Gourmet's loss was Salon's gain—in more ways than one. Not only did the San Francisco-based Web magazine launch a new Food section today with former Gourmet contributing editor and gourmet.com blogger Francis Lam at its helm. But where Condé Nast looked at print food journalism and saw hemorraghing profits, Salon is seeing online food journalism as a way to bring home the bacon.

Food is just the first of several new sections Salon plans to add as part of a multi-pronged strategy to ensure the magazine's long-term financial sustainability. News and politics, Salon's traditional strong suits, generally are not particularly interesting to companies advertising online. Softer areas, like food, Salon Media Group CEO Richard Gingras told BayNewser, offer "richer revenue opportunities."

While Salon's upfront about the need to find new sources of revenue, Gingras also says the company is choosing as targets of expansion "areas that we think are important parts of who we are as a culture." A previous Salon food section in the early part of the decade focused on eating out. Salon decided to make the new section more about cooking at home, Gingras said, in part after noticing that there was a lot of recipe-sharing going on over at Open Salon, Salon Media's blogging site.

Why Salon chose Lam to steward Food, after the jump.

While Gourmet's closure last month sent foodies around the globe reaching for their smelling salts, for Salon, it was a boon. The site had already decided to move into food, and suddenly there were a slew of talented food writers on the market.

Salon chose Lam, who has taught food writing courses for mediabistro.com, not just for his talent but because "he's one of those emerging voices in the food space who's comfortable working online," Gingras told us. "He's extremely open and adventurous about how use the Web, not just to write, but to develop a community around food."

Lam will do much of the writing on the site. He's also assembled what he's calling a "Kitchen Cabinet" of 14 food experts, including chefs, wine experts, food activists, a professor, a butcher, and a baker (no candlestick maker, as far as we can tell) to both provide content and act as consultants.

A weekly Kitchen Challenge invite readers to compete in a dish-creation competition, with submissions posted to Open Salon and scored for creativity, photos, and compelling backstories.

In his inaugural post, Lam says the section will offer "food coverage for curious people, for people who care about people, for people who are passionate about finding new ways to look at the world, whether they are 'foodies' or people who think foodies' main contribution to our society is allowing us to call wine dorks "winies.

Gingras said Salon will roll out other new sections in the coming months, but he declined to say what those would be.