Emily Turner
Emily Turner uses food coverage to connect Boston’s restaurant scene with the community stories readers care about. She is the deputy editor of community at Boston.com, overseeing reader engagement, community assignments, and innovation initiatives that span food, lifestyle, news, and politics, with a strong focus on local dining and restaurant news. Since 2019 she has led the site’s community coverage, shaping how reader interests drive stories across the food section.
Food coverage rooted in awards and recognition
Turner’s recent food reporting often centers on how awards and rankings spotlight Boston-area restaurants and chefs.
She covers national and regional honors such as the James Beard Awards, highlighting New England food and drink winners and explaining their ties to the local dining scene. She regularly writes about Boston magazine’s restaurant lists, including its Best New Restaurant of 2026 and its Best of Boston 2025 roundup of top restaurants, using these features to map out where the city’s dining energy is concentrated.
Her coverage of nationally ranked spots, such as a Martha’s Vineyard doughnut shop named one of the best in the country by USA Today, extends that lens beyond the city while still grounding it in New England’s food culture.
Across these pieces she breaks down what recognition means in practical terms for diners, from where award-winning restaurants are located to when they are open and what kind of experience they offer. The emphasis is on serviceable detail - addresses, hours, and context about the lists themselves - so readers can turn headlines about accolades into decisions about where to eat.
Tracking restaurant shifts and the dining landscape
Turner also reports on changes in the restaurant landscape, including high-profile closings that reshape neighborhoods and dining corridors. In coverage of a Davio’s Northern Italian Steakhouse location shutting its Chestnut Hill restaurant, she focuses on what the closure means for regulars and how it fits into the broader story of the brand and the area’s dining options.
Her food beat work treats these business moves as community news, explaining how a single steakhouse or doughnut shop fits into the evolving map of where people gather.
The same attention to change informs her reporting on emerging restaurants highlighted by outside publications, positioning openings and new concepts alongside award lists and rankings. By pairing industry developments with clear, reader-friendly details, she presents restaurant news as part of a longer-term narrative about Boston’s dining scene rather than isolated announcements.
Reader-driven guides and community assignments
Turner’s role in community coverage shapes how she approaches food stories, often bringing reader voices directly into the reporting. On-air segments and features have shown her curating business recommendations submitted by readers, including lists of AAPI- and Asian-owned businesses to support during heritage month, blending restaurant picks with broader community recognition. These assignments highlight restaurants not just for their menus but for their place in cultural celebrations and local identity.
Her food pieces frequently sit alongside invitations to sign up for Boston.com’s food newsletter and other engagement tools, reflecting a beat that is tightly integrated with audience strategy. Through this work she treats guides, lists, and rankings as collaborative projects with readers, using interactive elements and community submissions to decide which businesses and restaurants are surfaced in coverage.
Background in local dining, events, and lifestyle
Before her current community leadership role, Turner built a portfolio of local lifestyle and culture reporting that informs her food coverage today. Her bylines at a Boston city magazine include event guides such as Boston Pride Week highlights, Tall Ships arrivals, and profiles of a busy neighborhood bistro, all centered on how people experience the city’s dining and nightlife. That mix of restaurant profile writing, event coverage, and practical “can’t miss” guides underpins the service-oriented tone of her current food reporting.
Alongside her newsroom work, she has shared expertise on audience development and engagement in industry workshops, underscoring that her food coverage is part of a broader focus on building relationships between local journalism and its readers. Taken together, her background in lifestyle features and her current community role give her a distinctive angle on the food beat: she treats restaurants as venues for civic life, cultural celebration, and reader connection, not just places to eat.
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.