Another M&A reorg... and all the miscommunications...

[applehome]

From Editor-in-chief Jane Goldman's welcome message:

"CHOW launched in 2004 as a magazine. We suspended publishing in print a year later (too expensive, too limiting, too old-media for advertisers at the time) to work on a website. Then we were acquired by CNET, the online media corporation that had just acquired restaurant-discussion site Chowhound. With CNET’s expertise, we started building a site that takes advantage of just about everything the web’s got to offer."

So... we're a "restaurant-discussion site". How quaint. I guess giving chowhound any more credit would be diverting from their masthead and compromise their mission statement. This could lead to a real conflict. As "new" as they want to represent themselves, they're basically still a site that prints recipes and features from "experts" (like the turkey Cubano from the Citizen Cake chef... yeah I know... Cubans eat lotsa turkey...)

We're not that. We're the ground-up democratic (everybody has input) counter to the experts. The body of food knowledge here is so much greater than any single expert.

I dunno... I have this strange feeling (having lived - and died - through so many m&a's and subsequent reorgs) that this ain't gonna work out. At best, we're going to be the forum for their nice shiny "new" site. At worst, we're going to be forced to focus on restaurants - which is what apparently, this Goldman editor expert thinks we oughta be...

[Tatum]

I think another point worth making here is this: CHOW is the editorial sister site of Chowhound. The community will not always agree with the editorial team- and that's a good thing. For example, I've been grinning like a Cheshire Cat every since the great "Cubano" debate broke out here earlier. I just hope those kind of conversations to happen on the stories or in the forums instead of Feedback so more people will see them. I love that there is going to be a difference of opinion, and that the conversation going back and forth kicks out even better information that where we started.

[Jim Leff]

We're going to continue doing what we've been doing here, and with the same spirit. And we're going to do our thing in this much better-functioning software, and with the support of a major corporation (instead of fretting about paying the server bill each month).

I'm still here, the Chowhound Team's still here, and you're still here. Great tips (lots of them) are inundating our message boards. That's what Chowhound was created to achieve, that's what attracted you, and it's all still going strong!

[Robert Lauriston]

I think her "restaurant-discussion site" is a good short description of Chowhound for somebody who hasn't seen it. On the 45 regional boards, 90% or more of the posts are about restaurants. The ten other boards don't get all that much traffic.