Eclipsed
by Adam Kuban
On Gothamist the other day, I was a bit sad to see how this post on Slice was credited to Serious Eats instead.
Sure, they’re from the same “family” of blogs, and, sure, “The Food Lab” posts generally live on the Serious Eats homepage, so maybe this isn’t the best example to whine about, but it seems like more and more these days, Slice is referred to as “Serious Eats.”
In the end, I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. It’s good that people are viewing what Slice does as part of the Serious Eats mission. But when something you’ve worked on for six years (and that predates Serious Eats by three years and was in fact among the first wave of food blogs) is sort of overlooked, it kinda blows.
Oh well, it’s from some dude whose name I don’t even recognize on Gothamist. Probably some new young turk there.
Comments
One of the other problems is that the content is constantly re-pushed between the sites. That particular article showed up in my feed reader 3 times – once for SE, once for SE:NY, and once for Slice.
So it doesn’t really feel like the content “belongs” to Slice, more that it’s Serious Eats content and it gets spread around to the appropriate blogs within the network. (Same things happens with the AHT postings.)
Just my impression, though.
@Dan: Yeah, I know about the redundancy on the RSS feeds. I wish there were a way to take care of that, and there probably is—with a set of complicated MT If-Then template tags. (“If Category = Slice AND SE-homepage, then only output to X RSS feed.”) But then you’d have Slice-only subscribers missing out on things. It’s problematic, I know.
Maybe we’re too close to the process and can’t view it from a reader end anymore. It’s supposed to sort of work like Gawker when it has Defamer and Valleywag content pushed to the Gawker.com site (before those blogs were eventually subsumed into Gawker itself). I also view it sort of like Flickr—where you have your photo in your photostream but can also add it to different groups or sets. Here, it’s like a Slice post that gets promoted to the main SE page or SENY, depending on relevance.
It probably gets even worse if you follow the Slice Twitter feed or are a fan of Slice on Facebook. Then you have the possibility of seeing the same thing 5 times. :-/ Imperfect, I know, but I don’t know what the fix would be …
@Donatello: I think it’s not so much trying to differentiate it. I think it’s good that they’re moving more toward a unified voice and tone. Actually, I’d like to think that one of the reasons the sites sound alike is that Ed Levine originally hired me largely because he liked the tone and feel of Slice and A Hamburger Today and wanted me to help direct SE toward that voice. So if they sound the same, I think I’ve accomplished that. I would say there are some subtle differences. I probably get a little more ornery and let my hair down more on Slice, since I do feel like it’s still my baby — which, again, is probably why I’m venting here about this issue—which really isn’t a huge issue in the scheme of things. Really, I’m happy that more people are now reading Slice and (more important) reading about great pizza thanks to its association with SE.