In the pandemic summer of 2021, at a moment when the future of restaurants was less than certain, Hanna Raskin did something bold and risky: She left her job as the food editor and chief critic at the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, to launch a newsletter.
Raskin first spotted the opportunity the year before, when South Carolina re-opened indoor dining in May, still in the early days of the pandemic.
“Nobody knew what was happening — workers, patrons, and the legislators making the rules included,” she said. “They all turned to me as a source of information. I realized not only was I helping these people navigate their day-to-day lives and make, in some cases, life and death decisions, but giving them an opportunity to talk about all the issues that the pandemic brought to the fore.”
Dining suddenly wasn’t just about which new restaurant to try. There was a bigger conversation — about public health, social justice, and the future of work — to be had.
“It was really a great opportunity. I thought, ‘Boy, you shouldn’t have to live in Charleston to be privy to this chance,’” she said.
The next step for Raskin was The Food Section, which she launched in September 2021. It’s a publication that aims to bring independent and rigorous coverage of restaurants and food culture to the region.
Open an edition of The Food Section and you might read about food trends (are bagels coming to the Southeast?) or see the occasional restaurant recommendation. But you’ll also read about industry workers on strike, what’s behind gun violence in restaurants, and scammers preying on the reputation of a New Orleans do-gooder.
Readers have responded positively to the mix of stories. Raskin says The Food Section’s grown to 660 paying subscribers and more than $50,000 in gross annualized revenue. Critics have noticed, too. This June, Raskin’s writing won a James Beard Media Award — the Oscars for food. Even more impressive: The Food Section won for Dining and Travel, beating out feature stories from two old-guard magazines, Bon Appétit and Garden & Gun.
I first met Raskin in late 2021 when she was a student in the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. (I teach a handful of sessions every year to students in that program.) I’ve kept an eye on The Food Section ever since.
Something that’s impressed me over the years is Raskin’s willingness to experiment with nearly every part of her newsletter — particularly monetization. She’s experimented with different price points for her newsletter, sold ebooks and physical magazines of The Food Section stories, and tested out paid events and merch. She launched advertising as a way to support freelance writers for her newsletter. This year, she launched a partnership with The Assembly, a North Carolina-based investigative outlet, to bring food coverage to more readers.
But she’s also tested a few out-of-the-box marketing tactics to convert readers to subscribers. In May 2022, she told readers that she’d randomly remove 15% of her free list, but readers who chose to pay for a subscription would “avoid the axe.” It worked — she saw an immediate bump in subscriptions, and that growth has steadily continued for over a year.
“You have to know your publication and know your audience,” Raskin told me. Her audience surveys gave her confidence that an aggressive marketing pitch like that would work — even if it turned some readers off.
Raskin and I talked about what she’s learned as a reporter learning how to market her own publication, why experimentation matters for independent newsletters, and what others — even non-foodies — can learn from her James Beard win.
You’re now the writer behind a James Beard-award winning newsletter. How does that feel?
Still amazing and very new. But incredibly gratifying. I set out to do quality journalism, and I feel like that’s one of the awards that confirms that I’ve done what I set out to do.
The Food Section’s always been a little different than the food coverage you’ll see in other newsletters or on social media. Lots of the food writing I see online is about recipes or about the writer themselves. You do travel guides — including the Interstate 95 guide that won you the James Beard award — plus feature stories and investigative reporting. What makes a good story for The Food Section?
A story that’s interesting. That’s the thing. That’s the No. 1 criterion. But additionally, a story that has a takeaway, some insight. I say in my pitch guide for freelancers that every story should either answer a question that’s on people’s minds or put a question there that wasn’t there before.
What I keep preaching is that this is all really standard journalism and nothing I’m saying would come as a surprise to anyone who’s practiced it. It’s just I’m bringing it to food journalism, and that doesn’t happen as frequently as it might.
You mentioned to me before that there’s sometimes a disconnect between people expecting recipes and getting reported features and investigative stories instead. How do you think about presenting The Food Section to make sure you make a good first impression on a future audience?
To me, the most important thing is giving people the insight and analysis they need to appreciate their own dining experiences better and to make better dining choices. It’s really expensive to eat, period, whether you’re shopping at the grocery store or going out to restaurants. The idea is that we’re providing the information to make those experiences more meaningful, more rewarding.
To refer to the I-95 guide, when you pull off an exit on I-95, you’re not going to eat another McDonald’s cheeseburger that you won’t remember six exits later. You’re going to have an opportunity to experience the culture of that small town and a small business owner who’s from there.
Where did that I-95 guide come from? Because to me, it was so interesting. It’s not Hanna’s “Ultimate Guide to Traveling Through the South and Hitting Every Possible Hotspot.” It’s, you’re on I-95, you’re driving through Virginia or North Carolina or South Carolina, you’re gonna have to stop and you don’t want to go 30 miles off the road to find a place to eat. Where did the idea come from for that guide?
That idea came from a reader years ago, back when I was at [the Post and Courier]. For folks who haven’t traveled here, in South Carolina we have one interstate, I-26, and it connects the three biggest cities: Greenville, Columbia, and Charleston. A reader had said, “I’m on I-26 three days a week. What do you know about food options at Exit 71?” And I didn’t know anything about Exit 71 or any of the other exits.
I realized, I very much want to meet people where they are. And that could be Exit 71. The reality is, people may not have hundreds of dollars to put aside for a tasting menu that they can’t get a reservation for anyhow. But do people travel on I-95? Yes. So that’s the idea.
You shared that you currently have 7,200 total subscribers, 57% open rates, and about 660 paying subscribers who bring in about $50,000 in gross annualized revenue. But a year ago in June, you told me you were sitting at about 470 paying subscribers and that the future of the publication was uncertain. What changed in the past year?
I think one of the things that changed is I won more awards and have gotten more attention. Getting the word out is incredibly helpful. So long as you’re putting out a quality product, there’s going to be some gradual growth, right? But I also realized that cooperation and collaboration is the way to really grow. I explored additional income streams like events and a print version of my publication, but the big one for me is partnering up with other publications. I’m still developing a lot of those, but the one that’s already taken effect is with The Assembly, a digital magazine out in North Carolina. They are paying me $30,000 a year to essentially oversee and guide their food content. The idea is, and this is what I’m trying to pitch to other publications, they know what they want to do, but they have no idea how to cover food. There are still many upstart media organizations, super scrappy, aggressive, ambitious, that don’t have a clue about food but know that their readers care and [that food] is a potential source of revenue. So my goal is to fill that tray, and this is just starting out.
Having that partnership with The Assembly and the money coming in means I was able to cut my subscription price [for The Food Section] in half. Suddenly, I’m like the magazine at the checkout counter, right? It’s five bucks — “I can pay five bucks!” That’s been really helpful in continuing to acquire paying subscribers.
You cut your subscription rate from $9 a month/$99 a year to $5 a month/$49 a year. You had an existing audience that was willing to pay more. You also cut publishing for The Food Section from three to two days a week. But from where I’m sitting, you were under no obligation to cut the price of the subscription. Why reduce your rates?
Because I really like experimentation. I’m always experimenting, and this seemed like a great opportunity. I knew I was covered — I had that extra money [from The Assembly] coming in. It gave me this great opportunity to experiment with publishing frequency.
I can say I’m very consistent. From the start, I published at a certain time, every Monday, Wednesday, Friday — I never miss a day. I needed the freedom of something like this, like, “Okay, what if I published half as much? What if I charged half as much?” And it seems to be working.
What’s the feedback been after changing your rates?
Good! I mean, I’m going entirely by the rate of subscription, which seems to be higher. No one’s complained. No one’s said, “I really wanted to pay more.”
Tell me a bit more about the partnership with The Assembly. You announced your first correspondent, Lena Geller, a Durham-based writer, will be joining the team. What kind of coverage can readers expect, and what’s next for the partnership?
There are two components to it. One is that The Assembly is a statewide news organization. They put out a newsletter with big pieces. I’m helping to guide and edit those pieces. Additionally, [we’ll be reporting on] the local news, which I really missed since leaving [The Post and Courier]. That’s what Lena is going to be doing more. Being our correspondent in the North Carolina Triangle, she is going to have more of those stories like, Oh, my God, I can’t believe this restaurant closed! Why did it close? You know, digging into those little things that may not have larger repercussions but really matter to a local audience.
I wanted to ask about some of your marketing tactics. On May 6, 2022, you sent an email to readers with the title “Say goodbye to The Food Section.” You wrote: “In one week, I’m pruning The Food Section’s email list by 15 percent… The only way to avoid the axe is to subscribe today.” Tell me a little about why you did that, and what happened after you told your audience, “Subscribe or you’ll be removed from my newsletter”?
I was looking at my numbers very carefully and trying to figure out, as we all do, what causes conversion. What are the steps and what can I do to get people on that path? Much to my disappointment, I discovered there was no path — at least in my case.
What’s important about this whole scheme is that it’s incredibly unique, and the moral for me is you have to know your publication and know your audience. For my publication, conversion is an illusion. It does not happen. I just ran the numbers again recently. Essentially, if people haven’t paid in the first three days, they’re never giving me money. That may not be true for every publication. But to me, it’s a lesson as to why you need to keep going back to your numbers, to your subscriber list, and follow up to figure out what’s happening. Because it’s very clear in my case.
I think part of [the reason for all the conversions in the first 72 hours] is because I’ve been fortunate to have publicity, so people know what they’re getting into. We don’t really have that getting-to-know-each-other process I think many other publications do. So people pay in anticipation of what they’re going to get instead of gratification for what they did. They’re like, “Sign me up, let’s do it. I’m giving you my money.” And if they don’t, they won’t.
It turns out that there are literally thousands of people who love just getting sales pitches, which baffles my mind. [laughs] And so that is how I decided, I don’t need these folks around. I don’t know if I used the term “deadweight” in my post, but that’s exactly how I felt. If you are sitting on my list, I am going to continue to try and win you over. That is a real waste of time if you’re never, never going to convert, right?
The idea was, I’m taking 15% of y’all off the list randomly. The response was tremendous, for a couple of reasons. I know my demographic. I’ve done enough reader surveys to know, weirdly enough, my main demographic are older, educated white men, usually 63 to 81. They tend to read the sports pages more than they read food. I had a feeling they were gonna like this. I knew that would resonate with them. I know that there are food newsletters that are about, like, how to make pickles, where they have a totally different persona. This was completely in line with the persona of my readership. So they’re like, “Yeah, like she’s going to bat for us, we don’t want this dead weight around either.” So it was awesome. It was community building. It gave people a sense of the value of the newsletter. It gave me an opportunity to talk about why the newsletter, once again, does require paying subscribers.
The only negative of this whole thing is after I cut the 15%, I had so many new free signups that I ended up with more free readers than I had before! That wasn’t the plan. But obviously, I think it worked. With subscriptions, I had hit this big plateau in terms of growth [before I sent the email], and it just started climbing then and hasn’t really stopped since.
When it comes to monetization, you’ve sold ebooks and hard copies of your best work. How have sales gone for those and how important is it to your monetization mix?
It is not important to the bottom line. Obviously, I’m happy to take all the money I can. I just revamped my merchandise selection. I was happy to see there was money in my account there. I’m continuing to sell t-shirts, which is fine, but I’d ignored that for months because that is not a primary revenue source.
But the print product is hugely important for marketing. I take it to every meeting — it’s better than a business card. People flip through it, and they get it immediately. They really get it. It’s so important for people to see the images to understand that the South that I am covering is a diverse South. It’s a lively South. I can’t use a cliche like a picture says a thousand words [laughs], but it really is useful to have that. It’s great to hand that over. I also have some independent bookstores that are looking into carrying it. For marketing, it’s fantastic. Revenue, not so much, but for marketing, it’s been great.
You’re doing subscriptions, partnerships, some freelance writing, books and ticketed events. Now you’re accepting some ads in the newsletter to support additional freelance work. Do you envision adding any new streams of revenue, or doubling down on any of these revenue streams going forward?
I think I would like to grow the sponsorship revenue stream. Part of the discussion at The Assembly is we’re supposed to do some joint sales [to sell ads for both publications]. We’ll see how that pans out. But that’s something I want to develop further.
How far down the road are you planning and thinking about?
I grew up in a university town, so I still structure my year on the academic calendar. I launched the publication in September. Last September, I announced his plan to bring on freelancers, which I hadn’t done before. That was an important move to bring this beyond just me into an actual media organization. We’ll see what’s next come this September, but I do like each year to have a theme.
I’m definitely thinking at least one year ahead. Of course, that has to serve something larger. I can’t imagine beyond five years, but I say I’m within that one-to-three-year planning period.
This is your second James Beard win. Your first was in 2017 when you were the food editor at the Post and Courier. This time you won for a piece you wrote for an independent newsletter that you founded. What kind of message do you think that sends to the reporter or creator who’s thinking about going independent?
I think that goes to show, quality is quality. This is what I tell people all the time: No sales tactic is going to make up for a lack of quality. People know what they’re getting and whether it’s good. You can’t persuade someone that something’s valuable if it isn’t.
