher Kimball demanded that the skilled few “ask to be paid for what we do.”

As I often tell my students, there’s a reason why some of the best articles online require subscriptions, tantalizing readers with “snippet” views.  Good work often requires some financial incentive in traditional models of publication, and being “paid for what we do” not only proves an author’s credibility, but also ensures that readers are paying for something worth paying for.

Not that this perspective is always true, but it’s certainly worth noting.  If you haven’t visited Kenji’s “Food Lab” at Serious Eats, then do so immediately.  Readers don’t pay for access to articles on tenderizing chicken breasts ( “Why Do I Pound My Breasts?” ) nor do they pay for the “13 Rules of Perfect Prime Rib.”  If anything (and I’ll discuss this point further in section 5), Kenji’s call to bloggers to “utilize the Internet’s full potential” offers new ways of imagining old rules.

It also helps us to understand Kenji’s next two points – how to blueprint the “Architecture” of your own “Good Blog Post,” and why community has become so important as we move forward in this field.

 —

See tomorrow’s installment, Part 4: “The Architecture of a Good Blog Post” from Kenji’s talk, “I’ve Got a Test for That”: Notes from the Keynote, addressed to this year’s Food Blog South Conference (2013).

Directory:

Or, See Part 1: “I’ve Got a Test for That”

Part 2: “Gatekeepers” 

Part 3: “The Good, the Bag, & the Plain Weird” (above)

Part 4: “The Architecture of a Good Blog Post”

Part 5: “What Crazy thing Can I Do?”

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Part 3: "The Good, The Bad, & the Plain Weird," Kenji Lopez-Alt of Serious Eats, 5.0 out of 5 based on 2 ratings Google+