Last month, Penske Media Corporation (PMC) acquired Eater and a handful of Vox’s digital media brands left behind after James Murdoch acquired New York Magazine and Vox.com in May. Joining PMC, owner of The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Artforum, and other digital publications, is just the latest chapter for what was arguably one of the most successful restaurant blogs ever, but which has been in decline for some time.
Launched in New York in 2005 amid the indie blogging boom, Eater grew to a national brand with bureaus in most major US cities, plus a few in Canada and London. Yet, over the past several years, Eater experienced contractions, tonal shifts, and changes in priorities that wore away at its must-read status among food lovers.
Eater’s influence on food media was and remains far-reaching. Its longform and investigative reporting, like Vince Dixon’s 2018 piece “Heaven Was a Place in Harlem” or Craig Mod’s emotional quest across Japan in search of pizza toast, inspired a generation of journalists, chefs, and restaurateurs. The site’s eventual abandonment of this sort of reporting in favor of listicles, quick hits, and search engine-optimized coverage also inspired independent food writers and publications for better or worse.
“Over the years, Eater's just been chipped away at,” said Jaya Saxena, a New York-based food writer who served as an Eater correspondent for six years. “This is the case throughout so much digital media right now, but I think it hits food in a very particular way.”
Saxena and fourteen others were laid off from Eater in August 2025. Within weeks, she and four former Eater staffers — Detroit-based Frances Dumlao; Dallas-based Amy McCarthy and Courtney E. Smith; and Chicago-based Ashok Selvam, who’d just won a James Beard Media Award for his local coverage — began working on a new publication. Fed up with engagement farming, “best of” lists, and surrendering their careers to the whims of digital advertising, the team launched Ravenous, a worker-owned digital publication dedicated to in-depth and personal food coverage.
“Often in food media, the things that people are pressured to write are lists of restaurants or quick little blurbs and explanations — not even full-blown reviews, but just like, ‘Here's why you should visit this place’ and it's not even 500 words and doesn't really get into any depth or context,” said Saxena. “And that writing is incredibly useful for a lot of reasons, but I certainly found in my time at Eater that there wasn't much bandwidth for the larger stories, for the more in-depth reporting or in-depth culture pieces that I really loved to write.”
Ravenous, like many other new publications popping up, is supported by subscriptions, a break from the kind of scale-above-all else model Eater cultivated. Instead of focusing on subscriptions, Eater published broad-reaching, search-friendly stories, chased traffic, and sold advertising against a massive, largely casual audience. That approach served business teams, but not writers, or readers, for that matter.
“Being reliant on subscribers for the majority of the money we make, it's like a real promise,” Saxena said. “You give us money, we give you good writing. It's very straightforward.”
For Cale Weissman, a founding journalist of Gourmet, the never-ending battle to harness the attention of people online, however briefly, “seems like a mouse on a wheel.”
“Unlike other publications like Eater that have a mandate to write probably 10 to 20 articles a day, we have a little bit more time to really think about what we're doing,” said Weissman. Gourmet is a worker-owned, twice-weekly newsletter of long form food writing and recipes that launched in January; its founders believe that if they write it, and write it well, subscribers will come.
“We're not looking for scale. We're looking to just find people who actually want to pay to read this and so far it's seeming to work out,” said Weissman.
Another recently launched independent food publication, Caper, went live in March. It’s staffed by former New York Magazine, Eater, and Artnet journalists and edited by Dana Brown, the longtime deputy editor of Vanity Fair. Caper raised a $2.5 million seed funding round to employ its eight full-time staff members. Their coverage is also a mix of deep dives, scoops, and features.
The ethos of these independent food publications appears to be a direct response to the Eater and the BuzzFeed and the Infatuation of it all: The Caper team says they cover the hospitality industry the way the Wall Street Journal covers Wall Street, rather than posting “reviews and lists with reductive words like ‘best.’” Similarly, Gourmet’s editors think that readers “deserve more than 20-minute meals, lightly edited press releases, and another story about the decline of restaurant service.” For their part, Ravenous’ founders said they were “fed up with the conversation around food being reduced by AI slop, ‘best of’ lists, and influencer-driven trends.”
“Long-form journalism, that's how you create a relationship with a reader: by going deeper and longer, giving context to things as opposed to little 250-word capsule reviews or ‘the 10 best burgers in the West Village,’” said Caper’s Brown. “Long-form journalism and long-form writing are the things you look back on down the road as what told the stories of that era.”
These food publications are small and sustained by much smaller margins than their precursors online and in print. What they lack in institutional backing, they make up for in agility. Eater, during its Vox era, was one of many, many publications whose advertising was effectively gutted by Google’s AI overview and other forms of AI search that has altered how readers find and interact with stories.
“You look at what happened to Eater and Vox, they were just hit by a train,” Brown said. “Their business just collapsed over the course of a few years.” Eater, as a national brand with employees spread around the country, was too reliant on scale for its revenue. When search engines stopped supporting that model, and short-form video further chipped away at it, Eater found that it was too big to pivot.
A simpler, nimbler platform may be the key to longevity. Alicia Kennedy is a good example of this. An award-winning author, Kennedy has been running From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, a one-woman independent food media outlet, since 2020. She also recently launched a blog, Tomato Tomato, that operates as a digital magazine platforming other food writers.
“The fact is that corporate food media has disregarded its base readership — the people who would find food writing interesting — so we have to find these people somewhere else and get their support somewhere else,” she said. “The subscription-only model works for me because I'm one person. It's one of my revenue streams as a writer. I do other things, though my newsletter is my most significant and most consistent revenue stream.”
Independence doesn’t merely describe Kennedy’s business: It defines her work. Being her own boss allows Kennedy to think more expansively, write about more than recipes or trends. Much of her work has covered the political economies of food and agriculture, as well as cultural criticism of the beliefs and assumptions that enforce how we think about, write about, and present food through media. She believes that readers are hungry for something deeper than slop.
“It seems like the only places where we're seeing interesting work is in independent publishing,” said Kennedy. “It does seem like corporate food media really believes that its audience is extremely incurious about anything beyond consumption. It’s just like, slobbering at the mouth for something, some garlicky, chickeny, recipe, and there's no real emphasis on saying anything new.”
Kennedy, like a lot of independent writers, leverages social media to form direct relationships with readers, becoming a name and a personality that is recognized beyond their work. She says this makes sense within food media specifically because readers are literally consuming someone else’s taste: what that person cooks, where they eat, where they live and travel.
“They’re buying into a perspective,” said Kennedy. “I think food is very ripe for that in a way that maybe other arenas are not.”
One of the risks of building a media brand around an individual writer’s sensibility is becoming just another influencer, a profession with an entirely different mission, ethical framework, and approach to that of a writer or an editor. Influencers, for example, sometimes “review” restaurants or write about products in exchange for money or free meals rather than being driven by curiosity or rigor. Kennedy holds that line steady, as do Gourmet, Caper, and Ravenous, which Saxena noted, has a “no freebies” rule, a way to announce that its writers don’t owe anyone anything. That goes for advertisers, restaurants, brands, food celebrities, or, in the case of Eater, a multi-million dollar parent company.
As Gourmet’s Weissman put it: “It matters who a publication is beholden to.”
