PD Taste Section Leaves A Bad Taste
I think that the Cleveland Plain Dealer forgot that human beings need to eat for survival. For the most part shoes & celebrity gossip do not give our bodies enough nutrients to make it past day three.
For some reason, I am sure gas prices will be blamed, the city’s newspaper has decided to combine the Style section with the Taste section. To make matters worse they have decided to suck even more than they did before. I have been thinking about this for a long while and I was never going to voice my opinion about it because I felt there was a conflict of interest. But when you review a fucking Dairy Queen I no longer am going to consider you a respectable source. So the glove’s are off.
I had never read ANY food section before the chef & I got back together. He introduced my to this and I was forever hooked. I even follow on Twitter. When I came back to Cleveland the chef would buy a PD (cause I would never subscribe to the blatant propaganda and fear mongering) and a New York Times (cause I can’t afford to subscribe). The differences in the two food sections shocked me.
I continued to read Taste section in the PD, well skim it really, and would focus on the Times for the real food stuff. Articles about people cutting out the middleman & buying pieces of farms, restaurant reviews about actual restaurants, and the classification of wines (a favortie of the chef) inspire and educated me on a weekly basis.
The PD became less and less relevant every week. Articles about Bryers ice cream and reviews of Houlihan’s continued to turn me off until I completely stopped reading.Â
I want to read it I really do. I want to support the local paper but I want the local paper to support me too.
I wish the PD to follow in the spirit of other food sections and keep it simple. Have a formula and follow it every week. For example, this could be our weekly food section. Every week one of the following could appear:
- Restaurant Review (NON CHAIN), promote ALL areas, there are tons and mom & pop restaurants that are REALLY good throughout Northeast Ohio.
- Farm focus, as I recall there are some farms in Ohio?
- Weekly event Calender- There are MORE than enough culinary related events in this city to print a weekly calender. You just have to look for them. Or sign up for google alerts. It does it all for you.
- Wine & Spirit Focus (real wine & spirits, not a story on Franzia’s new shapped box).
- Recipe from a LOCAL CHEF!!!!! Not a book that the PD has had on a shelf for the past 20 years. A chef!!! A Chef!!!! Promote your own! Promote ALL of your own!! There so many awesome fucking chefs in this city and one of them should be featured each week.
As long as the PD continues to promote chains, print forum rumors as fact, and publish blogger reviews as actual stories, the Taste section will suck. And I guess I just have to come to terms with that fact. Or start my own goddamn newspaper.
Which I may very well do.
July 10th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Yes! Yes! Yes! You should start your own newsletter! I think most people already know that blizzards are a tasty treat in the summer.
Looking forward to dinner at Bar Cento tomorrow. I’m a big fan!
July 10th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Amen! I find that almost everything in the PD sucks, but none so much as the local entertainment and restaurant reviews. I get my news elsewhere.
July 10th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Jenny- cool glad you are trying out Cento!
IKATE- couldn’t agree more although I just got some hate mail about my background having nothing to do with journalism so how could I judge. Funny because I didn’t think journalism really existed anymore. At least good journalism.
July 10th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
“…but I want the local newspaper to support me too.”
Very well put! We have a similar problem with our local paper, it just plain sucks. Putting out your own newsletter is a great idea! You could do that in your “spare time”.
July 10th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
this? SUCKS!
i’m so annoyed with this combo. you need to send this as a letter to the PD editor.
do it!
July 11th, 2008 at 8:36 am
So much about Cleveland sucks, IMO. Glad the restaurant scene has improved but it will never get me to move back from San Antonio. If you want to see how a real newspaper does it’s Food section, go to the library and check out the Wed. Taste section of the SAExpress News, or go to http://www.mysa.com and click on the food/recipe link. Usually 10 pages long, 15-25 recipes, wine reviews, foodie calendar, recipe searches, chef interviews, 2-3 restaurant reviews, etc. Plus the dining guide to the most popular restaurants. All words of interest, no filler of grocery ads to speak of. EXCELLENT. Plus, the Friday mag does a Pub Crawl review every week. LOVE IT! Good luck getting the PD to listen to you!
July 11th, 2008 at 8:51 am
I totally agree. The only things I read in the PD are the comics and the weather. I get the rest from the NY Times online. And food info from great Cleveland food bloggers.
July 11th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Great points, Chef’s Widow, I noticed the incredible shrinking Taste Section as well. I could not stop laughing at the “FUCKING DAIRY QUEEN…” comment. You hit it right on.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:05 am
I would like to say that the PD is the best we’ve got, but actually for a daily it’s all we’ve got. I simply don’t have time to read the New York Times so most of what I get comes online, although I still read the PD daily. But there are many other newspapers with superior Food sections. I fear that the print media in general will just continue to shrink. But to your points, I find none of the recent changes to the PD as positive, but I’m sure they are all financially based. And lastly I actually looked forward to the Food section on Wednesday mornings but it is a mere shadow of it’s former self. Most of the recipes come from an AP source, not local. Unfortunately you don’t have to stick it with a fork to know it’s done.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Well said everyone. Well said.
July 11th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I think you and some of the Cleveland food bloggers (Cleveland Foodie, Cleveland Epicure) could run with this newsletter idea. The Eat, Drink, Repeat newsletter is a good jumping off point. Just a thought.
July 11th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I’d send this link to Joe Crea, but he’s probably down at the Quickie Mart, writing a review on the new “Cheez-it flavor” Squishie.
July 11th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
I couldn’t agree more! The “Taste” section has been so skimpy for several months and when I saw they combined it with “Style” this week, I had a fit. I am a daily subscriber, but certainly not for the food section which is a complete joke; especially given the size of our city and its surrounding communities.
July 11th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Honestly, you are 100% right. We should be very, very proud of our local chefs and non-chain restaurants. The Taste section is a disgrace. It was even worse when they had a guy with no food background doing the Restaurant Row column. The online PD/Cleveland.com food forum is a joke too.
Most of all, I can’t believe that for the inaugural combo edition, the style portion was front and center and it featured hair. I can think of nothing less appetizing than combining visual images of hair and food. Good god, somebody get the pd a hairnet.
July 12th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Excellent post, CW, and I agree with you on all points. Count me in on the newspaper idea if it goes forward. We could really rock with that idea.
News”paper” as a news source is pretty much all but dead. The PD is trying to push its website but it is about as lame as they come.
I am always promoting Cleveland as the City of Food. Any other city would kill for the chefs we have and places like the West Side Market. For the small number of residents and the pretty atrocious economy, we are able to support many great restaurants. The support from the community is pretty strong, I think, for the food scene here, even with all of the people who think a great meal can be had at Houlihan’s.
Keep up the great thinking and writing.
C Ep
July 13th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
My favorite recent headline from the PD food section: The secret to great cheesecake is cheese (or something like that). Imagine what they’d say about tomato sauce?
July 14th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Erika- for sure, actually I have been contemplating that as of late-
Pchak- right on. right on.
Kime & ME- couldn’t agree more- I guess we will just have to come to terms with its suckiness.
C EP- You rock every which way around. We should talk soon. I have an idea I want to run by you.
CFT- That the secret is tomatoes? Just a guess.
July 15th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Great post - very well said! I will admit, I like Joe Crea but I think he is falling victim to what so many traditional print reports have - the fact that the newspaper is dying thanks to social media. And papers are trying all sorts of ways to stay alive and compete. Unfortunately, they should stop fighting social meda because it’s just going to continue to grow, and figure out how to work with it. It’s a good things really - social media that is, but people haven’t figured it out yet. I haven’t been fond of Joe’s articles lately, but if I had to guess, he has lost his voice at the PD and is probably just doing what he can to hang on. It’s sad really how many journalists are out of work. It’s not an excuse to suck (and I fully agree the PD sucks anymore) but I work with a lot of reporters and I feel bad that so many are out of work. We could have a great paper. We HAVE a great community and I just wish the people who recognize how wonderful Cleveland truly is were in charge and the ones making the decisions.
July 23rd, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Just an f.y.i. My restaurant (Latitude 41n) had a good review a few weeks back in the P.D. But, the next week, Mr. Crea wrote an article about the Detroit Shoreway and had so many facts wrong, that I thought I was reading a fiction short story. I called and let him in on the “truth”- he never returned my call or retracted any of the erroneous statements!! So, on top of “downsizing” the taste section, most of the info in the Taste section is bull!