image credit: Jayne Howard
browse Pevensey Food and Drink Magazine here
The new Pevensey Food and Drink magazine that beta launched on Monday 5 August, has appointed an editor.
The magazine, that is both a web portal and a newspaper supplement in print, aims to raise the profile of pubs and restaurants across seven villages in this ‘hidden jewel in the crown of Sussex’.
Jayne Howard is based in Pevensey. She has a wealth of experience with the profiling of events. She is a retired Local Government events organiser, and, as she explains on her Facebook page, you don’t see many of them.
Her role is to oversee the content of the magazine and plan development of the publication.
Jane is currently planning her editorial for the full launch of the magazine on Sunday August 25. Talking about her appointment she said, “brilliant. I’ll work on my 100 words”.
She is also one of the two keynote organisers of the new Pevensey Food Festival that is at the planning stage.
Pevensey Food and Drink Magazine was beta launched yesterday. The team behind the publication are aiming to see 10,000 page views a month to the web platform within three months.
A spokesman for the technical team responsible for the development web platform said (5 August) “if we succeed with this web platform our aim is to roll out this approach to other ‘foodie heaven hotspots in Sussex’.
He said, “our premise from a technical point of view was a simple one, how would a family with little knowledge of the area coming to this corner of Sussex one Sunday for a special family occasion decide where to go for lunch?”
“What we found is that there were a myriad of possibilities, all accessible on the web to explore possibilities, but nothing comprehensive.nothing co-ordinated and nothing organised to give families a wider perspective of the possibilities.
“Most importantly, nothing from inside the local hospitality industries was accessible on a comprehensive up to date basis with news, that was based on a compare and contrast set of parameters, vitally, that included a local context.
“Where were the local food establishments in the local press? Where were the comprehensive links to all the websites in a small geographical radius, the grouping of social media profiles, the history of the food establishments, their latest offers and events?
“Some of these things were available by visiting each food establishment in turn online, but there was nothing comprehensive for the area, and most importantly no-one had set the search in a local news context to provide ‘the bigger picture’ of the foodie heaven that is in the cloud here, in this little corner of Sussex.
“Trip Advisor is such a useful tool and of course there is an opportunity to search out all the reviews of all the establishments within a small radius, so useful, but as we all know, Trip Advisor reviews have to be browsed with an element of interpretation and caution.
“There is nothing about each food establishment in the local press, for example. Moving between the reviews and the social media pages of each food establishment, another very useful source of up to date information, in each case we found, took some time.
“The websites for most local food establishments in the locality have got so much better in the last year, but wading through the information for each food establshment would have taken acres of time, searching out the history, special offers that week and current local news about each of the establishments could have taken hours.
“We estimated that a family, not familiar with the area, aiming to search out where to go for their special Sunday lunch might be searching on the web for something like two hours before they could make ‘an educated decision’ about where they might go for their special Sunday lunch. And anyway in the process, they might have missed a magical food establishment location that lacks profile online.
“Our starting point for the project was to ask ourselves, could we reduce that two hour search on the web, to a two minute search on one web platform?
