Special Sauce: Joe Yonan on Charting Your Own Path [2/2]

In part two of my far-ranging interview with Washington Post food editor Joe Yonan, we talked about his career in journalism and the ever-evolving world of food media.

Joe told me about his winding path to food journalism. After years of reporting local news, he eventually made his way to the Boston Globe. There, he became travel editor, but found himself yearning to write about food, instead. How did he manage to acquire one of the few coveted roles as staff food writer? He told his editor, “I’m going to leave… if anyone's listening and you're able to do this, make yourself indispensable and then threaten to leave."

At a certain point, it felt like his career at the Globe was stalling. So when the Washington Post came calling in 2006, Yonan listened. “I just said, ‘I really want to do it.’ I mean, it also was more resources, bigger staff. I thought naively at the time that the Post was in so much better shape than the Globe was.”

Little did he know, Joe was about to take on the monumental task of shepherding the Food section into the digital age, transferring thousands of recipes from the papers archive to the Post's online database. Since that was shortly after I launched Serious Eats, Joe and I would have long conversations about where food media was going. "You know, Ed,” he said, “I remember your advice having something to do with my mindset back then… I knew what you were up to with Serious Eats… I remember you told me about Twitter. I mean, you didn't tell me about it, but... I remember asking you. I was like, "You know, I don't know. Should I bother with this? Should I bother?" And you said, "You absolutely should bother."

Finally, we got around to talking about Serious Eater, which Joe had just finished reading on the train up from DC. "It's so much more dramatic than I had expected. I think for me what resonated was the passion and the drive to make something work in the face of all of these obstacles. I mean, just one obstacle after another. And just the commitment to keep going and making it work no matter what happened." After all, it’s not a story so dissimilar from his own.

I had a blast talking to Joe, and I think you’ll equally enjoy listening to this episode of Special Sauce. 

---   The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/preview?record=444871