Am I Reading Too Much Into This?
The “Best Individual Blog Post” category in Saveur’s first annual Food Blog Awards seems to be more of a didactic exercise in illuminating the small media/Big Media divide than anything. My analysis, I should say, is in no way a criticism of the posts or their posters; let’s call it a critical reading of the selection process.
The five nominated posts are fairly short–from a little over 300 words up to 850ish, discounting recipe text and metatext. Three of them re-use or respond to previously published material, be it by adapting recipes or commenting on a magazine article. The one post that provides an original recipe transcribes it in a lively and personal style, full of aside-rich notes and observations that most publications’ style guides would forbid–and then follows it up with assorted and disjointed reflections.
None of these things are problematic in themselves; all of the bloggers represented write very well. But it’s interesting to me that a print publication’s celebration of the blogosphere avoids long-form, stand-alone narratives in favor of shorter and/or “intertextual” (forgive me, I did linguistics in college) posts.
Read: “This is what you guys do, and you do it great. Oh, and, in case you’ve forgotten, here’s what we do.”