In its food and dining coverage, is The Atlanta Journal-Constitution keeping up with the times?
Certainly, the AJC aspires to fill you up with everything that pertains to eating, wherever and whenever you wish to consume it. Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and Facebook? The AJC websites, accessible on your desktop, laptop and mobile devices? The printed word, spread out on inky pages and pored over with a cup of coffee?
Our food and dining team has a presence in all these spheres. Our talented writers and photographers are charged with telling you what’s really going on when it comes to all things food and drink in this delicious city we call home. Our stories land in the newspaper at least five days a week, and we produce an average of six stories daily that you can view online.
Still, I must ask: Has the AJC been covering food and dining as best it can?
No, not always. But that’s changing.
About 18 months ago, the AJC began to shift its dining strategy by combining its food and dining content under the direction of one person. Before that, and off and on for nearly two decades, the AJC’s former lead dining critic, John Kessler, deftly managed restaurant reviews. Through the years, other editors handled the Food section.
The goal in establishing a food and dining editor was to ensure breadth, variety and cohesiveness in coverage. (Do you want to read about the same chef or restaurant week after week? Does the Atlanta dining world exist only inside The Perimeter? Are the taste buds of those of us who live and cook in the South limited only to what fits in some rigid category of “Southern cuisine”? No, no and no.) Now, rather than just planning which recipes to include in Thursday’s Food section or which restaurants to review for Friday’s Go Guide, we are thinking broadly about where and how food fits into the fabric of life in Atlanta.
While I oversee editorial content, one of my tasks is still to review restaurants. And this is where, starting now, things are undergoing a visible change.
Today, for the first time since I joined the AJC in September 2015, my photo appears with this column. Here’s the logic behind this decision.
Restaurant reviewing is tricky. We strive for as close a dining experience as one that any person would have when eating out. We don't make a reservation in our own name. We are as inconspicuous as possible during visits. We adhere to those essential standards and other guidelines issued for restaurant critics by the Association of Food Journalists.
Yet the once standard practice of keeping a critic’s face out of view was one that I considered sticky from the start. Because for all the efforts toward anonymity, my photo had been in the public domain as a food journalist before I arrived in the South.
A few times, I’ve been recognized. Other times not.
Let’s be real. There are select restaurants where a photo of me — or fellow AJC dining critics Wyatt Williams and Elizabeth Lenhard — is posted somewhere in the kitchen. Anonymity in the restaurant criticism world is a noble goal but one that is difficult to maintain.
That more restaurant critics are revealing themselves is a marker of the digital age in which we live. The motivation for today’s “reveal” is driven precisely by this fact.
When I say that the AJC aspires to keep up with the times but could do better, it is less about restaurant reviews — I hope that our reviews are as fair, factual and unbiased as any in the country — and more about the limitations of trying to act anonymously when the job is much more than reviewing restaurants.
Once upon a time newspapers might have employed someone whose sole job was to be the dining critic. Not anymore. Newsrooms are changing. And as the editor tasked with steering those changes in our food and dining coverage, anonymity hurts more than it helps.
Showing a face is necessary to get behind the scenes, to see what’s really going on, to sniff out the stories that you would be most interested in, and to share that news — often through a digital lens where you might see my face, be it in a Facebook Live cooking demo or a Snapchat taste test.
As one of the AJC’s dining critics, I will continue to keep my head down during restaurant reviews.
But as the food and dining editor, it’s time to look up instead of staring at my own face on a clean plate. I hope you agree this is in keeping with the times, and I look forward to going places with you where neither of us has been before.
