editorial strategy
Eater Magazine and
Eater Off Menu
Tasked with producing a new major tentpole to mark Eater’s 20th anniversary, I translated my passion for print into Eater’s first-ever standalone print magazine, spearheading the overall editorial and artistic direction. The completed book translated Eater’s voice into the new format by leaning into visually driven storytelling — front-of-book snippets, close-up looks at food at the near-molecular level, celebrity photoshoots laden with ceramic trout and a 52"-tall lobster fountain — that reflects my personal editorial ethos: Be smart and make a statement, but embrace the absurd.
The product also served as an exciting new revenue opportunity, with specific elements and features designed to attract brand interest across print, digital, video, experiential, and social media formats. “Eater Off Menu,” the experiential tie-in, has since been spun out by Vox Media into an ongoing annual tentpole.
Read more:
• Eater Turns 20!
• A Very Eater Dinner Party | We Threw a Dinner Party With the 10 Most Interesting People in Food | (BTS)
• The All-Time Eater 38
• “Off Menu” Dish Drops
Press: Eater Celebrates 20 Years With Off Menu Franchise Launch, Furthering Offline Push
Eater at Home and
Eater Dinner Party
Eater at Home launched during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, providing Eater’s restaurant-obsessed readers an essential source for navigating their own kitchens. In 2024, I led the vertical’s relaunch — now targeting an audience much more confident in their cooking skills — by rewriting its mission statement, refining its content, and consulting on video (and social video) extensions. The relaunch included a new newsletter written by EAH’s lead editor, emphasized shopping (and grew commerce revenue), and debuted Eater’s Dinner Party vertical.
Dinner Party, focused on at-home entertaining, was conceived as an extension of the Eater at Home brand; specifically, to appeal to CPG clients looking for closer alignment between their campaigns and editorial. The vertical centered on-set, fully styled photoshoots as central to the storytelling — the first section of Eater to do so.
The entire Eater at Home rebrand centered the section’s place as Eater.com’s primary revenue stream in 2024, attracting both new advertisers and engaged readers.
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Editorial voice and
storytelling strategy
During my tenure at Eater, I matured the brand’s existing voice by broadening its scope to a culture site that revealed where food (as both a business and a cultural product) intersects with immigration, labor, climate, personal identity, and pop culture. This interdisciplinary approach allowed the Eater brand to expand in both subject matter and format: I encouraged enterprise reporting and cultural criticism, personal essay writing and deep-dives into how identity forms experience. Crucially, applying this lens to food and dining emphasized the experiences of those behind the plate alongside those consuming it; it unpacked trends, celebrated innovators, revealed the realities of small business ownership, and generally explored why things are the way they are when it comes to what we eat.
In 2020, I led Eater.com's coverage of the largest industry story in decades: the immediate onset and lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to daily, breaking news stories and reported pieces about the human and economic impact, an editorial package “Now What?” seized the moment to ask if lessons learned in the pandemic's early days could result in a more equitable restaurant industry. That perspective would define much of the brand’s editorial point of view moving forward.
Read more:
• Some favorite stories over the years…
• Climate on the Menu
• Now What? Predicting the Future of Restaurants in America