Last week, news giant Vox Media marked its 20th anniversary not with a toast, but with another round of layoffs, including 15 people from Eater, Punch, and Thrillest -- three respected food, drink, and travel publications.
The cuts mark the second reconstruction at Eater in less than 10 months, but were a shock because just days earlier CEO Jim Bankoff told Puck's Dylan Byers that he did not foresee any impending layoffs, and some of the journalists affected had been nominated for and won James Beard Media Awards just two months ago.
While Eater's national food and dining site will remain, the cuts could be devastating for its network of city-based sites, which have long been vital for local restaurant news in places like Boston, New York, Detroit, Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Las Vegas. The future of those sites, and their local reporting, is now in question.
Erika Adams, the deputy editor of Eater's Northeast region -- which covers Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and New York -- was cut. So was Ashok Selvam, the regional editor of Eater's Midwest region, which covered Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. Janna Karel, the editor of Eater Vegas, confirmed on Instagram that she was laid off. Eater Texas editor Courtney Smith was also laid off, and now all of Eater's Texas coverage rests on the shoulders of a single temporary contract writer.
"To be abundantly clear: these layoffs are a gut-job," Vox Media Union, which represents many of Eater's writers and editors, said in a statement. Roughly a third of Eater's union jobs were lost in this round of cuts. The union has also started a GoFundMe in order to ease the financial burden of these layoffs.
A Vox Media spokesperson said Eater is committed to "operating all current Eater sites," but it's unclear how they would do so when some of the sites, like Eater Boston, have no employees. The Boston site had been periodically covering all of New England after Eater gutted or shuttered other local sites, including Eater Maine in 2016.
Adams, who is based in Boston, told me she doesn't know Vox's future plans for the city sites, but imagines Eater Boston will considerably slow its publishing cadence. "When it does publish, it will either be work from freelance food writers in the Boston area, or Eater staff based elsewhere," she said.
"The part that saddens me the most is that there's one less daily news outlet in Boston dedicated to covering its restaurants -- the cultural lifeblood of any city," said Adams, who was the only full-time employee dedicated to Eater Boston, which has not been updated since Aug. 6 before the cuts. "Now is the time to invest more in this essential coverage, not less."
Why this matters: Local food journalism has faced significant challenges over the years with the erosion of local news outlets and increased competition from food blogs and online influencers (who are often paid to post about restaurants, or get free food to create social media content). Eater was a free news site that many restaurant owners, bartenders, and chefs who couldn't afford subscriptions to pricier news sites would turn to for restaurant and food news. Losing credible food journalists is a blow to food enthusiasts everywhere.
There's also an AI and search problem. Eater became reliant on lists like their "38 essential restaurants" series in cities across America. It used to be a huge driver of traffic to their websites, but as Google and other search engines adopted AI-generated results, they lifted those listed and presented them as AI-powered overviews, so readers no longer needed to click through to Eater's original work.
"There has been an absolute apocalypse of traffic. Everyone has seen their maps and lists collapse," Smith told D magazine. "If I were a person who just wanted to do a quick Google for an answer, [AI is] not bad. The problem is that publishers need to move away from SEO traffic."
What's next: Like many readers, we'll be waiting to see which Eater city sites survive and which fade into oblivion. As a fellow journalist covering dining culture, I'm wondering whether we'll see any changes to Eater's editorial strategy to keep from being hollowed out by AI-driven search results. But the biggest question remains: Is this the beginning of the end for one of food media's most influential brands?