Bruce Shaw

I love exploring the world of food, both as it relates to food trends and also the future of the food business from the start-up perspective. I spend a significant amount of time keeping on top of food news and information, both online and off. I spend a lot of time traveling the country, meeting with prominent people in the culinary world, food start-up entrepreneurs and investors, attending and sponsoring food blogging conferences such as BlogHer Food, and the International Food Bloggers Conference, and finding strategic partnerships with online food companies. As an example of the latter, Harvard Common Press has made an investment in a successful online food start-up, Yummly.com, an intelligent recipe search engine that learns your taste preferences the more you use it. I'm also the founder of two wildly popular Facebook groups, Cookbook Friends (www.facebook.com/groups/bshaw) and Food Blogger Friends (https://www.facebook.com/groups/239696939468981/), which in aggregate represent a community of almost 2,000 prominent food writers, bloggers, journalists, authors, publishers, agents, editors and others, focused on discussions around cookbooks and food media and continues to grow daily. At the end of 2011, HCP also started a food blogger focused site, blogEATS (www.blogEATS.com), which uncovers the most interesting new bloggers and blog posts on the food web and is overseen by Harvard Common's editorial director, Dan Rosenberg. I’m looking forward to exciting opportunities in the coming years, as new trends emerge in the food arena and as the publishing world continues to undergo extensive changes. Harvard Common Press is poised to participate in and be a leader in these developments. Looking out to 2013, there are a number of exciting initiatives underway. Harvard Common is helping to organize the second annual Roger Smith Cookbook Conference, a conference on the past, present and future of the cookbook, to take place February 7-9, 2013, at the Roger Smith Hotel (www.cookbookconf.com). Harvard Common Press was deeply involved in last year's conference, which met with great success and had over 30 panels on a variety of topics. This year, HCP is again focusing on the future track, with 14 panels on issues ranging from digital media and copyright infringement to food photography in the online age, and about 60 major panelists from food media, publishing and digital arenas. We're also involved in a number of other food and blogger conferences, including Th