Add Times-Pic, or, are zombies the future of food criticism?

At first blush, the Cod was shocked, like many, that lead restaurant critic Brett Anderson was among 33% of Times-Picayune employees pinkslipped yesterday. After all, New Orleans is nothing if not a food town, and if your paper is getting leaner and meaner, doing more with less, etc, etc, you would focus on strengths, like  your Beard-winning restaurant ciritc, and cut elsewhere, right?  

Maybe, maybe not. What follows is uninformed speculation, and I would love to be wrong. As the boss announces here, the Times-Pic is becoming a digitally focused news organization. That's a fancy way of saying that going forward, you will be more of a website, and less of a newspaper. There are serious issues concerning this platform shift -- going digital shifts costs from publishers to readers, who are responsible for having access to a device and broadband to consume the news product -- but it's not just a platform shift. In theory, a "digitally focused news organization" could take advantage of lower production costs to be a trimmer and tougher news outlet. In practice, the web side of news organizations seem to rely on reader-submitted content. So, instead of more sustained investigative journalism, you get more pictures of readers' pets dressed up in the colors of the local NFL franchise. For example, the Boston Globe's  Pulitzer-winning coverage of Catholic sex abuse was a product of  the print edition; Boston.com today has a feature on funny license plates. 

The sad truth is, you can have a "food section" like this without paying a critic. If your readers will click and argue and generate pageviews fighting over what's the best roast beef po-boy, why pay Brett Anderson? Indeed, a single, qualified voice will sometimes be contrarian, while a mass of reader comments by definition represent conventional wisdom, which is what makes advertisers comfortable. It's possible to imagine a critic like Brett Anderson revealing that a new venture from a beloved chef ain't all that, or worse still, that a beloved institution is slipping. It's very hard to imagine one could learn the truth about brunch at Commander's Palace from a swarm of reader comments.  If pageviews, rather than restaurant criticism, is your news organization's goal, a real restaurant critic is unnecessary, and possibly detrimental. The future of restaurant criticism in newspapers looks more like Yelp than it does like Anton Ego. The Cod suggests that ambitious NOLA restaurauteurs make sure they have plenty of dishes with brains on the menu. 

Comments

[Todd Price (aka @Frolic)]

And doing it right costs money. Eliminate the restaurant critic, and you eliminate his expense account.

[gastropoda]

Do you mean "can't" have a food section like that? Want to tout you but want to make sure I'm not misunderstanding.

[Fesser]

@Todd: Surely that expense is negligible, in the grand scheme of things.

@Gastropoda: No, I mean you can have a "food section" w/ lots of reader forums and stuff w/ no food critic.

[Dave from MPLS]

Michelin should step in and make a guide for NOLA.

[TSWSarah]

What's funny is that this seems to be the opposite of what the LA Times is doing, since they just strengthened their already solid food coverage by hiring Jonathan Gold away from the weekly. (Which probably ties into the LAT pay wall, because there is no way you're not going to be able to follow Gold and not hit your ten free clicks a month within the first week or so.)

[Adidas Jeremy Scott]

Eliminate the restaurant critic, and you eliminate his expense account.