Recipes Need a "Lightbulb Moment," says Emily Weinstein, Editor-in-Chief of New York Times Cooking and Food
With 24,000 recipes in the NYT Cooking database, this high-powered editor knows what she wants from them -- and writers
One morning, I opened my email and found a paid subscription from Emily Weinstein. I gasped! What a huge compliment.
Emily is in charge of everything you see in the New York Times food section: recipes, reviews, features; and the NYT Cooking online database. She leads the team that assigns and edits freelance stories. She’s ultimately in charge of restaurant reviews and freelance stories, and writes the popular newsletter Five Weeknight Dishes.
I asked if I could interview her for this newsletter, and to my delight, she said yes. Emily has a huge, influential job. She leads a team of approximately 50 editors, reporters, restaurant critics, columnists, video producers, recipe developers, social media editors and photo editors. They produce content for:
· The New York Times Food section
· NYT Cooking, the subscription recipe app, which has around 24,000 recipes
· And the off-platform channels (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok).
Emily joined The New York Times in 2007, as a senior staff editor and web producer, for dining and home. Before she was at The Village Voice for four years in a variety of positions. She was also an editorial assistant at Jane magazine. She is a graduate of Vassar and has an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia university.
“I started really young and the work kept growing. It’s been an amazing education to work at The Times,” she told me. “There’s nothing like it.”
Here’s Emily on recipe testing and writing, career, and what The New York Times wants in a contributor:
Q. Your staff doubled between 2020 and now. Why is that?
A. The one-word answer is video. There are about 17 people now who work in video. In 2020 there were two.
Do you think food writers need to be good on video?
A. I don’t. These are really different skills. We work with freelancer writers who don’t have video skills.
Food writers need to hone an expertise, such as writing on Substack, that allows you to directly connect with people who want to cook your food and support your endeavors. Video makes a lot of sense, but you have to find your platform and work hard and strategically at it.
Q. What are you most proud of at the NYT Cooking and Food section?
I’m really proud of my team. It’s stacked with people who are smart, creative, collaborative, genuinely nice and supportive of each other. That’s something to shout from the mountaintops. I’m proud of how much people love NYT Cooking.
And there’s the new cookbook, a collection of 100 recipes of The New York Times recipes. When I promote the book, people want to talk about their favorite recipes on NYT recipes. It’s amazing to feel that love for the work that we do, and I’m proud to have built something people use in their daily world. I cook from this app all the time and I love it.
Q. The comments in NYT Cooking are infamous. There’s even an Instagram parody. Do you get frustrated with the comments sometimes? Do you ever have to turn them off?
A. I love the commenters. They are incredibly knowledgeable. We never turn off the comments.
It’s easier for me to love the comments because I’m not a recipe developer. I don’t take them personally. I can take them in stride. The ones that are really frustrating are from the readers who change literally everything in a recipe and then don’t have success.
Q. How many times is a recipe tested?