A Gourmet for the People

When asked why he wanted to revive Gourmet magazine, Sam Dean recalls that he had recently finished college and begun working in media when the iconic culinary magazine abruptly shut down. Condé Nast announced it was closing Gourmet in 2009 due to a decline in ad sales, deeply disappointing the magazine’s readership of elite foodies. Around the same time, the four other journalists behind the new reboot were also starting out in a more precarious media industry from when Gourmet was first published in 1941. “It's always been this kind of legendary dead thing, I think, for all of us,” says Dean. For him, the magazine represented a kind of top-tier, in-depth food writing that rarely finds a place in today’s media landscape.

The five co-founders, each with their own experience in food media, claimed the lapsed trademark and relaunched Gourmet on January 13 as a worker-owned, subscription-funded, digital newsletter. The startup joins the ranks of writer-owned news outlets like Hell Gate, Defector, and 404 Media that have recently sprung up, prefiguring a way to shift the power as corporate interests increasingly tighten their stranglehold on the mainstream media. Dean and graphic designer Alex Tatusian worked together at the LA Times until Tatusian was laid off in 2024. Dean, who eventually took a buyout because of the layoffs, has written as a freelancer for Conde Nast’s food magazine Bon Appétit, for which Tatusian also worked at a different time. After he approached Dean about collaborating on their own project, the two shared the idea with Bon Appétit contributing editor Amiel Stanek, software engineer and editor Nozlee Samadzadeh, and writer-editor Cale Weissman. “I think everyone involved wanted to just do a thing that felt good, and also that we could control as a group,” Dean says.

On an impulse, Dean searched the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database for any famous magazine trademarks that might be available, which was when he noticed Condé Nast had let the Gourmet trademark lapse in 2021. “Then it kind of ballooned from there."

The group quietly filed an application to claim the trademark, which Condé Nast had continued to use after the closing for other ventures like book publishing. “We were being a little cloak-and-dagger before we launched,” says Dean. Since an important part of securing a trademark is proving active use of it, he explains, they veered from their original plan to launch in February. “We bumped it up by a month just to plant the flag sooner in the trademark.” While they have not heard anything from the media conglomerate since debuting Gourmet in its new format, Dean says they have consulted a lawyer throughout the process and are prepared to defend the claim in court if necessary. 

When the New York Times covered the relaunch in its first week, it sparked an outpouring of excitement from fans of the original print publication, which for many years emphasized complex, high-end recipes and published notable essays like David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster”. In its new incarnation, Gourmet puts out one feature and one recipe a week for subscribers via email.

“Some people have become a little puzzled because we're a bit weird compared to the old Gourmet magazine,” says Dean. The lean format, however, is intended to keep overhead costs low, eschewing the need for advertisers or investors and allowing the worker-owners full autonomy to put out something geared toward people who actually love to cook. While the mainstream food media prioritizes getting clicks with quick, easy recipes, their newsletter centers lengthy, well-written material covering the food industry from all angles, while aiming for the old Gourmet’s eccentric style, which Dean describes as “goofily highbrow.”

On choosing the co-op model for their startup, Dean says, “It was both ideological in that we believe in co-ops as a good thing to do in the world, and also functionally, it doesn't seem like there is any other way to make things work.” The outside-investor profit motive, he says, has made newspapers into little more than capitalist products of profit generation, and the business model of trying to extract extra money through things like ad revenue seems to him “destructive to the creation of information.

Describing himself and his co-founders as “small D democratic, and maybe capital L left-minded people,” he says they have been greatly inspired by examples like Hell Gate, 404, and Defector. “There are a bunch of people who are doing this in a way that we admire and think is cool and makes sense because, I think, we've all seen the corporate structures of media companies run cool things into the ground, basically.”

Having each worked in the media industry for 15 to 20 years, Dean says the co-op members are well aware how low the pay rates for freelancers tend to be. “If you look at freelance rates from the 80s or 90s till today, people are getting paid $1 or $2 a word in 1985.” While some outlets still pay in that range today, he points out, with inflation this comes to about half as much money.

With this in mind, they have decided on a profit-sharing model used by very few publications for paying contributors. In addition to receiving a standard rate for their work, writers get a cut of the proceeds for three months after their stories go out. Part of the power of the co-op model, Dean explains, is that they control the overhead, which for the new Gourmet is limited to their software stack and paying contributors. Since they are not paying themselves yet and there are no profits going to investors, they can capture more value from subscriptions.

Gourmet’s worker-owners have deep professional connections with most of the writers who have contributed so far, whom Dean says are all very excited by this new venue for offbeat food writing. Now they have been getting pitches every day and expanding out into a broader field of people. “This is kind of what I wanted to do this for in the first place. As a writer and as a worker, I knew that the work conditions were bad and there was nowhere to publish cool stuff.” The current food media landscape, he says, does not give space for freelancers to pitch bold ideas like pieces about going on “a weird trip to hunt muskrats in Appalachia,” for example. “We're getting a ton of response from people pitching us because we correctly assessed that there was a pent-up supply of good ideas and nowhere to put them.”

As they find their footing as a co-op, the worker-owners have been sorting roles by their respective interests and abilities. Tatusian brings his own expertise to the newsletter’s design, while Weissman, being the most knowledgeable about cooperatives, has taken the lead on planning the co-op’s structure. Dean, who worked four days a week as a reporter and one day a week as a union rep during his stint at the LA Times, has been talking with the Media Guild about ways to become a union co-op. “I think we're all bringing our various left experiences to bear on how we do this stuff.” 

As a passionate culinarian who worked in kitchens before getting a job at Bon Appétit in 2011, Stanek leads the recipe side of things. “Amiel cooked at his huge college co-op, giant meals for hundreds of people,” Dean explains, adding that Stanek also worked with an even-bigger adult co-op near his school to get enormous vats of tofu every day.

Right now Dean handles customer service, poring over all the subscriber feedback that comes into Gourmet’s email inbox every week. He says expectation management has been a concern. “People just want more, is the thing,” says Dean. “I think people kind of expected something on the scale of a huge corporate magazine, which we are not. So we're slowly ramping up the amount of stuff that we're going to be publishing over time.” He says the response has mostly been very positive, however. “People seem psyched at the idea.”

Dean thinks the bleak state of the media world is one reason for all the enthusiastic support the co-op has received from both subscribers and colleagues. Between the onslaught of layoffs and ominous developments like right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison buying CBS and TikTok, he says, “There's just so much insane corporate-media stuff going on that I think people enjoy seeing a little ray of hope. Weirdos starting a weird thing, you know?”