Anthony Bourdain pre-"No Reservations Fame" and still a believer in print. Image: ew.com

Recently Anthony Bourdain declared that print media is gasping for its last breath. New York Magazine’s “Grub Street reported that in an interview with the Vernon Hills Review Bourdain said:

I’m not trying to be alarmist, but anyone who thinks (food-related) print media is going to survive is kidding themselves … Why am I going to read a five-page New York Times article on Singaporean food when there’s some unpaid nerd blogging about it, especially when that guy made eating his life’s work?

Not trying to be alarmist? *Snort* Let’s clarify, Tony, are you not trying to be alarmist in the same way that you are not trying to be inflammatory when you say things about other celebutante chefs like,”Alice Waters annoys the living sh*t out of me.”?

To be clear, I love Bourdain’s globetrotting to not-oft-traveled places on “No Reservations”, and think his his ribbing of the Food Network is pretty justified. (I mean seriously, does anyone who cooks with any degree of skill really believe the Kraft 30-second recipe tips are useful? Sorry but I am not going to be whipping up a Cheesewhiz casserole anytime soon.)

His statement is still irksome however. It not only annoys me as a journalist, but scares the bejeezus out of me because I feel like the more people say,”print is dead” the more this will come to pass like a Betelgeuse curse. Indeed, Bourdain himself is readying to release a sequel to his very much print work Kitchen Confidential called Medium Raw in 2010, and I’m pretty sure he’s not releasing it exclusively for the Kindle crowd. I’ll even go out on a limb and predict he will probably look forward to some hefty royalty checks from the paper copies of books he sells, you know the kind with words actually printed on paper in black and white.

Is print dead? Far from it. And I would be surprised if print ever really goes away entirely in our lifetimes. Case in point, I interviewed a wine writer, Alice Feiring, who fully accepts the print medium is declining, but she still considers it to be a medium that commands the most respect, and in Bourdain’s case hefty paychecks.

Obviously I don’t totally disagree with Bourdain. At a food writer’s conference this past summer I met plenty of award-winning journalists who were out of work because of the crumbled print revenue structure that has governed media profitability for decades.

What we’ve been learning in class over the last semester to survive in this climate is to diversify as journalists, and this is something Bourdain has done well. His portfolio is spread around t.v., the Web and print. Ma sil vous plait, Mr. Bourdain, please stop saying print is dead until the rest of us can secure a major network television gig, or at least a few Webisodes on youtube.

–Amy