Category: media

Square Pegs, Round Holes

It’s a cliche to say that the internet has changed the world, but in many cases it’s an important issue, because in terms of business, so many industries still haven’t caught up. In the writing/journalism/news industry, it used to be that the majority of writers headed to work every day, sat at a desk for an 8-hour shift, and generally answered to a boss of some sort.

With more and more publications moving online though, that is no longer the case. Whole publications are run from home offices, and newspapers and magazines realized that it was a heck of a lot cheaper in terms of benefits and overhead to just hire freelance writers as needed. From the perspective of the publication this is considerably more efficient, but when it comes to interacting with other industries, in this case, public relations firms, the old status quo no longer works.

Someone has to change how they do business. But who?

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Stupid PR Tricks – Pay Attention and Read What’s in Front of You

One of the flaws of the Internet is that, despite the great amounts of information out there available to make our lives easier, we don’t really read all of it before taking action. We have become a society of skimmers and at TasteTO we regularly get comments from readers that make us shake our heads. After a month on hiatus where we spent a bit of time cleaning up some back end stuff, I made a post about the changes we had made. We got a pile of comments complimenting us on “our new look”. But – we never changed the look of the site at all. Same layout. Exactly.

One of the things we did change was the manner in which people can contact us. Previously we had a variety of email addresses that were listed all over the site. And we got a lot of spam as bots hit the site and spewed out junk. We also got a lot of unsolicited press releases and attachments for stuff we couldn’t or didn’t want to cover. So we put in a contact form so the emails addresses aren’t out there.

Except that people don’t like contact forms. Especially people who want to send attachments. We could sense their frustration in the message “I need an email address to send you information about a new beverage product.” “Please provide contact info so we can send you a press release about an upcoming food event.”

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Buried Treasure – The Hidden Gems of the Food Network and Why You Can’t Find Them

It’s no secret that I would rather watch UK food shows than anything made in Canada or the US. Chefs like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver, Valentine Warner and even Gordon Ramsay do a lot of good work for Channel 4 and the BBC when it comes to promoting seasonal, local, sustainable foodways. For years, Greg and I have had no choice but to download these from online file-sharing sites (shhh!!) because they seldom get shown here and there’s few, if any, domestic equivalents.

Except, bit by bit, Food Network Canada has been picking these shows up. Heston Blumenthal’s Big Chef Takes on Little Chef series that ran last year recently got aired here. Likewise his feasts series in which he recreates (with his own twists, of course) historic meals. Jamie Oliver is a big commodity on this side of the pond, so most of his stuff eventually shows up, but sometimes up to a year after its original air date.

This delay is annoying enough, but makes sense – Channel 4 wants to rerun these shows before selling the rights to anyone else. My frustration is that when Food Network Canada finally gets them, they do very little to promote them.

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Picking and Choosing

I had an interesting conversation the other night with two different people involved with small independent bookstores. The conversation touched on how customers come into their respective stores and get upset when they don’t have something in stock. But as a small indie shop, they don’t have the space or budget to carry every single title in the genres in which they specialize. So they have to make a decision as to what makes the cut. And their customers mostly have to trust that judgment.

The art of curating (or editing) – it takes place all the time, in every industry, on every level. It’s somebody’s job to decide what products make it onto shelves and racks in various stores, what artwork is included in a show, what stories make it to the pages of magazines and book anthologies.

There’s a certain unfairness to it, of course – depending on the topic or product there might be 5 or 20 or 100 things that don’t make the cut for every 1 that does. This also comes with a lot of responsibility – woe be to the fashion buyer who chooses incorrectly and sticks her store with something that doesn’t sell – especially if it was ordered in the hundred – or thousands.

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You Can’t Fool the Children of the Revolution

Back in January, I posted a rant on TasteTO, asking where were the Canadian chefs, activists, TV shows and documentaries that would advocate for better food in our country, as is the case with chefs in the UK such as Jamie Oliver. I specifically called out CBC, suggesting that they should start running food-related documentaries, especially related to various political issues.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email advising me that CBC would be running a 4-part documentary series called The Great Food Revolution. The first two episodes ran last night, and the final two will run next week.

Now I know these docs had to have been in the works well before I posted my rant (part of the second episode was filmed at an event I attended in November – my chest makes a cameo appearance), so I really can’t bitch too much about the fact that they don’t exactly address the issues I mentioned. But part of the problem is, they don’t exactly address much of anything – and what they do address is kind of scattered and incomplete.

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Watching the Clock With Martha

I’ve got to admit that I’m not a regular reader of Martha Stewart Living. I don’t buy very many “women’s” magazines at all, so this may very well be a trend that has been on the go for some time now. But yesterday I was in a magazine shop flipping through stuff and the latest issue of Martha Stewart Living was especially disturbing. A visit to the website reveals the same. Almost all of the food photographs have been taken from above. The “clock shot” has reared its ugly head.

From its very inception MSL broke new ground when it came to food photography. Stewart’s whole schtick was clean, tidy, and organized paired with rich yet classic elements. This was not only obvious in the magazine’s recipes but in the photographs of the food. MSL set the standard for many, many years in terms of how magazines styled and shot their food articles. It was the MSL photographers who turned on their macro settings and got us in there to see the crumb of a cake, the glistening crispy skin of a roast chicken, the grain of a slice of roast beef or the detail work of a spectacularly decorated cookie. “Food porn” originated in the MSL studios where they managed to make food look sexy well before anyone else ever thought of it that way.

MSL was the inspiration not only for every other food magazine, cooking show and blog that followed in its footsteps, but it made us all strive to not only become better cooks, but better food photographers.

Which is why the shot from above place setting is so disturbing.

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My Invisible Children

There’s nothing more disconcerting than to be flipping through a glossy print magazine while riding the streetcar across town and to come across your own name mentioned in an article where you’d never expect to see yourself included.

In this month’s Toronto Life, writer Katrina Onstad looks at the issue of hipsters with babies. About halfway through the article, I come across this…

Sheryl Kirby, the editor of foodie web site Taste T.O., has kids herself, but even she’s posted about “self-involved” parents in restaurants. “I was at a brunch place recently where a toddler made it out the door and onto the front sidewalk because his parents and their dining companions were too busy comparing tattoos to keep an eye on him.”

Nevermind that that’s NOT the exact quote, which, best as I can tell was lifted and rearranged from a brunch review I did of a place in my neighbourhood. But the writer never bothered to contact me. Not to get a quote, and not to confirm whether or not I had kids.

Dear Toronto Life,

It’s a good thing my mother doesn’t read your magazine, otherwise I would be inundated with phone calls as she demanded to see her non-existant grandchildren.

While I found Katrina Onstad’s article on hipsters with babies to be informative, interesting and well-balanced, I must admit to wondering where she got her information.

While I greatly appreciate the mention of my website Taste T.O. in her article, and recognize the quote she uses as part of a review I did recently on Parkdale restaurant Mitzi’s Sister, she is incorrect in stating that I have children of my own. I am, in fact, QUITE adamantly child-free.

What I don’t understand is why Onstad or a Toronto Life fact-checker didn’t contact me personally to confirm the information included in the article. It’s not as if it’s difficult to contact me online.

If my relatives track down a copy of your magazine and start sending me booties, onesies, and Tickle-Me-Elmo dolls, it’s on all of your heads.

Regards,
Sheryl Kirby
Editor, TasteTO.com

Dunno if that will do any good, at best it will get published in the letters section or garner a retraction. But sheesh – people complain about bloggers not checking facts – how about the high-profile, high-paid journalists?

UPDATE – Apparently the fact-checker at Toronto Life misread some comments on a post to TasteTO and blended my comment with that of a previous poster who mentioned having 4 kids. Apologies were offered, but both Greg and I are now getting emails from friends and acquaintances who “never knew you guys had kids”. I suspect this will go on long past the point of being funny. In the meantime, we plan to enjoy our status as new parents and have named the four invisible children Larry, Curly, Mo and Shemp. We are excitedly looking forward to the birth of their little brother Joe.

I’ll See Your Organic Free-Range Chicken and Raise You a Tin of Lamb Mince

While the name Delia Smith is familiar to me, I’ll have to admit that I’m not especially familiar with her cookbooks. Given the recent fuss about her newest cookbook How To Cheat at Cooking, I sort of assumed she was one of those slack-assed Rachel Ray types with the canned goods and bagged greens, teaching fans how to spread salmonella in three easy steps.

But it turns out that Smith is more well-known for being the UK’s answer to Martha Stewart. She spent years teaching Britons how to cook real food, teaching them basic cookery techniques and classical dishes. How to Cheat at Cooking is apparently a rewrite of her first book published in 1971, but from there, her work was all about cooking with real, fresh ingredients.

Any new book sells better with a wave of press, and there is some speculation that Smith’s recent public comments about Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign against battery chickens might simply be desperate publicity spin. Smith claims that her recipes are designed to feed the poor, especially the chyllldrunnn (who will think of them?), but even poor kids are likely to turn up their noses at some of the stuff in her new book.

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Ladies, Please

When we started TasteTO last year, I subscribed to a bunch of Canadian women’s magazines because I thought they might be useful references for stories. They haven’t been especially, as they’re not Toronto-specific enough, and they also run to seriously mainstream tastes and trends – generally enough that I find something about every issue that annoys and frustrates me.

The most recent issue of Canadian Living is billed on the cover as their “Go Green Issue” with a whole lot of lip-service paid to the recent trend of eco-activism without any real commitment required on the part of the reader/consumer *or* the magazine. There’s your typical spread of eco-friendly shopping bags, tips on eco-friendly laundering, and generally a whole lot of articles on how we can all be good little consumers yet still save the earth. (ie. Don’t stop buying *stuff* just buy environmentally-friendly stuff!) I saw no mention of important actions like hey – get out of your fucking car! Or – stop taking the annual family trip to Disneyworld! Just a lot of suggestions of how to renovate your house with beach stone tiles or stuff that *looks* like it’s from nature (ie, plastic photo frame that looks like logs).

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Getting Taken For a Ride with Canada’s Food Guide

Yes, it’s the day that Canadians have been waiting for with bated breath – the release of Canada’s first new food guide in fifteen years. The media can’t stop singing the praises of the thing, but much of the media write their articles based on press releases. The truth is, the new Food Guide is not especially useful to anyone.

The guide has been redesigned to allow more personalization of choices; there are more ethnic foods to accommodate the cultural changes within our population, and it allows individuals to make specific choices with regards to which foods they will eat from each section.

But while the new Guide does offer serving sizes, it doesn’t differentiate it terms of calories or fat content. In the milk and milk “alternatives” section (to which I must emit a giant “HA!” – the only non-dairy “alternative” offered is soy milk), skim milk, 1% and 2% milk are all considered equal. And in the alternatives section, you can have pudding instead of a glass of milk. Not that milk should even be there to begin with (it’s really not necessary to good health and nutrition), but the Food Guide really wasn’t created with the health of Canadians as its primary focus anyway, and marketing boards have a much bigger say in the final draft than the real and genuine health concerns brought up by doctors.

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