Cathy2 wrote:How about those who do mine a website like this, then never offer any hint of the source of the great find except to imply it was their great investigative efforts alone. Suddenly someone referencing "online food chat sites" is at least being more honest with their reader.
I don't think it has anything to do with honesty. While many journalists do read this site and others to find out about new restaurants, research, word of mouth and a concept I think of as "Steam Engine Time" also play a role. My use of the last isn't quite according to Charles Fort's original idea -- "it's steam engines when it is steam-engining time" -- but brings into play its corollary: when it becomes steam-engining time, steam engines are suddenly everywhere. So it is sometimes with restaurants.
You drive past a place and wonder about it, but you're going too fast to really take note. Then you overhear a conversation where someone mentions it. Somebody else gives it a fleeting recommendation. Ultimately, curiosity leads you to Google it, and up pops a thread on LTHForum or Chowhound or eGullet or an item on Metromix or in the Reader or all of the above. Now how do you describe that process to a readership who mostly couldn't care less about your research methods but only about what you found out?
Let's say the writer didn't find out about it through LTHForum. Suppose they wrote this: "Restaurant X is creating a huge buzz with absolutely no publicity. We heard from our brother-in-law, Jimmy, who knows the chef's uncle, as well as the taxi driver in the cab we finally managed to flag during last week's thunderstorm, and then we spotted their delivery van outside the restaurant supply outlet, so we called our friend Irving, who's always the first one in the door of a new restaurant and...."
Would you really want that boring a level of honesty? As m'th'su said, "cumbersome and irrelevant."
In a column like "Dish," where they're writing about a dozen different places, each of which they likely found out about by different means, each perhaps as convoluted as described, detailing the discovery processes could make the column twice as long.
Also bear in mind that the exigencies and ethics of print mean a longer lead time than it takes to post here. Just because they didn't get into print before someone posted about it doesn't may not mean they didn't know all about it before it went online. For example, the Association of Food Journalists recommends that restaurants not be reviewed till they've been open at least a month.