Celeste E. Whittaker
Celeste E. Whittaker is a news features reporter at the Courier-Post whose food coverage shows how local restaurants, chains and grocery stores shape everyday life in the communities she serves. She focuses on stories where changes to a favorite diner, coffee shop or takeout spot reveal wider shifts in business, routine and local culture. Her work blends service journalism - helping readers find the best ice cream, burgers and comfort food - with close attention to the people and decisions behind those meals. With more than two decades of reporting experience at the paper, she brings long memory and detailed reporting to a beat that might otherwise be treated as simple lifestyle content.
Food businesses in transition
Whittaker’s recent coverage of food businesses often centers on moments of transition, documenting what happens when familiar places change hands, re-open or shift their focus. In a story on Mexican Food Factory, she reports that the restaurant plans to sell its building to a cannabis dispensary while remaining open, breaking down how a long-running establishment is navigating a new chapter without abandoning its current customers. She also follows the fate of a local diner that closed for nearly a year after a devastating fire, highlighting its return to serving freshly prepared meals and comfort food favorites once it reopened.
Her work on these stories balances clear, factual explanation of what is happening to the business with close attention to what that means for regular patrons who rely on it as part of their daily routine.
Smaller changes in the local food landscape also get close treatment in her reporting. In one piece, she chronicles the return of a Starbucks to a town that had previously lost the store, framing the reopening as a notable shift for residents who use the chain for coffee, snacks and a gathering space.
Taken together, these stories show a reporter who treats restaurant and cafe changes as news events in their own right, explaining how business decisions ripple into everyday life rather than covering them only as entertainment or trend pieces.
Reader polls on local favorites
Another defining feature of Whittaker’s food coverage is the way she builds stories around reader polls, turning community preferences into structured reporting. She invites readers to nominate and vote for their favorite ice cream shops in the area, using a dedicated poll to collect responses and frame subsequent coverage.
A follow-up piece on the same contest details who won the ice cream poll and breaks down the vote totals, showing which shop finished first and how close the competition was. In similar fashion, she reports on a burger poll in which a national chain in a nearby town is named the best place for a burger in the region, again using reader voting to anchor the story.
These poll-driven articles display a blend of data and narrative: Whittaker reports specific vote counts and rankings, but also treats the winners as springboards for describing what makes those spots appealing. By structuring stories around questions such as “Where is the best ice cream shop?” and inviting readers to help answer them, she turns food coverage into a participatory project, reinforcing the idea that the value of these businesses is defined by the people who eat there. The result is coverage that is both interactive and grounded, rooted in verifiable reader input rather than opinion alone.
Everyday food culture and retail
Beyond restaurants, Whittaker’s current beat includes food-adjacent retail like grocery stores and other places where people shop for everyday items. Her stories on chain coffee and burger outlets show a reporter interested not just in independent venues, but in the full mix of options that define the local food environment, from long-running family businesses to large brands. The way she writes about these chains emphasizes practical detail - why a reopening matters, what a poll result says about customer habits - over branding or trend-chasing.
Author notes attached to her work describe a wide brief that spans food, dining, events, arts and culture, and grocery stores, placing her food reporting within a broader features role.
That breadth allows her to connect stories about where people eat and shop to larger coverage of local happenings, ensuring that food pieces do not sit in isolation from other community news. Her consistent use of clear, direct headlines and accessible formats makes these stories straightforward to scan, while the underlying reporting gives readers enough context to understand why each change in the food landscape matters.
Veteran reporter on a food-centered features beat
Whittaker has been with the Courier-Post since the late 1990s, spending many years as a sportswriter before shifting into her current focus on news features and food coverage.
That long tenure and cross-beat experience inform her present work: she approaches food stories with the structure and precision of hard news, whether she is explaining a property sale, covering a reopening after a fire, or tabulating votes in a reader poll. Public professional profiles describe her as a news features reporter, underscoring that her food stories sit within a wider mandate to cover local life and events rather than a narrow restaurant-review role.
Across these assignments, the distinguishing thread is her insistence that food coverage is about more than taste or novelty.
In her reporting, a burger poll reveals patterns of loyalty and habit, a building sale raises questions about continuity and change, and an ice cream contest becomes a snapshot of how readers use and value their favorite shops. Communications around food businesses, retail and community events that tie into these themes are the ones most likely to align with the way Whittaker currently works.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
Aaron Guerrero is head of the digital department at Miami’s Community Newspapers, where he pairs restaurant coverage with community-facing content. He focuses on how Miami-area restaurants evolve, celebrate, and experiment through new concepts, menus, and neighborhood-focused dining experiences. He reports on restaurant openings, such as an Italian food hall at Plaza Coral Gables, new executive lunch menus, and wood-fired Latin steakhouse brunches, explaining what sets each venue apart. He also covers awards, like a Wine Spectator honor for an Italian chophouse, and events that turn dining rooms into social hubs. His bylines extend to features on sports-themed gatherings, civic renamings, local visits to restaurant programs, sponsored community pieces, and official notices. His work is straightforward and descriptive, helping readers and local businesses connect around specific openings, promotions, and dining experiences.
Aarron Fleming
Aarron Fleming reports on how courts, jails and public safety systems work over time. He is a reporter at The Daily Memphian covering public safety, the local court system, suburban news and business developments in North Mississippi. His work follows trials, sentencing, appeals, plea deals and judicial decisions, including major cases tied to Tyre Nichols and rapper Young Dolph. He also covers jail conditions, inmate deaths, crime data, prosecution units, trafficking, shootings and public-order incidents. His suburban reporting examines cannabis businesses, restaurant openings and how commercial growth affects communities such as Olive Branch. Fleming previously covered education in the same newsroom. He uses clear, unadorned prose to explain legal steps, deadlines, institutional problems and the political, commercial and community effects of public-safety decisions.
Alana Al-Hatlani
Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor who treats recipes, restaurants, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating. She works on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print recipes and reported features. Her pastry-focused, restaurant-tested perspective comes from time in restaurant and bakery kitchens. She helps plan and write monthly food packages, including “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts,” and wrote “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year.” She also writes recipe tips, ingredient explainers, restaurant guides, and reported stories about workers, owners, and communities. Her subjects include regional specialties, dining scenes, kitchen basics, and food industries. Her work has appeared with OpenTable and Yahoo. She reports on the ground, explains techniques clearly, and connects specific dishes and places to larger stories about food and livelihood.
Alana Edgin
Alana Edgin is a business reporter whose strongest focus is food, restaurants and consumer-facing businesses. She works at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and has also had work syndicated across AOL and Yahoo News. She covers new openings, closings, expansions and franchise growth, along with retail, health, services, corporate news, data incidents, business support programs and sponsorships. Her reporting includes detailed roundups of new restaurants and businesses, coverage of El Pollo Loco’s opening, and stories on burger trucks, dessert shops, Vietnamese sandwich restaurants and gourmet markets. She also contributes to food and drink reviews, including fall coffee and jerky comparisons. Edgin reports with practical “what, when, where” details, structured comparisons and clear explanations of how offers, partnerships and business changes affect consumers and the local economy.