Cover Story — September / October 2007
Goodbye to All That
The decline of the coverage of books isn’t new, benign, or necessary
By Steve WassermanThe health of a society is always best measured by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable citizens. The same test may be usefully applied to America’s beleaguered newspapers. Set against the general loss of confidence afflicting the profession is the crisis confronting those few newspapers that bother to regularly review books. Over the past year, and with alarming speed, newspapers across the country have been cutting back their book coverage and, in some instances, abandoning the beat entirely. At a time when newspaper owners feel themselves and the institutions over which they preside to be under siege from newer technologies and the relentless Wall Street pressure to pump profits at ever-higher margins, book coverage is among the first beats to be scaled back or phased out. Today, such coverage is thought by many newspaper managers to be inessential and, worse, a money loser.
Yet a close look at the history of how America’s newspapers have treated books as news suggests that while the drop in such coverage is precipitous, it is not altogether recent. In the fall of 2000, Charles McGrath, then editor of The New York Times Book Review, the nation’s preeminent newspaper book section by virtue of longevity, geography, ambition, circulation, and staff, was already lamenting the steady shrinkage of book coverage. “A lot of papers have either dropped book coverage or dumbed it way down to commercial stuff. The newsweeklies, which used to cover books regularly, don’t any longer,” McGrath told a Times insert profiling the Book Review. Indeed, the following April, the San Francisco Chronicle folded its book section into its Sunday Datebook of arts and cultural coverage. The move was greeted with dismay by many readers. After six months of public protest—and after newspaper focus groups indicated the book section enjoyed a substantial readership—it was reinstated as a stand-alone section. (Five years later, it would lose two pages in a cost-cutting move that reduced the section, now a broadsheet, by a third to just four pages.) In 2001, The Boston Globe merged its book review and commentary pages. Today, The New York Times Book Review averages thirty-two to thirty-six tabloid pages, a steep decline from the forty-four pages it averaged in 1985.
That book coverage is disappearing is not news. What is news is the current pace of the erosion in coverage, as well as the fear that an unbearable cultural threshold has been crossed: whether the book beat should exist at all is now, apparently, a legitimate question. Jobs, book sections, and pages are vanishing at a rate rivaled only by the degree to which entire species are being rendered extinct in the Amazonian rain forest. Last spring, Teresa Weaver, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s longtime and well-regarded book editor, was shunted aside, her original book reviews largely replaced with wire copy. The paper’s editor said without shame or chagrin that the move was part of a more general intent to reconfigure the newspaper’s coverage of arts, including music and dance. Meanwhile, readers of The Dallas Morning News found themselves without a full-time book critic when Jerome Weeks, who had filled the role since 1996, accepted a buyout offer amid a vast restructuring of the paper.
Other papers, including the Raleigh News & Observer, the Orlando Sentinel, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer, also eliminated the book editor’s position or cut coverage. The Chicago Tribune decided to move its book pages to Saturday, the least-read day of the week. Its book editor, Elizabeth Taylor, ever the optimist, said that the very slimness of the Saturday edition would mean that its few pages would loom larger in the eyes of readers and, with any luck, in the esteem of potential advertisers. In June, the San Diego Union-Tribune killed its decade-old, stand-alone book section, opting instead to move book reviews into its arts pages. And earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times, in a significant retreat from the ambitions that prompted the creation of its weekly Book Review in 1975, decided to cut its twelve-page Sunday tabloid section by two pages and graft the remaining stump to its revamped Sunday Opinion section. The press release announcing the change sought to allay readers’ concerns by proclaiming the paper’s intent to expand online coverage (a task made more difficult by the paper’s reluctance, so far, to add staff, but instead to increase the burden on the Review’s editor and subeditors). The paper also promised to increase the number and prominence of illustrations and photographs, neglecting to note that doing so would further reduce the space allotted for actual words.
For many writers, this threat to the nation’s delicate ecology of literary and cultural life is cause for considerable alarm. Last spring, the novelist Richard Ford decried the disappearance of book reviews. Michael Connelly, an ex-Los Angeles Times reporter and now a bestselling mystery writer, denounced the contraction of his former paper’s book section. Salman Rushdie, in a rare public appearance, went on The Colbert Report to voice his displeasure. Writers and readers alike signed petitions circulated by the National Book Critics Circle, hoping to reverse the trend. America’s newspapers, they argued, must not be permitted to regard the coverage of books as a luxury to be tossed aside. A widespread cultural and political illiteracy is abetted by newspapers that no longer review books, they charged.
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Beatitudes![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Sun 2 Sep 2007 01:32 PMI was stuck by the ending of your article, about the officer and gangs. I believe that and have been an advocate of public libraries all my life. After Katrina, I decided to donate all of the royalties from the sale of my book, The Beatitudes, Book I in The New Orleans Trilogy, directly to the New Orleans Public Library Foundation. New Orleans is my hometown. Recently, I started The Beatitudes Network (www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com) to raise awareness of this rebuilding need of New Orleans and of the importance of public libraries. I am trying to get the word around, but as to paper reviews, it is surely hard to come by as there seems to be an impression among writers that the books that are reviewed are pushed by marketing people and on any given Sunday you will see the same ten or so books reviewed by the large papers. Thank you for your article....my book on Amazon.com notes that it is part of the New Orleans Public Library. So I am trying to cut down on the commericialism.
C. Ikehara![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Tue 4 Sep 2007 05:42 AMThe following recent article on literacy may be of interest:
http://starbulletin.com/2007/06/03/editorial/commentary.html
Allen Varney![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Tue 4 Sep 2007 08:32 AMI. Kids these days
--IA. Dull-witted
----IA1. With their
------IA1a. videogames
------IA1b. Internet
------IA1c. mindless TV
----IA2. Not like in my day
--IB. Uncultured
----IB1. Their music
------IB1a. It's just noise!
------IB1b. Not like in my day
----IB2. They don't read
------IB2a. Harry Potter doesn't count
--IC. Rude
----IC1. Talk back to their elders
------IC1a. Not like in my day
------IC1b. We were civil back then
II. Apres moi, le deluge
--IIA. Newspapers dying
--IIB. Can't publish good book reviews on Web
----IIB1. Too hard to scroll through long text
----IIB2. Anybody, just ANYBODY, can say ANYTHING!
------IIB2a. Not our sort of people
------IIB2b. No degree
------IIB2c. Don't attend best parties
------IIB2d. Their views uninstructive and unimportant
--IIC. Civilization built on foundation of books
----IIC1. It just is
----IIC2. Disagreement --> (IIB2a)
----IIC3. No conceivable foundation for civilization that doesn't involve
------IIC3a. Books, newspapers, dead trees
------IIC3b. Ourselves as gatekeepers of taste
------IIC3c. Our sort of people --> (IIB2a)
----IIC3. Stop arguing, it just is
Harvee![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Tue 4 Sep 2007 05:23 PMThough I read constantly, I am hardly a reader of newspaper book reviews, which I merely skim in order to get a general idea of a book. I prefer to make my own judgements about books, and that's one reason I don't read literary book reviews.
The newspaper industry may understand that only an "elite" segment of the population rely on literary book reviews. The general public may prefer the less esoteric commentaries of the average book reader, which unfortunately are considered "pablum" by the author of the above article.
Some may be, of course, but that is a generalization that I don't subscribe to.
Arethusa![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Wed 5 Sep 2007 02:37 PMI admit that I have never been able to understand the idea of not reading book reviews because one wants to form one's own opinion. It would be like me deciding never to converse with others on certain topics again because, well, I've made or would like to make my own judgement, and must judiciously weave it in solitude.
I look at book reviews as part of an on-going conversation not a court judgement. I wish more people could see it that way. (Although critics who feel as though their place in life is to *tell* their readers what to like do not help.)
sandecohen![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Sat 22 Sep 2007 09:35 PMAlthough Wasserman makes many points that are unassailable, he neglects to say that the notion of a book review for "fans" modeled after the sports page is already banal. In fact, during his tenure, the Book Review published misrepresentations of movements such as deconstruction and cultural studies, written by local academics who seem to have been Wasserman's "tribe." New scholarship got no hearing at all during his tenure. Critical scholarship even less--Wasserman added to the "de-intellectualization" of discourse, unfortunately.
Scott Buxton![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Sun 4 Nov 2007 05:46 PMSorry, the first place I go to in the Sunday paper is the book review -- it's the primary reason I buy the paper.
sjb,
Perioikoi![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Sun 25 Nov 2007 02:08 AMPoor Mr. Wasserman. He's is fairly beside himself that you, dear reader, might prefer magazines, professional or diversionary, to books, or, worst of all, that you will not turn to him and other members of his class to "filter" (his word, not mine) your reading choices thru their discriminating palates. How will you possibly manage without his prejudices and those of his friends to keep you from reading books that would embarrass him? I note with interest that he's headed off to do book reviews for Robert Sheer, an unreconstructed leftwing nut still living in the 1960s Berkeley and who considers it his duty to discredit authority everywhere he finds it except, of course, in his own pages and his own world. I hope none of you follow him.