Southern Food Newsletter Struggles To Be Found

It seems like journalists are launching newsletters every day of late. What’s often missing, however, is actual journalism. Some of it is curation, some is opinion and some is more like industry gossip.

Which makes what I stumbled upon when I found The Food Section a marvel, replete with personality and actual reportage, as well as cultural commentary and travel guides (no recipes, though). Hanna Raskin, founder and sole full-time employee, covers “food and drink across the American South as though it mattered as much as crime and politics (because it does.).”

Stories include a racial dispute over a black-owned restaurant in Baton Rouge, Covid-19 mortality among food workers, a call to keep Wawa’s hoagies out of North Carolina and what happened when one of South Carolina’s most storied barbecue destinations shut down all but one of its pits and installed a Southern Pride cooker (freshly split oak and hickory versus gas).

You can search for stories by topic (arts & literature, science & nature), by type (essay, investigative) or by mood (celebratory, challenging). Can’t decide? Click on “Take me to a random article” to be surprised. She has 11,000 subscribers, 800 who pay.

Raskin’s paying readers are largely not from the south. They are from New York. They tend to be well-educated white men aged 64 to 81 who like to travel. They are also a bit of a dying breed.

“The vast majority of our readers and subscribers are not from the industry. They are definitely restaurant patrons, not restaurant workers,” Raskin told AMO. She would like to have more stats and be able to conduct more surveys to get a better sense of what her readers are looking for and how she can better serve them in part because Raskin’s struggling to attract new paying readers, despite a wealth of quality content.

Last year, a reader even hired a fancy New York PR firm to help her out. They were at a loss. They didn’t know how to sell a publication unlike anything else on the market, Raskin said. They managed to book her on several podcasts; most never aired. They also then suggested asking influential people to host house parties on behalf of the publication, and invite their like-minded friends. However, they weren’t able to suggest any influential people. It was a bust.

Now Raskin is scrounging everywhere to raise money as she expands to new cities with more consistent, niched coverage.

$45,600 a Year

Outside of New York, most readership comes from the Carolinas—Raskin is based in Charleston—and the target audience is anyone who wants to better understand the South and its people through food, with the publication aiming to be accessible to a wide range of readers. Subscriptions cost $9 a month or $99 a year, prices that were about doubled on March 1.

Readers still aren’t showing up in big enough numbers. Raskin readily admits she is not good at social media.

“I’m not going to beat the algorithm,” she said. Instead of relying on social media, she reaches people through more traditional methods like word of mouth, networking, attending conferences, entering awards and leveraging media partnerships. For example, Raskin writes a column under The Food Section brand once a month at the Jacksonville Today newsletter, including this story about restaurants surreptitiously jacking up the price of sweet tea to deal with inflation.

While TFS doesn’t have the technology to measure on a consistent basis whether readers clicked over from a Jacksonville Today story or related social media post, when people answer the “Where did you hear about TFS?” question in the signup process, the Jacksonville newsletter turns up in at least 5% of answers.

Raskin has been a reporter and food critic for over 25 years. She spent nearly eight years at The Post and Courier focused on the Charleston food scene. She decided she wanted to cover a broader swath of the South and founded The Food Section in 2021.

Off the bat, she received a year-long grant of $70,000 from Substack in exchange for 90% of subscription revenue, a mixed blessing in hindsight because she wasn’t encouraged to diversify revenue sources—the grant was predicated that she make no money other than from subscriptions. She later received a $10,000 grant from the LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers, a professional association for local independent news publishers, to specifically migrate away from Substack.

Last year, revenue totaled $97,812. At year’s end, TFS had 22 fewer paid subscribers than it had at the start, and recorded a loss of $1,104. Raskin pays herself $1,900 twice a month, or $45,600 a year. Subscriptions accounted for half of revenue, while media partnerships and consulting work represented the remainder. She expects revenue to hold steady in 2025.

“I perpetually feel behind in developing other revenue streams, but I’m always working on it,” Raskin said. Last year, she beefed up the offerings. She added the first restaurant reviewer: Michael Stern, the originator of Roadfood and a longtime Gourmet editor, and expanded publication to five days a week. She has about nine total contributors today, and created an advisory board this year to help her push ahead.

Garlic Crab, Legs & Cans

TFS also holds events like last year’s rain-soaked Garlic Crab Championship, Legs & Cans, a sampling of beers, sparkling wines and fried chicken, and the Spirited Brunch, a self-guided snack tour of downtown Charleston’s “prayerful spaces.”

Each event has a different objective and no event is held without costs being fully covered in advance through sponsorship or other arrangements, since ticket sales are not dependable. Raskin said:

Every event should give participants a sense of The Food Section experience, so discovery and appreciation of the South’s diverse culinary scene and the communities responsible for it are prioritized in programming. For example, the Garlic Crab Championship—priced to cultivate paid subscriptions—was designed to celebrate the vibrant Gullah-Geechee seafood tradition, which is wholly absent from fancy downtown Charleston restaurants. That event just barely broke even, but imagery from the party caught the attention of a national TV show, which is planning to underwrite and document the next edition.

The goal of Legs & Cans is to attract free readers, and Spirited Brunch is an exercise in building brand awareness, Raskin said.

Still, it’s hard to please everyone. She had one subscriber who quit because they complained about not getting enough local coverage for their specific city. So to hone in on specific markets, Raskin hired local correspondents that are currently covering Nashville, Asheville, Atlanta and West Virginia. Then she got a complaint from another reader who wanted broader and more regional coverage instead.

“Obviously the idea is that in five years, we would have 25 cities fully covered, right? That would be the dream. And then people get what they want,” she said. “We’re just not big enough to meet the need right now.”

Will she get there? As a reporter, I don’t take sides and I aim to be objective in all of my work, but I do support my fellow journalists. Here’s hoping.