Mark Bittman finds new niche
Writer to launch online publication
Times Union Editor’s Note: The original title for Mark Bittman’s publication was Salty. Via Twitter on Tuesday, Bittman said he would be changing the name and logo of his publication after social media posts by Salty, a lifestyle newsletter for women, trans and nonbinary people, called
Mark Bittman wants you to know he’s not dead.
Since his departure from The New York Times in 2015 to join a food startup, Bittman has had the unsettling feeling that people think he’s six feet under.
“It was like I kind of fell off the map,” Bittman said.
But the 69-year-old journalist and author of
20 books, including “How to Cook Everything,” is very much alive. And now he is going to work for Medium, the online platform and publisher, to head an online magazine focused on food.
“This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” Bittman said in a phone interview from the South by Southwest Conference this month in Austin, Texas. “I pitched it to several different people and came close a bunch of different times.”
Bittman wrote for The Times for three decades and started his column, “The Minimalist,” in 1997. It lasted until 2010. He spent five years as an opinion columnist and food writer for The New York Times Magazine. More than 1,200 of Bittman’s recipes can still be found in The Times’s Cooking section and app.
He has bounced around since leaving The Times. He spent less than a year at Purple Carrot, a vegan meal-kit startup. He wrote a column for New York Magazine and Grub Street. He started a newsletter. He posted recipes on his personal website. All along, he said, he had the idea of creating his own publication.
“If I dropped dead tomorrow,” he said, “is there something we’ve done that can last?”
The publication, which made its debut Tuesday, will include recipes, stories related to food and more.
“There’s a large part of me that wants people to be interested in food agriculture, or policy, or kids, or immigrants, or race,” Bittman said.
There will be no articles on restaurant openings, think pieces on super foods or profiles of celebrity chefs, he added. Some of the stories he has lined up go into racism in restaurants, how to buy an egg and how your relationship to food changes when you become a parent.
“We’re doing practical stories that will help people see food in a way they haven’t seen it before,” Bittman said.
Alongside Bittman at the publication are Melissa Mccart, the dining critic for The Pittsburgh Post-gazette; Daniel Meyer, a former restaurant critic for Time Out New York; and Kate Bittman, Bittman’s daughter and a public relations consultant.
The effort is one of several publications planned by Medium. Digiday reported in February that the site was hiring for four original online publications. So far, there are Onezero, on technology, and Human Parts, a health publication that Medium recently revitalized.
Evan Williams, founder and CEO of Medium, said more original publications and partnerships were in the works. Among them are a quarterly publication, GAY, created with author Roxane Gay, a contributing opinion writer for The Times.
In 2018, Medium invested $5 million in publishing. This year, Williams said, it’s “several multiples of that.” The new publications are meant to increase the number of Medium subscribers, who pay $5 a month or $50 a year.
“It’s a really good thing that the market is being retrained to pay for quality content,” Williams said.
Medium is free of ads, and its chief executive plans to keep it that way.