Associated Press’ stand on recipe testing

To help newspapers avoid disasters, J.M. Hirsch pushed the Associated Press to adopt recipe testing when he became food editor at the wire service about seven years ago. “At the time, we weren’t really testing anything,” he says.

Hirsch has changed that. He has hired two trained chefs to work with him in his home kitchen, which has been expanded and modernized, to test and photograph every single recipe that goes out over the wire. Hirsch considers it a service both to readers and to the 1,700-plus newspapers that subscribe to the AP in the United States. “If the recipe is wrong, they hear about it, because their local readers call them and complain,” Hirsch says.

Though he can’t say exactly how many more subscribers are turning more to the AP for recipes as the industry suffers, Hirsch suspects the numbers are increasing. “Their budgets are shrinking, and they’re relying on us more to fill those gaps,” says Hirsch, who tries to publish five to seven recipes weekly.

Tim Carman, The Washington Post