Eater.com Binges On The Corpse of Gourmet

Mere hours after Condé Nast announced that the venerable Gourmet was among the four titles to be shut down in the wake of their McKinsey evaluation, Curbed Media’s Eater blog, which recently went national, was already picking at the bones. Their cheeky proposal: if you were on contract for an unpublished feature meant for Gourmet, they’ll pay you $100 to take it off your hands and run it in full on their site.

From Eater:

The macro tragedy today is the loss of Gourmet, of course; the micro one, however, is that there are issues-worth of that sweet Gourmet-brand editorial that aren’t going to see the light of day. So, here is our offer to any writer who was on contract for any Gourmet feature: for a $100 consolation fee (admittedly, nothing more than a consolation fee), we’ll run the story here, in full.

This comes in the wake of Eater’s offer to pay 25 food bloggers $25 apiece to shut down their blogs and make this ad for Eater their last post.

$100 might be a prettyish penny for just one piece of content in the online realm (well, unless you’re The Daily Beast), but it’s a bargain for the type of writing they’ll have at their disposal — and besides, it’s good buzz. Whether or not it works in material terms, Eater National’s willingness to spend money on content and be upfront about it — in short, its swagger — is a refreshing change of pace in a gun-shy market.

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