Phillip Kaplan
Phillip Kaplan is a visual-first features journalist who covers food and local culture for The Blade, using photo-driven stories and detailed narrative to document the places where people gather. He works across writing, photography, and multimedia, so his byline and photo credit often carry both the story and the images.
Restaurant history and food features
Kaplan’s food coverage centers on restaurants as cultural fixtures, not just places to eat. In his feature on The Beirut, part of The 52 series on essential Toledo places, he traces the restaurant’s story from its opening in 1977 and shows how its family ownership expanded into sister restaurants and spin-off concepts in the area.
He writes with detailed attention to menus and wine lists, cataloging dishes such as grape leaves, lamb preparations, marinated beef filet tips, shawarma, and house specialties alongside notes on Lebanese wines and the restaurant’s recognition for its list.
In more recent food work, he produces photo-led stories such as a gallery on a new downtown ice cream shop opening during a heat wave, highlighting the shop’s arrival and its role as a place to cool off. Across narrative features and photo galleries he links food to the city’s identity, showing how long-running establishments and new openings fit into everyday life.
Photo galleries of community events
Kaplan produces photo galleries that document festivals and gatherings, often with succinct captions and scene-setting text. His Peace Fest gallery from Ordinary Pioneer studios covers a community event focused on intentional steps toward peace, pairing images with brief copy about the event’s themes. He compiles year-end selections of his work, as in a photo-of-the-year package that brings together images drawn from business, community, and other coverage.
His photographs anchor coverage of neighborhood initiatives, including a pool barbecue aimed at fostering connection and preventing gun violence. In education reporting, his images accompany profiles such as the story of a longtime French teacher retiring after decades with the local school district.
These visual assignments show him working across beats while maintaining a consistent focus on people and the atmosphere of shared spaces.
Features on local institutions and newsroom history
Beyond food and events, Kaplan writes feature stories that examine institutions and their place in local history.
In a Monday Memories installment, he explores The Blade newsroom over the years, using the series to look inside the organization’s changing space and culture. The 52 project piece on The Beirut likewise situates a restaurant within decades of city life, connecting its growth, offshoot concepts, and recognition to the broader story of the city’s dining scene.
Across these features he combines reporting with archival and descriptive detail, balancing institutional facts with vivid description of physical settings and the people who inhabit them. His longer pieces show a preference for deep context around familiar places, whether that is a newsroom, a restaurant, or another local institution.
Multimedia and cross-beat work at The Blade
Kaplan’s role at The Blade spans writing, photography, and multimedia production, including video, audio, and graphic design elements for news features. Professional materials describe his specialization in culture, food, and art, with serialized online shows on food and culture alongside feature illustrations and design projects. Masthead listings associate him with NewsSlide and photo work, reinforcing that his contributions include both storytelling and technical image production.
His byline and photo credit appear across food, living, and local news sections in stories ranging from restaurant coverage to community pools, teacher retirements, and city events. That cross-beat presence makes his food coverage distinct: it comes from a reporter who treats restaurants and dishes as part of a wider visual record of community life.
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.