RIP?

By JOHN PALATTELLA [The Nation] – I’d like to talk about a meltdown, one that’s occurring not on Wall Street but Grub Street, that storied realm of writers, booksellers, bohemians and hacks. Though the problems on Grub Street are slight compared with the hardships that have befallen millions of people thanks mostly to Wall Street, they are matters of cultural importance. On Grub Street, for nearly a decade, and especially during the past four years, people have been wailing, rending their garments and otherwise voicing their displeasure over the deterioration of books coverage in the United States. (The meltdown on Grub Street coincided with the release of the Kindle in 2007, but the gales of anxiety and gusts of delirium stirred up in book publishing by digital readers are a different story.) The laments have focused mostly on newspaper books coverage because, rightfully or not, it has long been regarded as an accurate barometer of the delicate climate of literary life. Who hasn’t heard someone in a bookstore or a friend ask, “Have you read that novel the Times Book Review raved about”?

That a steep erosion in newspaper books coverage has occurred is undeniable. Newspapers that have killed or drastically reduced coverage during the past few years include the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, to name just a few. But this decline, though severe, has not been sudden, nor limited to newspapers. With the exception of The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Atlantic and Harper’s Magazine, weeklies and monthlies began rolling back books coverage in the 1990s. As for newspapers, there’s no better example of the long contraction than The New York Times Book Review. When the critic and novelist John Leonard edited the Book Review in the early 1970s, an era generally regarded as its golden age, on some Sundays he could count on having a canvas of at least eighty pages. In 1985 the Book Review averaged forty-four pages; two decades later, it was averaging thirty-two to thirty-six, and in recent months its average size has vacillated between twenty-four and twenty-eight pages. The Book Review is still the country’s most visible newspaper books section, but there is not much to read in it.

Some questions, then, to serve as boundary stones for the ramble ahead: Is it true, as many people who have commented on the matter have claimed, that the recent decline in newspaper books coverage is a problem for the culture at large, and also representative of larger cultural problems? Are review sections disappearing or shrinking because they can’t turn a profit? Or is it because they can’t compete with material originating on the web? Why are weekly and monthly magazines, despite producing a bounty of thoughtful essays and reviews about books, generally left out of the conversation about books coverage? And finally, as for quality books coverage— by which I mean not reviewery but scrutiny, the deliberate, measured analysis of literary and intellectual questions without obvious or easy answers—can such coverage originate online and also find a loyal audience there?

The newspapers that many of us, or many of our parents, grew up reading were a product of the sweet spot of the twentieth century—the postwar boom. By midcentury, the occupation of newsgathering had been thoroughly professionalized, and during the following three decades abundant ad revenue enabled newspapers to expand their newsrooms and to increase the quality and quantity of news coverage. Between 1964 and 1999, the volume of news published by some metropolitan papers doubled. The dimensions of the news changed too. As Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson explained last year in the Columbia Journalism Review, during the boom years newspapers began to gravitate away from a longstanding preoccupation with government and with pegging coverage to specific political events; papers still worked those beats, but they also began to cultivate “a much broader understanding of public life that included not just events, but also patterns and trends, and not just in politics, but also in science, medicine, business, sports, education, religion, culture, and entertainment.”

Continued at The Nation | More Chronicle & Notices.