- Michael Gebert
- Ed Levine (in midchew) and Nick Kindelsperger at Serious Eats Chicago’s launch party in 2011
Every food-media website deserves notice on its way out the door, so this is mine for Serious Eats Chicago, which technically still exists but has largely been absorbed back into its New York mothership. That this was happening was obvious several weeks ago (when its Chicago focus was radically reduced and, more significantly, shifted to items of tourist rather than local interest), but is de facto confirmed by the departure of editor Nick Kindelsperger and the site’s general reorganization as a more recipe-driven site following the arrival of a pack of consultants. (Disclosures en masse: I wrote for the site, I’m a friend of Kindelsperger’s, I succeeded him as editor of likewise-deceased Grub Street Chicago, and so on.)
But the internet keeps changing, and the disruption it once visited on print media now happens to online media that have been around a little while too, and were founded when a different advertising model held sway. There’s a lot you can read about what they went through in this post from Levine and in the comments, mostly responded to by Lopez-Alt, but what it seems to come down to is that consultants told them that what did well in search engine traffic was recipe posts, and so they needed to join the legion of sites getting traffic from people who search “best way to sear a steak.” As far as local coverage was concerned, Lopez-Alt promised “we don’t mean to say that there will be zero city-specific coverage, but just that each city story will be much larger and more useful in scope.” Which in practice, meant pieces for tourists about restaurants Chicagoans kind of don’t care about. In the Internet age, you’re either locally focused or you’re not.
