The Signal and DiningGuy.com will join together to create video profiles/advertisements for local restaurants the paper announced today:
The Signal has partnered with restaurant review siteDiningGuy.com to offer a local dining guide, which went live Wednesday.
DiningGuy.com specializes in four to five-minute video featurettes of local restaurants, showcasing their atmosphere, specialty dishes, chefs, owners and entertainment.
With this agreement, DiningGuy.com has become the official dining guide for The-Signal.com, has an audience of 100,000 unique visitors per month online and 100,000 readers in print.*
The Signature Selections page will feature pictures of specialty dishes and details of each restaurant, all headlined by DiningGuy.com and The-Signal.com.
Neat.
Obviously this is more ad than editorial focused, but that doesn’t mean the ‘featurettes’ will be useless. Right now if I’m hungry and stuck in the SCV, I have only one source I go to for reliable reviews and information: Yelp.
Yelp, of course, is the grand-daddy of all restaurant and business review sites, and local Yelpers are constantly providing well-written and in-depth reviews of new and tried-and-true restaurants in the SCV.
So how does Dining Guy fit in? Well it looks like it’s more than just a video service; they have more in-depth profiles of restaurants than say, SantaClaritaGuide’s restaurant section. I like the idea of reviewing this site before going to a new restaurant, seeing how the restaurant’s owners and chefs market themselves, and seeing some high quality video and pictures of the establishment.
And then…of course, I’ll go on Yelp and see what everyone else thinks of the place.
* Since when did the Signal get 100,000 readers in print by the way?
Has the Dining Guy done a review of the Rice King restaurant out here in Canyon Country? I was wondering if it would be worth the stop for lunch?
people who know better that all of us will tell you that the Signal’s real circ is in the four figures.
I’m interested to see what they do. Production values are pretty good so far.
The signal-to-noise ratio at Yelp is suffering lately, but it’s going to be the best source for information on SCV eateries for a very long time. There are a good dozen or so very solid reviewers that have covered the SCV well.