Hi, this is Frances, a co-founder of Ravenous, and I have a confession. In my previous corporate food media role, I was essentially a project manager that ensured sponsored social media content went live with the right asset, copy, links, and brand logos. I’d pitch ideas that were “sponsor friendly” which meant they could be easily incorporated by any tourism board sponsor or a consumer packaged good food or drink product. This meant I wasn’t necessarily producing the most creative or culture-shaping work. I was praised when the campaign received positive feedback from the sponsor — especially when they returned with more business. In this tumultuous media environment, it’s tough to walk away from a solid gig with good pay and benefits.
It was never my dream to ensure a client was satisfied with the deliverables and the product was mentioned within the first three seconds of the video. I accepted sponcon as part of the job. If you produced cool, important food journalism and writing, you needed sponcon to pay the bills. The problem is when those sponsors interfere with the editorial integrity.
For one video I produced, a client wasn’t happy with a recipe shown because it was "unrelatable." The video featured a recipe with ingredients from a Japanese grocery store. The underlying gripe was that ingredients like sashimi and perilla leaves weren't appealing to a mass audience. A meeting was called to figure out how to handle the situation. I spoke up worried that sponsors crossed a line in influencing editorial decisions. My concerns were met with silence, and visible muted sighs on the Google Meet call. The conversation moved on on how to make good with the client, which included pitching a recipe for a sandwich or hot dog.
This wasn’t the first or last time sponsors interfered with editorial work. Sponsored content at best produces mediocre, regurgitated content. At worst, it perpetuates the flattening culture that is pervasive on social media and also makes me want to vomit. The divide between advertising and editorial is an ongoing conflict across all forms of journalism, but is it just me or does food media seem more susceptible to blurring those lines?
When my fellow worker-owners and I were dreaming up a food media publication a year ago, we intentionally wanted to build a media business that wasn’t reliant on advertisers. We took a bet that there were enough readers out there who craved quality food journalism and writing and would buy a subscription to support us. The magic of Ravenous is that we can choose what partners to work with and say no to ones that don’t align with our values. We’re not reliant on pageviews or advertising goals, and there’s no one making our editorial decisions but us.
While corporate media companies are cutting costs and getting rid of human workers, we’re aiming to do the exact opposite. We want to hire talented food freelancers who have something important to say and share our platform. We want to help new writers get their foot in the door with current opportunities really scarce.
Right now we’re in the middle of our Feed the Bird subscriber drive, commemorating one year since we all lost our jobs in Big Food Media. We’ve hit about a third of our goal of 300 new paid subscribers. Here’s a breakdown of what we’ll be able to do if we reach these milestones:
If we get…
- 100 paid subscribers that will allow us to cover basic website operations costs for the year. That includes website hosting and our CMS.
- 200 paid subscribers that will also allow us to do the above + cover 1 part-time salary of worker-owner for two months — that’s the work of 8 feature stories.
- 300 paid subscribers that will allow us to do the above + have a budget to hire freelance food writers, photographers, and other creatives, so we can produce more than our current four stories a week. This means more profiles, investigations, labor stories, and dives into food trends
Here’s a special discount. Join the flock or bring a friend over!
New on Ravenous this week
Amy McCarthy
Jaya Saxena
Jaya Saxena
🐦⬛ Bird Droppings
- For the true crime fans out there, you can catch Jaya talking about how Hooters has failed to protect its workers in The Hooters Murders documentary over on the USA Today Network. Bonus, read her story about how the breastaurant is planning a comeback.
- Dishwashers are paid $70K at John’s Food & Wine in Chicago and Food & Wine just named John's its Restaurant of the Year. Read how they developed their hybrid counter service business model to prioritize paying their workers well in a fine dining setting.
- Listen to Amy commemorating Dolly Parton’s legacy in music and food on Serious Eats founder Ed Levine’s podcast, Special Sauce.
- After La Fête in Birmingham, Alabama earned a Michelin star, chef and owner Kristen Hall had transitioned her role to become the face of the restaurant. This quote really resonated with me as I think about how Ravenous will continue to grow. “When you get accolades, the demand for you is so much greater,” she said. “I think, when you start to get where demand exceeds supply, you feel the pressure [to] expand or to grow or to do something differently. For me, it only made me focus on what we were doing, in the way that we were doing it.”
