Rant: Local Food/Drink Bloggers, Step Up Your Game!

Local food & drink bloggers, listen up and carefully consider my words. I'm challenging you to Step Up Your Game! Are you willing to accept that challenge? 

In May, The Passionate Foodie will reach another milestone, its 10th Anniversary, though I wrote for another blog for a year-and-a-half before that. So, I've been writing about food and drink for 11.5 years and have written over 4,100 posts. During those years, I feel that my writing has continued to improve but I know I still have room for improvement. It is a never-ending objective, to continue to hone my writing, to better myself.

There are plenty of other food & drink bloggers in the Boston area, some who have been around for about as long as I and many others who are much newer. I don't view any of them as competitors but rather see them as colleagues. As such, I freely share suggestions and advice with other bloggers, helping them and hoping others will reciprocate. Even if these bloggers attend the same event as me, writing their own articles about the event, they each bring their own unique viewpoint to their story.

Now, I've also seen some lost blogging opportunities as well as food & drink articles which could be improved. I freely admit that I'm guilty of such offenses and that means I continually try to up my game, to eliminate such offenses. Today, I'm calling on every other local food & drink blogger to follow my lead. Step Up Your Blogging Game! I don't want to hear excuses. I want to see results, to see other blogs improve and shine.

Let's consider a recent example of lost opportunities and where bloggers could have upped their game. The recent Boston Wine Expo offered two days of wine and food tasting, with numerous wine seminars as well. There were over 1800 wines available for sampling and a few dozen food vendors. Such a large event should garner a blogger sufficient fodder for multiple articles. There were so many diverse ways to approach the Expo, concentrating on a variety of wine regions, types, varietals, and much more. It was easy to find dozens of different story seeds at the Expo. I've already written fourteen articles inspired by the Expo.

However, some bloggers took the easy route, writing only a single post about the entire Expo weekend, primarily addressing a handful of their favorite wines and foods. Where is the challenge in that? Why only dedicate a single post to such a rich and diverse event? It would have been easy for them to write more about their experiences, to expand upon what they tasted and to share more of what they learned.

I've seen this similar phenomenon at other large-scale events too, where bloggers post only a single article, giving short shrift to all that they experienced. Such events offer a wealth of material for plenty of articles so you should take advantage of the experience. Step up your game! Don't take the easy route.

Of course you don't have to follow my advice. Maybe you don't have sufficient free time to write more than a single post about such event. Or maybe you don't care about upping your game. I'm trying to reach those people who do care, to wake them up and hopefully stir them to action. I would like to see the local food & drink blogging community improve overall, and that requires many of us to work harder at our craft. It takes us looking more critically at our own writing, to see where we can improve.

Are you willing to do so? Will you accept my challenge?