May 01, 2007

M’aidez

Much has justifiably been written recently on the constricting changes in newspaper book review coverage — changes at The Raleigh News & Observer, the Chicago Tribune, the L. A. Times, last year at The Dallas Morning News, and in too many other papers. We hear rumors of more such changes to come. All of which will, of course, lead inexorably to fewer titles’ being covered by fewer reviewers as newspapers cut the cultural pages and turn increasingly to the wires to fill their few remaining review inches.

Like, I imagine, most bookpeople who came upon it (there are 4,211 undersigners this morning), I signed the petition encouraging the publishers of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to retain their book editor position and the fine book page there.

Many commentators on the squeezing of the book have asserted that it’s ironic for newspapers, which are losing readers annually, to do a disservice specifically to those subscribers who define themselves as readers.

I suppose it’s likely that review outlets will blossom online. And I’m hopeful that many of those will have the constitutional strength of Jerome Weeks at BookDaddy. But this doesn’t make the current trend less unsettling.

It has been widely asserted that literacy is falling and newspaper publishers are only admitting this to be the case. Michael Connelley has written persuasively that such a view is a failure to see the long-term picture. Newspaper publishers, he says, should understand that fostering book reading is fostering newspaper reading. But, with that said, it doesn’t seem to me that newspapers have ever been oriented to the long view — certainly not recently. (Neither have publishers been, but that’s another subject.)

Those who explain this snowball of bad decisions on the basis of sound business practice seem inclined quickly to blame book publishers for not advertising in stand-alone book sections. This, of course, aligns the interest of newspaper review editors with those of the mainstream commercial houses.

And it strikes me that this may be the point.

The world doesn’t need me to say that an independent and unfettered Fourth Estate is a cornerstone of a free society. But in this context it seems to me that bringing to its readers the voices of artists, historians, contrarians, novelists, analysts, poets, and independents, every cogent thought of people who are not supported by the mainstream cultural engine (in this case, those big potential book-page advertisers) is itself a check on The Dominant Idea in any given historical moment. Perhaps reviewing books should simply be seen as part of the media’s mission always to offer a balancing view.

In any case, maybe the delimiting of ideas that decreased book review coverage represents should be folded into the Press’s current breast-beating, ash-wearing, late-arriving, public self-analysis.

Fred Ramey
Posted on May Day 2007

Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog

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