Meet Tim Hayward. He Does Fire and Knives.

We asked Tim Hayward, the passion and drive behind the wonderful quarterly Fire & Knives (there's a link to the mag on our site in the title above) to tell us about his work. This is what he came back with. It was long -which is good- so we'll finish it tomorrow.

I’d love to say it was my life’s ambition to launch a magazine, that I’d always been a Murdoch wannabe with printers ink in my veins instead of blood but I’d be lying. I never set out to publish a magazine at all. Seven years ago I quit advertising when I realised people would actually pay me to write. I specialised in food because, well because I’m greedy and since then things have progressed to the stage where I make a reasonable living for a writer - which for those of you not au fait with the current state of publishing, is about the same as I’d make bussing tables in a greasy spoon. All the contact I’d ever had with magazines, apart from reading them, was visiting their vast offices. Entering through the imposing doors, signing in with the receptionists, taking the lift through the two floors of ad-sales staff and having a meeting with an editor while we drank vile coffee from a machine. People say there’s been a food renaissance in this country and to an extent, they’re right. In the big cities there are better restaurants, across the country supermarkets have better quality ingredients and we have a great network of farmers’ markets but in truth, the biggest change in our national approach to food has been in the media. A decade ago, food coverage in a magazine comprised a single column near the back. The writer was either a hack, too drunk to trust with features but too respected to fire, or a relative of the publisher. Their task was to produce around 300 words of agreeable prose about a restaurant they’d visited, something they’d knocked up in their kitchen or a simply lovely week they’d spent on holiday in Umbria. Then food, like gardening, travel, homemaking and, (god-help-us) parenting became 'lifestyle' subjects and the papers sprang new columns, pages and sections. Suddenly there was lots and lots of work for food writers - even me - and a much broader audience. A magazine food section could attract a wider audience if it included lots of celebrities, it increased readership if the recipes were simpler. Numbers only dropped if they ran stories that were alienatingly nerdy, too specialist or obscure. Bigger audiences, of course, meant bigger money as all these magazines relied on advertising.

Food writers, every one of them an enthusiast and food nerd, found themselves in an uncomfortable position: lots more work but not necessarily the kind of thing they enjoyed writing. It would be wrong to speak of ‘dumbing down’ yet all of us experienced the same thing with increasing regularity; a story would come back from the editor with the comments, ‘It’s a bit ‘foodie’. Can you make it more accessible, shorten the recipe, take out the long words and namecheck a celebrity.’

I knew dozens of food writers in the same position, with bottom drawers increasingly groaning with stories they loved but couldn’t sell. I also knew from the online food community that they were desperate to read almost anything that didn’t involve celebs and ’10 quick ways with mince’. It seemed so obvious that a magazine which put writers' work in front of readers would be a success but the only model I knew involved that big office, full of people trying to sell enough advertising to keep themselves, their lifts, receptionists, ad-sales departments and coffee machines afloat......to be continued.