Pick Wednesday. If the San Francisco Chronicle does, actually, end its Sunday stand-alone food section, as The New York Times reported Wednesday, it would be in pretty good company if it moved its food coverage to Wednesdays.
“Some do Thursdays but Wednesday is most common,” said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for Poynter, in an e-mail. “Having food content and related advertising (much of it preprinted inserts) in one issue is a plus for the advertisers.”
Linda Stradley tries to keep up with American newspapers and their food coverage through her web site, What’s Cooking America. But it can be hard, she said in an e-mail with Poynter.
“Keeping them updated was even harder,” she wrote. “For some reason the newspapers like to change their links.”
And sadly, she said, they’re all downsizing.
“I always looked forward to reading them. The Internet has probably caused this.”
“My understanding is that Wednesdays became a day for many Food sections, including ours, because that’s the day the supermarket chains wanted to publish their weekly coupons,” Washington Post Food and Travel editor Joe Yonan wrote Poynter in an e-mail. “Interestingly, we started on Thursdays (and there was a time when we had a second section, on Sundays).”
Stradley’s favorite food section has been The Oregonian’s Foodday.
“It was the best – but not now! It has been sized down to almost nothing. So sad!”
That section did come out on Tuesdays, until about six weeks ago, Peter Bhatia, editor of The Oregonian, wrote in an e-mail to Poynter.
Now, it comes out on Wednesdays.
After this story ran, Bhatia contacted me, disappointed that I hadn’t given The Oregonian the chance to respond to Stradley’s complaints about their food section. I agreed.
In a comment with this article, he wrote, “If you had offered a response I would have noted we still maintain a strong food section, full of local content and recipes. It remains very popular with our readers.”
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