San Francisco Niche Media

How much Avalanche Cheese can people eat?

BASALT — How did Darren Ryan, a food distributor in San Francisco, manage to get Avalanche Cheese in his line of products? According to Wendy Mitchell, the owner/cheese-maker of Basalt-based Avalanche, it was a combination of luck and perseverance. “He called me up and wouldn't stop calling. Finally, he got me on a good day,” Mitchell said. Ryan, who places Avalanche Cheese in cheese shops and specialty grocers in the San Francisco area, is the one dealer outside of Colorado who gets his hands on Avalanche products. Even in most of Colorado, the goat cheeses — bleu; cheddar; cabra blanca; fresh chevre; the soft, Robiola-style named Lamborn Bloomers; and two varieties of cheese spread — are a rarity; Avalanche recently got picked up by Whole Foods, but availability is limited to five stores on the Front Range. On the Avalanche Farm & Dairy in Paonia, though, Mitchell has 135 milkers — females, or does, actively giving milk — which translates to a lot of milk, and a lot of cheese. It's enough for Mitchell — who has seven full-time employees on the farm, another three at the creamery in Basalt, plus part-timers in high season — to exclaim, “I'm shocked at the volume we do.” So where is all that cheese going? Nowhere. Or more precisely, not very far. As shocked as Mitchell is about the amount of cheese she is making, she is awed by how much of it is being consumed locally. Between Aspen and Glenwood Springs, Avalanche has nearly 40 accounts, including most of the top-tier restaurants, including Cache Cache, Pacifica, Rustique and the Pitkin County Steakhouse, which offers the cheese on their salad bar. Montagna creates an all-Avalanche cheese plate. (”Sometimes I eat that and go, I can't believe this is my cheese. They make it look so special,” Mitchell said.) “I thought when we got to a certain volume, we'd have to be shipping all over the country to get rid of it all and take on a distributor. But the majority of our clients are in the Roaring Fork Valley and a lot of little shops in Paonia,” Mitchell, who works a booth at the Aspen Saturday Market, said. “Sometimes you think, How much cheese can people eat? Sometimes I worry it'll be like a song on the radio — you hear it so much, you're sick of it: ‘Oh, not that song again.'” While creating the business, Mitchell has also given herself an education in cheese-making. And goat-farming.

With xoJane Launch, Say Media Embarks on Transformation into a ...

. The publication is built on a platform that Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez calls “TypePad plus” (the official name is TypePad for Publishers) and it’s the first home-grown property in what he describes as a “passion-based media company” that will specialize in matching niche online publications with the rich-media digital ads for which VideoEgg was known.

Say’s other big story of the spring was its acquisition of Dogster, Inc., the San Francisco-based creator of the leading pet-services sites Dogster and Catster . The Dogster sites haven’t yet been rebuilt on the Say Media platform, but as the company assimilates or launches more publications, the outlines of its media empire will take clearer shape, Sanchez says. “Right now we’re in this interesting flux period,” he says. “But a year from now it will be really evident from the outside where we are going, and you will really start to see more enablement of independent content creators and people building interesting niche media properties.”

In other words, Say Media is making a bid to join the ranks of technology-driven vertical media networks, alongside San Francisco-based rivals such as Glam Media , which owns Glam.com, Brash.com, Bliss.com, and Tinker.com; Federated Media , which supplies ads to a network of independent sites such as Boing Boing and GigaOm and also owns niche sites such as Foodbuzz; and Blinkx , which recently bought Burst Media , the advertising supplier for site like Cooks.com, Politico, and RuneScape. In some ways, these networks call to mind the big 20th-century magazine publishing empires like Time-Life, in that each publication has its own special voice and audience and subsists on ads from the big brands who want to reach those audiences. The difference this time around is that it’s not the editors and publishers who are assembling the empires—it’s the middlemen, the companies with the technology needed to package and distribute the ads.

For Say Media, xoJane is the pattern-setter. The site’s tagline is “where women go when they are being selfish,” and it’s full of first-person, mostly breezy articles with headlines like “Wear Your Pajamas Outside” and “My Spin Instructor Quit and I’m Kinda Freaking Out.” There are also big, interactive video ads for brands like Ford, BlackBerry, and Puma. Like Oprah’s O magazine, xoJane is loosely built around Pratt herself and her busy life; for instance, there’s a feature called “Jane’s Phone” featuring text messages, photos, and e-mails extracted directly from Pratt’s iPhone in real time. “I want this to be the no-bullshit women’s site,” Pratt said in an article in Say Media’s PDF-based house magazine —an assertion she backed up with a jarringly personal May 24 post about her history of miscarriages.

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