Maclean's article on chowhound

[John Manzo]

And I was interviewed for it.... http://tinyurl.com/y9p5trn

[lynnlato]

Interesting. The tone is awfully negative on Chowhound. I can appreciate journalists taking issue with some of the moderation but all-in-all CH is a community of folks who love food. That can't ever be bad. Hell, I was turned on to CH by our local food editor. I think they forgot to cover what's great about CH. Maybe if we sent the writer a link to the the Sam Fujisaka memorial thread...

[reiflame]

I didn't get that at all, other than the one mention of the restaurant critics posts getting deleted.

[lynnlato]

I should clarify, the tone is negative in general. As if CH and other similiar sites are a forum for inexperienced folks to carelessly and recklessly "review" restaurants, outmoding the professional food critic. Which I don't think CH does at all.

I think the community here is very effective at spotlighting those folks who have nothing nice to say or who are quick to make negative judgements about restaurants, shows, cookbooks, etc., and so if someone invests the time to research and read the posts they will come out of it with a fair assessment of an establishment, generally speaking. It's really no different than when folks visit restaurants and then go out and talk about their experience to friends, family, etc. - just a broader audience.

It seems the writer was skeptical about the value of the info found here. I don't know, that's just my humble opinion.

[Bex_03]

"He admits that initially he harboured a dream of being discovered on Chowhound and landing a moonlighting job as a paid restaurant critic".
Hehe. This made me giggle. My dream? To win the lottery and pay myself to be a restaurant critic! =) Continue dreaming....

[John Manzo]

You only have one dream? :-)

[Bex_03]

lol. Unfortunately, dream two (marry justin timberlake) is actually less plausible than the first dream. And it doesn't involve food (which is a sad sad dream), so the lottery + food dream remains as dream #1 =)

[Jetgirly]

I just don't understand why they didn't want to interview ME!

[John Manzo]

They did- but there are so many people named "jetgirly" that it was impossible to find you.

One perk (the only one, so far) of using my real name here....

[dmd_kc]

Interesting, and Macleans gets it -- largely. And John, I wish I lived close to you to participate!

I still think those of us who spend a lot of time online and are very Web savvy vastly underrate how important the mass media still are to most people. John, you're willing to put your actual name an identity on what you write, which is great. But I think the average Joe has been burned on the garbage from Yelp and Urbanspoon so many times that they've come to have the same credibility as a Craigslist personals ad. Web 2.0 is fine for some things, but way too game-able for things like reviews. At least newspaper and TV critics put their real names and contact info on what they write. You know when Jane Doe for the Denver Post reviews a restaurant that she isn't really a disgruntled server or an investor trying to pump up the brand.