---
title: "Laid-Off Food Journalists Start Their Own Publications, Betting Readers Will Pay"
description: "Worker-owned collectives like Ravenous and Buffet charge $7 a month; one start-up, Caper, raised $2.5 million"
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-09-30T05:30:00Z
modified: 2026-10-01T01:53:06Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/laid-off-food-journalists-start-their-own-publications-betti-146d44
language: en
tags: ["media", "food", "workforce", "ai", "culture"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Laid-Off Food Journalists Start Their Own Publications, Betting Readers Will Pay

*Worker-owned collectives like Ravenous and Buffet charge $7 a month; one start-up, Caper, raised $2.5 million*

By rews desk · September 30, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/laid-off-food-journalists-start-their-own-publications-betti-146d44

## In brief

- Laid-off food journalists are launching subscription publications like Ravenous and Buffet as corporate outlets retrench
- Ravenous, worker-owned by five founders, began in May with about 1,600 paid subscribers at $7 a month
- Buffet, renamed after Condé Nast sued over the name Gourmet, emails about 10,000 readers twice a week
- Caper Media covers the hospitality business with $2.5 million in seed funding and $99 annual subscriptions
- Saveur’s owner revived its print edition, published twice a year at $25 an issue

As corporate publishers pull back from food journalism, laid-off writers and editors have started publications of their own this year, swapping advertisers and investors for subscriptions they hope readers will keep paying.

The wave includes worker-owned collectives and a venture-backed start-up alike. It evokes earlier moments when journalists struck out on their own, from the zine resurgence of the 1990s to the rise of alternative weeklies. Food is the latest test of whether readers will support the work directly.

The clearest case may be *Ravenous*, which began publishing in May after a monthlong subscriber drive in April. When layoffs hit their newsroom, a co-founder, Jaya Saxena, emailed everyone who lost a job that day. “If you’re at all interested in maybe building something like this, let’s get on a call, let’s talk,” she wrote. Five people — Ms. Saxena, Frances Dumlao, Amy McCarthy, Ashok Selvam and Courtney E. Smith — became the founder-owners.

“Food writing is one of those things that gets hit first, because it’s not seen as necessary,” Ms. Saxena said. What survives at corporate outlets, she said, is often restaurant maps, lists and gift guides. “As a writer, that’s not the stuff that makes me want to go to work.”

Each founder put part of a severance payment into the publication. *Ravenous* has no investors and takes no advertising; subscriptions start at $7 a month or $70 a year, with some content free. It has roughly 1,600 paid subscribers, enough, Ms. Saxena said, to pay the five of them part-time salaries and some freelance writers as well. Its stories have treated immigration policy as a route to lower food prices, traced Los Angeles’s historic restaurants and cataloged A.I.-generated food slop. Its only list so far has named restaurants with private equity investors.

*Buffet Magazine*, another worker-owned collaboration, was started by five friends with time at *Bon Appétit*, The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle: Sam Dean, Nozlee Samadzadeh, Amiel Stanek, Alex Tatusian and Cale Weissman. It debuted in January under the name Gourmet, until Condé Nast, publisher of the original *Gourmet*, sued. After a stretch as \[Untitled Food Magazine\], it re-emerged last month as *Buffet*, pronounced like the smorgasbord.

“What if we launched a food publication that was a harkening back to magazine writing?” Mr. Weissman said of the premise. “We always wanted to have fun, weird, zany food writing, and also recipes.”

The magazine goes out by e-mail twice a week to a list of about 10,000 people, for the same $7 a month. Its owners keep other jobs and split the profits, the losses and the work. “There’s no one who just does editing, who just does finance,” Mr. Weissman said. Freelance writers, he said, get market journalism rates “and above-market food journalism rates.”

*Caper Media*, which went live in February, is a different species. Founded by Max Tcheyan and Daniel Tsinis, it covers the business of hospitality with $2.5 million in seed funding, eight full-time employees who receive equity and bonuses on top of salary, and subscriptions at $99 a year. Its hires include Dana Brown, the editor in chief, from Vanity Fair, and founding journalists from *New York* magazine and Eater.

Mr. Tcheyan, who helped build The Athletic and Puck, said the old food-media model had been “all about ranking in search.” With readers now relying on A.I.-generated summaries instead of clicking through, he said, search sends less traffic. “There’s now an opportunity to attract audience through smarter and really quality reporting, which had kind of fallen out of favor,” he said. “It costs more to produce, quite simply.”

Even legacy print is getting another look. Kat Craddock bought the 30-year-old magazine *Saveur* from the media company Recurrent in 2023 and brought back its print edition, which now appears twice a year at $25 an issue alongside the website.

“If Saveur can cover our costs and pay our people and our contributors fairly and give everybody a little bit of a raise, that’s enough as far as I’m concerned,” Ms. Craddock said. “We’re not trying to overly inflate the numbers with some effort toward flipping this business. The idea is for Saveur to survive.”