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In addition to my journalism, now I am blogging for a living over at Ad News and for St Ali where I’m producing a series of video blogs looking at various aspects of coffee culture and some of the geekery behind it.
Cafe and coffee culture in Melbourne is going crazy right now and the new generation of roasters started with St Ali. Perhaps I have sold out, but it’s a great opportunity to experiment with video content and I seem to have a fairly open brief from owner Salvatore Malatesta, who I interview about great coffee, fixy bike racing, street art and DJs.
This is my first effort at the recent laneway festival at Yarra Place and the next will be here – or there – soon.
I haven’t been posting because I’ve been busy trying to pull together a few sponsors for the Food Bloggers’ Conference and finally have pulled the last big one in.
And it is great news. SBS Food has come onboard to sponsor/partner a one week photo exhibition of food and drink bloggers’ photos to kick off on Sunday March 21.
SBS joins our other sponsors The Essential Ingredient, which is providing the daytime venue and coffee roaster, cafe, cum restaurant St Ali, which is providing food, the evening meal (by chef Ben Cooper), and the space for the exhibition and kick-off cocktail party.
This is very cool as it will help spread the word about food blogs to the broader community.
Enter your pictures
To enter simply submit your pictures to the Eat.Drink.Blog.2010 Flickr group and our judges (who are being sorted in the next few days)
DEADLINE: Midnight Sunday March 7 2010
The Guidelines and small print
1. Submissions are open to Australian and New Zealand food and drink blogs only.
2. Try and limit your submissions to half a dozen or less. (I’ve been cheeky and entered four to start things off.)
3. Each picture will be framed and the entrant will received the framed copy. At some point we will need to get hold of a high resolution copy of the pic for printing.
4. The pictures should be original works from 2009/2010, have been blogged and the copyright owned by the entrant.
5. In return for SBS Food’s support, I’ve said they can include each of the pictures in the exhibition in an online slideshow which will include a blogger profile on the SBS Food website. By entering you will be agreeing to this.
6. That’s about it. All entrants will be invited to the cocktail launch.
7. A judge cannot vote on their own work but we’d love them all to enter.
A While back Stewart White from the The Food Media Club, which is renaming itself Australian Association of Food Professionals, called me to talk about launching an award for food blogs as an addition to the Food Media Club Awards. And finally he’s made it happen with the sponsorship of Australian Pork, and I attended the last a few weeks back to a packed house of mostly Sydney bloggers.
Initially, I was skeptical. For as long as anyone can remember in food blogging there has been a rift between traditional media and the food bloggers, mainly traditional media knocking food blogs.
Usually a panel of peers judges journalism awards. The system is imperfect but the panels tend to know what they are talking about.
The difficulty with these food blog awards is in selecting the correct judges but also in establishing the correct criteria for judging and ensuring that they understand it. I think that food blog writing – and blog writing in general – may be completely different to what we consider good writing. Content presented on podcasts and vodcasts is often quite raw, which doesn’t mean it’s any less engaging than the ABC or SBS.
A good food blog is very different from a good food magazine. Usually, it is written by an amateur, one person who is writer, editor, stylist and photographer. And it’s usually a personal story rather than a sharp journalistic fabrication.
If you want to see the difference between the two style perhaps look at the difference between the style of this blog, which is often snarky (even negative) and perhaps a little threatening for some people to leave comments, and Lorraine at Not Quite Nigella. She is embracing, writing to her “dear readers” and has developed a friendly nurturing place (rather than somewhere dark and misanthropic) to inhabit and leave comments.
Most awards for food blogs are themselves massively flawed, skewed towards whoever can mobilise the most votes. I wonder can there be a happy medium perhaps?
Stewart’s own draft criteria are:
- Originality of content – Engagement with the community (comments, Twitter) – Quality of writing and photography – Website design and its usability (content is easily searchable)
These seem pretty good and are on my list too.
I don’t know the answer but what do you think should be the criteria for winning a food blog award?
I was surprised when I received an email from Pam Jewson asking me to suggest people who might like to be judges for the Golden Plate Awards as we have history. I didn’t reply. I was even more surprised to hear from somebody who had been contacted who said the Golden Plate Awards were using [...]
There’s a bad joke among old skool strawberry nosed newspaper sub editors when training newbies. “Fresh fish sold here” is the sign above the fish shop. “Fresh” can be removed because of course it’s fresh. “Here” because that’s obvious. It’s a shop, so lose the “sold”. And the “fish” because you can smell it a [...]
Exciting! The results of our sixth annual Menu for Hope – with the help of two hundred bloggers, two hundred and four items on our raffle list, and in the span of just over two weeks, we raised US$78,898 (that’s about AUD85,154) in support of the UN World Food Program. That’s in a year [...]
One of the most exciting chefs to be in town for the Sydney International Food Festival was the witty and erudite David Thompson. If you aren’t familiar with Thompson, the caffeine-fuelled chef is the father of Thai food in Australia and one of the main reasons that Sydneysiders have a taste for good spicy [...]
Thought you missed out on your chance of winning the Menu of Hope.
You still have a chance to buy into the Menu for Hope draw as Pim has extended the deadline for buying tickets until 31st December (US time).
Here I’ve listed the Asia Pacific prizes with the odds of winning from the best chance of [...]
UPDATE: Select your prizes below and enter using the easy donation widget here.
Phew! Finally here is the first iteration of the local prizes forMenu for Hope VI. Pictures and updates coming soon.
Here’s the instructions for the bloggers.
1. Write a post about Menu for Hope and the raffle bid item they are offering. Please clearly [...]
I’ve been asked again by Pim to help run Menu for Hope for Australia and NZ. It’s a great opportunity for blogs old and new to gain some profile while doing some great work for charity.
What is Menu for Hope?
Menu for Hope is an annual fundraising campaign hosted by Pim of Chez Pim and a [...]
Hungry Jack’s Angry Angus that arrived with “ANUS” written on it.
The gourmet burger is now mainstream. Even Hungry Jacks has its own salt and fat packed version dragging down the reputation of Angus beef.
It’s the latest trend in food, knowing the provenance of your ingredients – with Maccas being the first mainstream brand to name [...]
Weeping isn’t something that comes naturally to me in public. Usually, I do it somewhere dark and private where I’m watching Love Actually, probably the bit with the Portuguese girl or the kids in the airport.
But on Saturday night tears rolled from my eyes eating the offal salad at The Middle Park Hotel (opposite [...]
I‘m starting to judge cafes by their espresso machines. The more serious the machine, the better the coffee. So when you walk into a cafe and you see a six group Synesso longer than a coffin worth some $40,000 and you know something special is going on. It sorta trumps even St Ali’s $30,000 Slayer [...]
In a world with big budgets and high overheads, Streetsmart is one of those charities that helps the small and local, roping in cafes and restaurants to support often forgotten frugal local causes.
On Monday 9th November its 2009, running until Christmas Streetsmart’s campaign kicks off. The idea is that diners leave an extra $2 for [...]
