Is The Wall Street Journal Abandoning Local Restaurant Reviews?

by Drew Grant | 6:19 pm, March 10th, 2010

» 2 comments

If it is, it would be an odd move for a the Rupert Murdoch-owned entity, which just last year expanded into the local journalism sector along with The New York Times by adding a SF-bay edition in November. But Raymond Sokolov, who has been doing freelance restaurant reviews for The Wall Street Journal for the past four years abruptly left his position when he was told by editors that they wanted him to start reviewing “food trends” instead: a much broader, nationally-themed topic.

Interestingly, this would buck against last year’s ideology that newspapers needed to start competing with blogs for hyper-local coverage of specific areas. While The Wall Street Journal demurred that it’s not getting rid of its restaurant criticism, but it’s acknowledgment that they are still “committed broadly to food coverage,” reveals a slant toward a more global perspective. Concurrently, the paper plans to start a new section entirely devoted to local New York news, and how can you cover New York without talking about its fine dining? Mike Taylor at Mediabistro sees this not so much an issue of local v. national coverage, but with the recent news of Variety letting Todd McCarthy and three other reviewers go, could signal the death of the traditional critic.

Wall St. Journal

Zach Seward

Hey, Drew. The answer to the question in your headline is contained in the NYT piece you’ve linked to: “We are not abandoning restaurant reviews and are still committed broadly to food coverage.” I don’t know anything more about it, but that’s definitely true.
http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

From purely a business perspective: An article about “food trends”, which as you note is a broader topic, could be repurposed and republished throughout the WSJ/NewsCorp network, while a review of a restaurant would only be usable in a single market and for publication, once.

IOW: It sounds like a cost-cutting, synergastic, maximizing investment, kind of thing to me.