Slashfood

» see slashfood.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The last post on Slashfood went up at 4:21 in the afternoon on 16 May 2011, under the byline "Slashfood Editor" rather than anybody's name. It said AOL had bought the Huffington Post, that certain sites overlapped, and that instead of running two separate sites covering the same food news the company had decided to join forces at HuffPost Food. Six years of daily posting closed out in a couple of paragraphs.

None of that coverage was written for me. It was American grocery news and American restaurant openings, sold to American advertisers, with recipes that assumed a supermarket I could not walk into. What makes it worth recording from here is the machinery behind it, because Slashfood was a component in the first serious attempt to industrialize blogging.

The site belonged to Weblogs, Inc. Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey started that company in September 2003 on a plain bet: pick a subject, hire cheap writers to post about it many times a day, let search engines handle distribution. Slashfood's first surviving posts are dated 21 July 2005. AOL bought the whole network that October and the food blog went with it.

What ran there was short and quick. Recipe of the day items, a Bottom Five Friday column, roundup lists under the Slashfood name, single-paragraph notices about a discontinued soda or a new cookbook. Close to ten posts a day at its busiest, with no issue date and no press cycle behind any of it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Weblogs Inc ran as many as ninety blogs. Engadget and Autoblog were the money, Joystiq and TUAW and Cinematical and Download Squad filled out the catalog, and Slashfood held the food slot. AOL paid a reported twenty-five million dollars for the set in October 2005, which at the time read as a lot of money for a pile of blogs and a few years later read as the cheapest media purchase of the decade.

Under AOL the strategy grew into MediaGlow, which meant more narrow sites rather than fewer. By March 2010 the company had launched KitchenDaily, a recipe destination built with celebrity chefs, while Slashfood was still posting every day. Two food properties inside one company is a condition that resolves itself eventually.

~ the day it died ~

AOL agreed to buy the Huffington Post in February 2011 for 315 million dollars and handed Arianna Huffington the entire editorial side. The reorganization that followed cut AOL's content brands down to roughly twenty, and Engadget, Autoblog, Joystiq and TUAW were the only former Weblogs Inc titles left standing.

Slashfood was not among them. The editor's note pointed readers at HuffPost Food and the posting stopped that afternoon. No wind-down, no farewell series, one post and then nothing.

~ what got buried with it ~

The domain kept answering long after the writing stopped. Archived captures of slashfood.com return pages into 2021, a decade past the last entry, which is the usual pattern when a large company kills a brand and nobody gets around to the DNS.

What did not survive is the register. Slashfood wrote about food several times an hour in a voice that sat somewhere between a magazine and a restaurant critic, and that voice got absorbed into a much larger and much flatter content operation where it stopped being distinguishable from anything else. The network was a bet that a subject could carry a brand, and in 2011 AOL decided only a few subjects could.

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