Editor’s note: In the travel world the shift from print to the web and to apps is palpable. Here is a personal note on Jules Older’s travels along that path. He has shifted from an editor-in-chief to making travel videos and launching his first iPhone app. Hey, if you’re headed to SF the app is worth a test. He knows food.
We live on a fault line.
Here in San Francisco, we live on two fault lines. The better-known one is the San Andreas Fault, which may bring the town down sometime soon.
The lesser-known one has already brought down many colleagues and friends.
This one’s a grinding shift of epochs, not of tectonic plates. We live on the divide between the Gutenberg Era and the Digital Age. The days of print may be done, and friends who write or shoot for newspapers and magazines have lost their source of income.
And not just friends. I was editor-in-chief of two magazines, both victims of the shift. There went the income.
With the magazines gone and others going, assignments became fewer and further between. As newspapers started folding along with magazines, former journalists and once-were-editors began competing with freelancers for rapidly shrinking editorial space.
You’ve heard that old Chinese curse, May you live in exciting times. If you’ve made your living in print, yer soaking in it.
I was soaking in it.
Then the phone rang. No, because we are now in Digi Times, an email arrived. It’s from Sutro Media, a couple of entrepreneurial San Francisco engineers who want to know if I’d like to create an iPhone app about San Francisco restaurants.
“If I do, I want to do it my way.”
“Which is?”
“Which is the opposite of Yelp and Urban Spoon and all those.”
“Which means?”
“Which means not crowd-sourced — one man’s palate, one woman’s photos. Which means uncorrupted by influencing ads, by pay-to-play, by anonymity.”
“What have you got against anonymity?”
“A lot. Writing as “Foodfreak,” the owner proclaims how fabulous his restaurant is. Writing as “Truthseek,” his competitor down the block swears that it totally sucks and he got ptomaine poisoning last time he was there.”
“Anything else?”
“Matter of fact, yes. I want to take users to where San Franciscans eat, not just to the same old stops on the Tiki Tour. I want to get them off the Tourist Reservation. I want to introduce them to bargains, not money flushers. I want to name my favorites and to castigate the overpriced and the overhyped.”
Sutro said, “When do we start?”
I said, “We just did.”
Sutro said, “Oh, and who’s the woman?”
“That would be Effin Older, my wife, the photographer.”
The app, San Francisco Restaurants, has been through three expansions since that day. It still costs 99 cents. Upgrades are still free. And it’s beginning to reach beyond the bridges to where visitors go on their big San Francisco trip.
Am I making anything like what I did when I was the editor-in-chief? Hell no, but writers are used to get-rich-slow schemes. Especially when we’re living on a fault line.
