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24 The College of New Jersey Magazine C ome for the food; stay for the fun." That's the motto at Delish.com, where editorial director Joanna Saltz '99 oversees 18 staffers who produce original content for a Facebook page with 17 million followers, a website with 27 million unique monthly visitors, and 40 food-related videos each week, many of them filmed in two test kitchens. It's a crazy schedule, but Delish, which caters to that healthy portion of individuals who don't necessarily relish the thought of cooking dinner every night — or any night, for that matter —does crazy really well. Delish's multi-platform success owes much to what Saltz calls "a heavy dose of super- surprising, crazy, over-the-top ideas that make us different." To wit, a regular five-minute video titled "The Mash-Up," in which she's collaborated on recipes with, among others, R&B stars Boyz II Men and the actress and former Saturday Night Live cast member Ana Gasteyer. "One of the things we really wanted to do," Saltz says, "was incorporate fun and personality in everything we did." Saltz developed the brand, in large part, by leaning less toward Julia Child and more toward Guy Fieri. Saltz believes the food media tends to hoist celebrity chefs upon pedestals so they can show the rest of us how it's done. Instead, Delish invites its audience into the kitchen (bonus points if they laugh along the way). A regular feature is called "Insanely Easy Weeknight Dinners to Try This Week." A spring headline urged readers to "Give Your Easter Celebration a Boozy Upgrade With Peeps Jell-O Shots." It was not always this way. When Saltz took over in 2015, Delish was Hearst Communi- cations' sole digital-only enterprise, a struggling site that produced no original content. Back then, Delish functioned mostly as a warehouse of already published recipes — or, as Saltz puts it, "a dumping ground for other Hearst properties." On social media, the Delish brand barely registered a pulse (its Facebook page had just 100,000 followers). And while Saltz was a veteran of New York's print magazine world, she had zero experience working in digital. "There's something about entering a space and not knowing any better," she says. "It was all just like, 'Well, let's try it like this.'" Three years later, Delish has emerged as a digital juggernaut (which is, no doubt, responsible for the recent naming of Saltz to lead another Hearst property, housebeautiful.com). Its videos The success of Delish owes much to what Saltz calls "a heavy dose of super-surprising, crazy, over-the-top ideas that make us different." Delish-iously good "The more butterscotch the better," says Saltz. "

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