Readers, Lament
Why you won't hear about the next James Joyce
By Tom Meagher
IN the past decade, the book review has gone from a serious,
taken-for-granted ingredient of newspapers and newsmagazines
to a near-endangered species. At least four major
U.S. dailies, from San Jose to Philadelphia, stopped publishing
Sunday review supplements. Many others reduced the weekly space
they allotted to books. Whereas ten years ago, both Time and
Newsweek featured regular, weekly book sections, finding a review
in either today requires a good eye and a little luck. Only a halfdozen
newspapers continue to publish standalone book sections.
The coverage of literature as an art form, it seems, has been relegated
to the space between the movie reviews and the personal ads.
Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News folded its eight-page book section three years ago when the paper stopped publishing on Sundays. “When I had the pullout, we had one regular ad,” books editor, Patti Thorn said. It was from Tattered Cover, a local bookstore. Thorn’s section became a part of the Friday entertainment coverage.
Shortly after, papers around the country felt the strain of the struggling economy. Book sections became one of the first places to cut. In the spring of 2001, The San Francisco Chronicle eliminated its twelve-page book section. After a great public outcry and letter-writing campaign, the paper revived the supplement that fall. Since then, The Philadelphia Inquirer has stopped its book section and wrapped it into another part of the paper. So did The Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News.
In a recent spot check of seventeen major American newspapers, seven of them lost space devoted to books in the last ten years. Only two of those seventeen, the Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, have increased the number of book pages.
Some critics, editors and observers blame the disappearances and stagnation on cultural tastes, economic cycles, poor standards and lost advertising revenue. Malcolm Jones, Newsweek’s books editor, started editing his first newspaper book section in 1977. He sees the shrinking book coverage as part of the print media’s falling influence. Page counts are down in newspapers and magazines, and arts coverage as a whole has been reduced. Newsweek publishes book reviews sporadically, as opposed to the weekly page or two it carried ten and twenty years ago, when prestigious critics Peter Prescott and Jean Strouse contributed regularly. Readers no longer have a regular page to turn to for book criticism.
“The fact is that you can sell ad pages in sports sections till the cows come home,” Jones said. “Almost nobody advertises for books in newspapers outside of the major papers like The [Washington] Post and The [New York] Times. Publishers, in turn, don’t have that much ad money to spend on any given book.”
At The San Diego Union-Tribune—which killed its semimonthly book supplement in 1995, only to bring it back as a weekly eightpage tabloid two years later—editor Arthur Salm believes the key to bolstering arts coverage is to publish it for non-financial reasons. “It’s not supposed to generate enough ad revenue to cover itself. If that were the case, no paper would have a metro section,” Salm said. “[The book section] informs people’s understanding of everything else that goes in the paper, not to mention everything else that goes on in the community.”
Only five other U.S. newspapers continue to publish standalone book sections: The New York Times Book Review supplement, which towers above them all; The Washington Post, which has kept a steady sixteen pages for nearly thirty years, the Los Angeles Times; the Chicago Tribune; and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Yet even The New York Times has cut back. Ten years ago, its Book Review regularly ran at twenty-eight to thirty-two pages. Today, the section weighs in at a svelte twenty pages.
Publishers don’t generally have the advertising budgets that newspapers seem to think they do. In a 2000 study for the Authors Guild, former New York Times book industry reporter David Kirkpatrick wrote that most books have less than $5,000 to cover the cost of advertising, author tours and all other promotions. That doesn’t leave much for newspapers.
For the critics, the fate of the print media is on a track parallel to that of the book section. Mary Ann Grossman, the book editor at the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, said, “People are paying far more attention to the reader comments on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com than [to] professional reviewers. That feeds into the whole idea of whether newspapers are going to exist anymore.” She added, “It’s like everything else in our society, people don’t feel they need experts anymore. They can find things by themselves.”
But perhaps critics and book review editors alone can’t make the
case. People want to read intelligent book reviews that contribute
to the public discourse, but until those readers make themselves
heard, the editors fight for space unarmed. “I think the public,
which reads a lot of books, needs to complain if they’re not getting
book review coverage in papers,” said Jim Concannon, The Boston
Globe’s book editor. “I think [that’s] something that eases the money
pressure and something that assures publishers and editors that
readers care. Public complaints tend to get a reply. If we’re waiting
for the pressure to come internally, it could be a long wait.”