Daily Gullet on hiatus as part of the transition from eGullet.com to the not-for-profit eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters. The transition involved a complete institutional reorganization as well as major technology upgrades. That transition is now complete, and the Daily Gullet is back.When we went on hiatus, the eGullet Society executive team asked me to take over as editorial director of the Daily Gullet. My job started with a careful review of what had come before, using the experience and knowledge we gained in the first incarnation of the Daily Gullet to develop a new vision and plan.
When founding Daily Gullet editor Steven Shaw launched the journal, he set out with the goal of becoming the Slate, the Salon, the Wired of food writing on the web. Almost two years later, with the impending shift to a not-for-profit model ahead, and considerable evolution and learning under our belts, I proposed to the team that we re-characterize the mission of the Daily Gullet. Instead of being the Slate, Salon or Wired of food, I suggested that we become something more akin to a culinary version of the .
It's possible -- even likely -- that you've never heard of this magazine. Compared to mainstream poltical periodicals, it has a small circulation, and it's geared, like the Daily Gullet, to addressing a population of hard-core enthusiasts. To give you some idea of its impact, the Washington Monthly is widely credited with the coining the term "neoliberal," as well as laying, inside the DC beltway, the ideological foundation for the election of Bill Clinton. More to the point, it launched the careers of writers like James Fallows, Gregg Easterbook and Walter Shapiro, among many others. Say what you like about its politics, the Washington Monthly has clout that counts. Like the eGullet Society, the Washington Monthly works hard and wields impressive influence in its market, despite modest monetary resources. It makes up the difference in exposure, integrity and nurturing. Because the Daily Gullet enjoys sincere, passionate backing and a committed editorial mission, we believe it can generate the same loyalty, authority and presence in the food community as the Washington Monthly does in political circles.
What you will see here in the coming months is a new Daily Gullet, extending its original commitment to promoting new voices, but shifting its focus to high-quality content over quantity, with a front page that changes daily in details but is more sedate in the rotation of its major features.
The new Daily Gullet functions as an editorially autonomous segment within the eGullet Society, with a distinct editorial mission and voice. While it is a unique service that the Society offers, it is not a Society newsletter.
The Daily Gullet “lives” on the new eGullet Society portal page. From now on, the www.eGullet.org web address will take visitors to the Society portal, and from there to the Daily Gullet and other features of our webspace. The portal page and the Daily Gullet both will be much more integrated with the rest of the site, especially our eG Forums.
We regret that we have not communicated very well about our plans and progress while we've been building the Daily Gullet and portal. Limited resources meant that we had a choice between doing the work or talking about it, and we chose the former.
We hope you like what we've done with the place.
Dave Scantland (aka ") is editorial director of the Daily Gullet. He also devotes an inexcusable amount of time to his paying job as creative director for a high-tech firm in Atlanta, Georgia.
Art: Dave Scantland
