First person, commentary & news analysis

[Steve Klc]

Jeanne--are changes underfoot affecting how we perceive newspaper food sections? For instance:

Do you feel under any pressure to create an ongoing first-person food column--or significant food personality--a rival, if you will, in the style of Amanda Hesser in the New York Times Magazine?

Do you think the next step in the evolution of newspaper food sections is for certain writers and voices to be slotted more as  "Columnists" than "capital-J Journalists?"

I'm specifically thinking of Russ Parsons at the LA Times.

Are either of these examples evidence of newspaper food writing being taken more seriously--or aiming to be taken more seriously--and should we expect to see more first-person writing, commentary and news analysis from Food section writers?

[Jeanne McManus]

Regarding the first person: Nothing bothers me more than an abundance of first-person food writing. As I’ve mentioned, I hate the kind of piece that says to the reader: I’m eating in a fabulous place AND YOU’RE NOT.

Variations on this theme are: I have access to great chefs, or Great chefs know me on a first-name basis and you, dear reader, YOU ARE NOTHING.

Other kinds of first person food writing I don’t like: Ah, asparagus. Ah lemon, Ah vanilla. Then the second sentence is, I have a love affair with asparagus, an addiction to lemon, and special passion for vanilla.

I really believe that a writer, especially a young writer, can wear out the first person voice much too quickly if absolutely every food encounter becomes the occasion to reveal one’s inner soul. If you spill your guts out over vanilla, what are you going to do when, for example, your mother dies?

That said, some pieces seems to be juiced up by a writer who is strong in first person. Candy Sagon did a piece last spring: Martha, Oprah, Rosie and  Me” in which she cooked from each of these celebrity magazines and her voice really made the piece something special, something other than just a simple evaluation of each magazine’s strength and weaknesses.

Also, I’ve been Tony Kornheiser’s editor long enough to know that a powerful voice, even if it’s’sometimes whiny and extraordinarily self-absorbed, is a magnet to a section.  The Post’s sports section, if you don’t like Kornheiser, has other powerful voices: Sally Jenkins, Michael Wilbon, Tom Boswell, Andy Beyer and Angus Phillips. But TK and the others did not just arrive on the scene as columnists. They all worked long and hard in the field as reporters and from so doing they gained knowledge, confidence and assurance that support every one of their opinions, no matter how loopy.

And when it was time for them to shift from reporting to columnizing. they were ready for it.  Those columnists are all still very much journalists, believe me. I’ve heard them all work the phones and even if line for line their columns don’t show the fruits of that reporting the reporting is nevertheless very much THERE.

I am also committed to Robert Wolke’s Food 101 column, which runs every other week. I think Bob is another good example of the combination of good reporting/information/science and voice, which can be downright professorial and annoying to some readers, but in a good way.  

So,  to get around to answering your question:  I think a writer has to sort of exceed the boundaries of his own skin and then become a columnist. I don’t think you can take a reporter and force an overnight conversion. And when I see that happening—that a reporter is still working hard and still reporting but moving into a different kind of writing with a different kind of authority--then I might  have a reporter try out the role, not for publication, just to see if he or she can write 5 or 8 columns and sustain that voice and personality. As I’ve mentioned in another answer, it blows my mind when I get queries from freelancers suggesting that they write a regular column, when I’ve only published one or two of their articles. I just get the feeling that they have no idea what hard, demanding work it is and how good you have to be to pull it off.

I’m a fan of Amanda Hesser’s “The Cook and the Gardener” and of much of her work in the Dining In/Dining Out section of the Times. But I generally find the focus of her magazine column to be too narrow, her friends and family and fiance not quite enough for me. On the other hand, a good friend of mine, closer in age to Amanda, a woman who has great taste and knows a lot about food, loves Amanda’s column, thinks of it as sort of a food lovers “Sex in the City.” So I may be showing my age here.