From Mediaite’s Founder, a Site for Blanket Coverage of Celebrity Chefs

Mr. Abrams wanted experts for his newest site, The Braiser, which will go online in mid-May and will cover chefs who have cultivated worldwide reputations.

The Braiser will be the latest Web site in a flourishing space — foodie media — and will also be the latest expansion for Mr. Abrams, the television analyst and lawyer who has been creating niche Web sites for the last three years. His best known site, Mediaite, covers the media industry where it intersects with politics; others cover technology news, fashion, women in business, and women who follow technology.

“What will distinguish The Braiser from Day 1,” Mr. Abrams said, “is that it’s in an underpopulated yet very attractive space for particular advertisers.”

In the chase for brand advertising dollars, his company, called Abrams Media Network, is joined by networks like the Sugar Network and Business Insider. Mr. Abrams’s recipe for a new site starts with a topic like celebrity chefs. He then hires a few writers and editors to collect the Web’s best material and create original pieces about the topic, with an emphasis on boldface names. In Mediaite’s case, that would be people like Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann, the names that stand out in headlines and stir up page views.

For The Braiser, the stars will include Mario Batali, José Andrés and Bobby Flay — those chefs who “have gone from being food icons to becoming mainstream celebrities,” Mr. Abrams said. Such chefs have recurring segments on morning television, have entire shows on the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, and have a growing number of magazines and books associated with their personal brands.

“I’ve been stunned that no one has devoted this kind of attention to them,” Mr. Abrams said.

Lockhart Steele, a founder of Eater, a network of 17 local Web sites about food and restaurants, and one national site, said the personality strategy seemed to make sense. “The best online food sites all have a prism through which their coverage is filtered,” he said. Eater is place-based; others are cuisine-based, like Serious Eats, which has separate sites about hamburgers and about pizza.

The risk for The Braiser, Mr. Steele said, is that “there are only so many celebrity chefs that everyone knows.”

Mr. Abrams, who doubles as a legal analyst for ABC News, also has a hand in the restaurant business: he’s an investor in the Lion in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. Asked about the potential conflict for a Web site about chefs, he said he would not oversee day-to-day editorial operations of The Braiser, nor does he oversee the day-to-day running of the Lion.

“Considering how Mediaite often mocks me, I look forward to (and ever so slightly fear) The Braiser’s coverage of my future restaurant endeavors,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Abrams Media is self-financed, by Mr. Abrams and initially by what he characterized as a small investment from his family. (His father, Floyd, is a prominent First Amendment attorney.) He said the business was now “modestly profitable, less so than we would have been without the rapid expansion.” He declined to share specific financial results.

It has been slow going for one of his seven sites, SportsGrid, but he said the others had attracted brand advertisers, like Ralph Lauren on Styleite and Intel on Geekosystem, his technology site. To grow, he said, he will look to help advertisers create content “that our readers appreciate,” something that the Gawker Media network is working aggressively to do.

The Web measurement firm Quantcast shows that Mr. Abrams’s network receives about eight million monthly visitors, 5.7 million of whom are in the United States. At least a third of those visitors are actually located on other Web sites where Mediaite and SportsGrid’s video players are posted with advertisements attached — demonstrating how valuable aggregation can be to the business models of Web networks. The sites post clips from news and sports television shows — and surely there are lots of chefs on television ripe for the clipping.