Leventhal: Eater avoided reviews and photos at launch to prioritize publishing speed
Ben Leventhal · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · Jan 20, 2025 · at 11:12
Ben Leventhal describes launching the digital restaurant publication Eater with Lockhart Steele in 2005, explaining why they chose not to compete directly with traditional food critics.
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“Now, we did say, we're not gonna write reviews. And we also said, we're not going to post photos of food. And we said, we're really not interested in, in adding to the noise with more photos of food. And we're really not interested in writing reviews because we're actually not going to be any good at that. Because as I still do at that time, we held the big time food critics in extremely high regard and had a ton of respect for what they do. And we just said, we can't compete against those guys. But what we did have was we had the cadence of blogging, which was certainly a competitive advantage. We could post things whenever we wanted to.”
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