Surf for Great Food Web Sites
June 17, 2016 10:01 AM
I'm helping out with a ground-breaking, high-visibility project run by a well-regarded food writer. We need a small mountain of highly specialized research-via-surfing, along with some light writing. Not academic...it's for popular use. And, yes, it pays real money (negotiable).
Here's the gist:
1. Surf around and find particularly fun and great English language web sites/pages about world cuisines ("Chilean", "Laotian", etc) or specific topics within cuisines ("Thai Curries", "Japanese Nostalgia Food", "Brazilian Rodizio Dos and Don'ts", "Photo Encyclopedias of German Wursts"). Cooking video sites, recipe sites, cuisine overview or encyclopedia sites, everything is fair game....but you must ferret passionately for absolute treasure, rather than easy Google search results (i.e. "good enough" isn't good enough). The urge to ferret and filter should be a natural, happy-making drive for you that won't flag over time.
To repeat: you need to feel an exuberant rush from having found OMG greatness every single time....and repeat many times! This is hard, unless you're good at this sort of thing!
2. Describe the sites tersely but persuasively, in the voice with which you might text message a friend. I.e. passionately sum up why it's great and worth surfing in a natural, non-writerly voice that doesn't sound like some cubicle worker who's churning these out by the bucketload. We don't want slick professional writers or writer wannabes. We need earnestness.
REQUIREMENTS:
Strong experience and enthusiasm for ethnic food. You'll learn tons from this work, but we need you to be reasonably informed to begin with (from dining out and/or cooking and/or traveling), so you're able to gauge sites for their savvy and authenticity and winnow pandering sites (e.g. ones that call kimchi "spicy pickled cabbage"), or swap in trashy supermarket ingredients, or that feature well-intentioned home cooks who just aren't really very good, etc..
No lazy procrastinators. You'll need to work for several months, in your spare time, self-paced and unstructured...yet produce with unflagging determination. All while retaining enough innocent treasure-hunting joy that you never drop your standards, and always write your descriptions with genuine passion. This will require Trix Rabbit level exuberance. This undertaking is ambitious. It will need to excite you, beyond just the pay, if you're going to do a good job..
You must be moldable . Flexible enough to accept loads of feedback until you're fully calibrated with the sort of thing we're looking for. Maybe even enjoy being calibrated in this way.
If this "sounds like fun", it will be. But it will also be serious work, so if you have trouble reconciling "fun" and "discipline", this project will wear you down. If you can produce over long haul, it will be something you'll be very proud to have been part of (and a fine resume credit). You'll also learn a massive amount about world cuisine. But, again, it requires disciplined and sustained work without a lot of structure. Understand: this is a monster commitment, albeit under low pressure, and done at your own pace, so it can function really well as a nights/weekend/idle moments fill-in project (perfect for young mothers waiting for babies to crash, etc).
Send a note telling us why this is the most amazing coincidence because you're so strangely and amazingly perfect for this.
payscale: Negotiable
job type: part-time
Here's the gist:
1. Surf around and find particularly fun and great English language web sites/pages about world cuisines ("Chilean", "Laotian", etc) or specific topics within cuisines ("Thai Curries", "Japanese Nostalgia Food", "Brazilian Rodizio Dos and Don'ts", "Photo Encyclopedias of German Wursts"). Cooking video sites, recipe sites, cuisine overview or encyclopedia sites, everything is fair game....but you must ferret passionately for absolute treasure, rather than easy Google search results (i.e. "good enough" isn't good enough). The urge to ferret and filter should be a natural, happy-making drive for you that won't flag over time.
To repeat: you need to feel an exuberant rush from having found OMG greatness every single time....and repeat many times! This is hard, unless you're good at this sort of thing!
2. Describe the sites tersely but persuasively, in the voice with which you might text message a friend. I.e. passionately sum up why it's great and worth surfing in a natural, non-writerly voice that doesn't sound like some cubicle worker who's churning these out by the bucketload. We don't want slick professional writers or writer wannabes. We need earnestness.
REQUIREMENTS:
Strong experience and enthusiasm for ethnic food. You'll learn tons from this work, but we need you to be reasonably informed to begin with (from dining out and/or cooking and/or traveling), so you're able to gauge sites for their savvy and authenticity and winnow pandering sites (e.g. ones that call kimchi "spicy pickled cabbage"), or swap in trashy supermarket ingredients, or that feature well-intentioned home cooks who just aren't really very good, etc..
No lazy procrastinators. You'll need to work for several months, in your spare time, self-paced and unstructured...yet produce with unflagging determination. All while retaining enough innocent treasure-hunting joy that you never drop your standards, and always write your descriptions with genuine passion. This will require Trix Rabbit level exuberance. This undertaking is ambitious. It will need to excite you, beyond just the pay, if you're going to do a good job..
You must be moldable . Flexible enough to accept loads of feedback until you're fully calibrated with the sort of thing we're looking for. Maybe even enjoy being calibrated in this way.
If this "sounds like fun", it will be. But it will also be serious work, so if you have trouble reconciling "fun" and "discipline", this project will wear you down. If you can produce over long haul, it will be something you'll be very proud to have been part of (and a fine resume credit). You'll also learn a massive amount about world cuisine. But, again, it requires disciplined and sustained work without a lot of structure. Understand: this is a monster commitment, albeit under low pressure, and done at your own pace, so it can function really well as a nights/weekend/idle moments fill-in project (perfect for young mothers waiting for babies to crash, etc).
Send a note telling us why this is the most amazing coincidence because you're so strangely and amazingly perfect for this.
payscale: Negotiable
job type: part-time