Tim Zagat: Why our guides are still relevant in the Yelp age
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Zagat Survey, which provides ratings on everything from diners to doctors, traditionally in a slim, burgundy-bound book, recently announced that its Atlanta and Texas guides would only be published digitally. Earlier this year, the company launched Zagat To Go 3.0 for the iPhone, also compatible with the new iPad (3.0 features off-line sync, so you can even access content on flights without WiFi). Then there’s their deal with Foursquare, and a Twitter integration that gives Zagat.mobi users all the latest tweets about a particular restaurant.
Hungry for more? Here’s excerpts of a recent conversation with co-founders and co-chairs Tim and Nina Zagat.
Before we get started on all the cool tech-y stuff, let’s set the scene in 1979, when you just started the survey. What did your publication look like then?
TZ: In some ways it was even before that. In 1968,we were living in Paris as young lawyers, and we used to survey our lawyer friends. We’d go around the table and say, “Write down a list of 100 top restaurants.” Then we started in 1979 as a mimeographed sheet, stapled together. In 1982 it became a book (with 1983 on the cover). We said if you participate [in the survey] you get a free copy. The first year we had 200 people voting on 100 restaurants. In the fourth year, we made it into a book, and it looked a lot like what it does today. But we had no publisher that was willing to take it. They said, “We don’t want local content, the entries are too short, the book’s too small, it’ll get lost on the shelves.”
