July 23

A Debt of Honor — Skipped Out On

The Sunday book supplement of the Los Angeles Times is being discontinued after a run of more than three decades. It will make its final appearance this coming weekend. Four former editors of the section have signed an open letter of protest. They point out that the Times has been sponsoring an annual Festival of Books at the University of California at Los Angeles for a dozen years now – a matter of some civic pride, but soon to be “a hollow joke” given the gutting of the paper’s literary coverage. From now on, any reviews will run in the “calender” section of the paper, along with movie schedules and advice on where to find the best pizza in LA.

In the spring of 2007, this column raised one of the first calls for readers to put some pressure on newspaper editors not just to continue to offer book reviews but even to expand their coverage. And in November, I reported here on the encouraging case of The Austin American-Statesman, which is offering regular reviews of titles from university presses.

Last month, during his speech at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, outgoing president Sandy Thatcher quoted from my interview with Roger Gathman, who writes “The Academic Presses” for the Austin paper. “The people making decisions,” Gathman had said, “have to realize that it is in their interest to encourage reading. They have to start thinking about the need to generate an audience. At that level, it makes no sense for all of your cultural coverage to point to activities that don’t involve reading.” Thatcher, who is also the director of Penn State University Press, indicated that his recent venture in editing the review section of a local newspaper, the Centre Daily Times, was inspired in part by that column.

At the time, I pointed out that Gathman’s comment about reading would seem profoundly sensible to anyone who gave it two minutes of thought – but who could spare that much time when (as it seems at newspapers nowadays) the sky is falling?

Not all of it comes down to economics, though. We’re also talking about the effects of a long-term change in ethos.

People at newspapers – not a majority but any means, but a significant core – once held respect, verging on reverence, for the printed word as such. A sort of continuum existed between the world of newspapers and that of books. The examples of H.L. Mencken, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, and Walter Lippmann seemed to prove it. Each had been a journalist and gone on to write things of a more durable nature; and knowledge of this possibility left its mark on others.

Indeed, to a bothersome degree sometimes. The legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell – who started his career covering the police blotter in Brooklyn – could wryly note that “a newspaper can have no greater nuisance than a reporter who is always trying to write literature.”

Over the years, book-review sections have existed because somebody in charge had a commitment to them – an old editor, perhaps, with an unfinished novel in the drawer, stored beneath the shot glasses. The oft-repeated claim that shrinking or abandoning book coverage is economically justified because publishers have stopped buying enough ads is nonsense. They never did; and anyway, no sports page depends on business from the teams it covers. The willingness to keep book sections alive was never rational in the narrowest sense. It manifested a sense of participation in print culture; it tried to pay a debt of honor.

Somewhere along the way, however, the book ceased to function as a reference point – an ideal model, a standard of seriousness, the outer limit of one’s sense of possible aspiration. Television took over that role. (But only, it turns out, as a wedge: TV was only the first of the screens that would define the way we live now.)

The horizon was was increasingly defined by CNN. There was no fundamental reason for newspaper people to feel obliged to keep covering books, as such. The element of filtering, the determination of “news value,” is performed outside the realm of print. An author is important once he or she has been on cable — or, if very fortunate, Oprah. So why bother keeping a review editor around, hazarding guesses?

Last year, the University of Missouri Press published Faint Praise: The Plight of Reviewing in America by Gail Pool, an experienced literary journalist with a sharp sense of just how many problems beset the field, even apart from downsizing. “Though people deplore the poor quality of reviewing,” she writes, “no one seems to conclude that so many reviews are bad because reviewing is hard to do well.” In the best case, wrote Pool, reviewers would be able to “read critically, think lucidly, and argue logically. They must write clearly enough to accessible, sharply enough to be entertaining, and tightly enough to turn seven hundred words into an article.”

Pool’s argument, in a capsule, is that reviewing in general-interest publications tends to be mediocre due not only to the scarcity of such talent, but also to a lack of incentives for learning to do the job well. The rewards structure does not make reviewing a good investment of one’s time or talent. The pay is terrible. Glory must be calculated using metrics normally applied to the size and half-life of subatomic particles.

The thrust of Pool’s analysis is that, even so, ultimately nothing will improve unless editors and critics formulate and uphold higher standards for their own work. Reading Faint Praise when it appeared last summer, I thought its author made many smart and telling points, and vowed to try to live up to her call.

But given the latest news, it’s hard to think that the demand for seriousness and craftsmanship even makes sense. After two decades of reviewing books for newspapers, I have acquired a few tools and some capacity to use them. But the effort seems to have been like an apprenticeship in horse-shoeing or the repair of covered-wagon wheels. It took a lot of patience, but market demand for this skill is not now trending upwards.

The Los Angeles Times Book Review was one of the last freestanding literary supplements in an American newspaper. Preserving it would have been a matter of pride to anyone capable of grasping that a newspaper is one part, potentially an honorable part, of print culture itself. Instead, the publisher is grasping dollars, and honor has nothing to do with it.

Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week. He also blogs at Quick Study.

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Comments

The news business has welshed on many debts to society, and not because journalists are averse to literature or hard news. It’s because people who own the news business are not in the news business; they’re in the scrap business.

News organizations all over the country are being destroyed so their owners can recover the assets in the rubble. The Tribune Tower, for example; nice piece of real estate. The name “Wrigley Field.” Whatever can be sold. How much will you give for this chunk of a pillar of liberty? Going, going. Gone.

Some early predictioons that Sam Zell buying the Tribune empire and Murdoch buying the WSJ saw a positive trend in business seeing profit potential in news. Apparently, only short term.

BTW, I’m just starting to read Faint Praise myself. It appears wonderfully readable.

Barbara Fister, at 9:00 am EDT on July 23, 2008

A Sad Day

Thanks for this illuminating piece. It is a SAD day for print culture. I hope regular readers of the LA paper book supplement are causing a ruckus. When the bell starts tolling for the NY Times Book Review, we will know the ghost has been given up.

Ken Bielen, Director of Grants Management, Adult & Graduate Operations at Indiana Wesleyan University, at 9:10 am EDT on July 23, 2008

My understanding is that the term “welshed” is an ethnic slur; I couldn’t find an alternate etymology in a quick online search. And I’d advise avoiding “gypped” or “Indian giver” as substitutes.

Susan Loffredo, at 9:10 am EDT on July 23, 2008

But, don’t all of today’s experts agree that no one under 40 is reading anymore and that no one over 39 is demographically desirable? I keep reading that the book is on its way out, to be replaced by microblogging or hypertext that can be mashed up and made into something “wonderful.” And wouldn’t folks rather read the reviews posted on Amazon? This is the change whose embrace should be sought, isn’t it?

Larry Schwartz, at 10:10 am EDT on July 23, 2008

“Thanks” Susan. What took you so long? Let’s add the PC Inquisition to forces draining the blood from contemporary literature.

Fritz Katz, at 10:20 am EDT on July 23, 2008

Thanks Fritz Katz, and my guess is that Susan is a troll, although I don’t know why one would pop up in this context. For example, “Indian giver” is not a negative remark about Indians, but rather against white people who “gave” things to Native Americans (land in a treaty), then took those things away just as quickly. Or perhaps Susan means that the term is racist unless it’s changed to “Native American giver.” I wouldn’t go as far as blaming such political correctness for the decline in book culture, but I found Susan’s post to be trivial and petty, and along with the news of the LA Times’s decision, definitely gets my day off to a rotten start.

Oh come on, at 10:50 am EDT on July 23, 2008

Extraordinarily fine piece, Scott. Do you think if someone brought this problem to the attention of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they might toss a few hundred million dollars at it?

BTW, “welsh” is from the Old English welshen, meaning “to stiff some poor sucker.”

George Scialabba, at 2:10 pm EDT on July 23, 2008

Gail Pool’s argument could apply to more than book reviews. Her argument provides some explanation for Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, where movie reviews are reduced to summing yeas and nays. The status of the printed word has atrophied even when honoring what had been the most venerated screen.

Shane Taylor, economist, at 1:20 pm EDT on July 23, 2008

Re: Larry’s comments. No, it is NOT true that “all the polls show that no one under 40 is reading,'’ let alone that anyone over 39 is not demographically desirable. I find this view particularly odd coming from a librarian whose professional site shows him surrounded by books. This does not explain the proliferation of fine first and second novels and nonfiction by young writers — there are too many examples to name, but let’s start with Dave Eggers and take it from there. Some have broken into the commercial mainstream, some not. Yes, Kindle is stirring interest and may become the wave of the future, but we’re not there yet. Posting reviews online is fine, but by the same logic, the rest of the newspapers should simply fold up shop and be put up there as well. Or do different rules apply. Since people who like to read book reviews and book sections are by definition people who like to read books (even in electronic form) it boggles the mind that this is the one remaining area that is constantly under attack. It’s understandable that people are looking for fall guys (and gals) when the industry is in free fall, but it speaks to the shortsightedness of the people who are running the newspaper business right now — and to the fact that book sections are in perennial last place in newsroom politics, as has been pointed out.The bad economic situation is just a way to blame the victim, instead of provide a needed forum in a printed medium for people who actually read, of whatever age and demographic desirability. (Actually, the affluence of the average book buyer would seem to make them even more desirable, in the proverbial 18-39 age group the networks are, or used to be, chasing after.) Far easier to moan about the “death of literacy'’ than to try to perpetuate commitment to literature and nonfiction, both in print and online.

Paul Wilner, at 2:25 pm EDT on July 23, 2008

Depends on whose ox is being gored, I guess.

If Susan is a troll, then so should we all be. I’m wondering, which groups are OK to slur and which are not. The Welsh are an ethnic minority in the UK, where that expression comes from. This isn’t about political correctness, it’s about more careful word choices and common courtesy.

hyacinth, at 2:50 pm EDT on July 23, 2008

Trolls, the Welsh, and Gypsies

My college-age daughter has started taking me to task for my [rare] use of such expressions as ‘getting gipped/gypped’ and ‘welshing on a bet.’ I find this tiresome, to be sure, but I probably would not write a published piece using any of those terms. And, while ‘indian-giver’ may have an anti-white etymology, most people hear it as a slur on indians/native americans; so, why run the risk for a silly expression?On the other hand, is it ok to pick on trolls?

cts, at 3:35 pm EDT on July 23, 2008

Ok, this is now a sidelight to Scott’s main point, but I picked up the following from http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog..._05_01_grammarphobiacom_archive.html re. the term “Indian Giver.” It apparently doesn’t reference white practices, however much that may have been more appropriate:

“The OED‘s earliest citation for “Indian giver” is John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1860): “Indian giver. When an Indian gives any thing, he expects to receive an equivalent, or to have his gift returned."”

“But a posting on the Linguist List, a forum for linguists, offers this 1848 entry from a previous edition of Bartlett’s dictionary: “INDIAN GIVER. When an Indian gives anything, he expects an equivalent in return, or that the same thing may be given back to him. This term is applied by children in New York and the vicinity to a child who, after having given away a thing, wishes to have it back again."”

One of the biggest cultural conflicts between Native Americans and colonists was the inability to comprehend—or perhaps just to accept and accommodate—different conceptions of economics and how economics shaped human relations. Especially, colonists notions of private property and their failure to understand the way gifts functioned in Native American culture led them to interpret Native Americans as morally corrupt. Of course, it helped matters that interpreting Native Americans as morally corrupt justified their own efforts to take over native American lands.

Peter Kerry Powers, Dean of Humanities at Messiah College, at 10:10 pm EDT on July 23, 2008

Newspaper death rattle

The bottom line — economically speaking — is that newspapers can’t reference other printed media without acknowledging how obsolete their own medium has become. If they have an obligation to cover authors writing books, do they have a similar bond and duty to authors publishing online?

And the internet is, without a doubt, the 500 pound elephant in this digital chat-room.

Newspapers sell the news — but these days what is printed at 2 AM is an old story by 9 AM coffee time. The New York Times and LA Times are getting their best advertising reach with breaking stories online — sure it might make a nice headline for tomorrow morning’s paper as well but its not really “news” anymore in the instant information culture.

Online, publication is moving toward three things that printed media has a hard time incorporating: niche focus, real-time interactive discussion, and a mixture of democratic and hierarchical editing. In many ways, this is an evolution of the ideas behind academic peer-reviewed journals seeping into mainstream news and publishing — thanks to the internet.

Since there are places to gain and contribute information about *specific* literary genres and topics, newspapers aren’t going to generate much interest unless they choose to focus on books as a niche.

edu2.0, at 5:00 am EDT on July 24, 2008

What’s the deal that’s being reneged upon?

OK, I’ll play the philistine (although not the troll): Granted that reviewing is an art—indeed, an art of which Scott is one of the true masters. And granted, too, that not all of us have given up on books printed on paper in favor of reading books on a glorified TV screen. Even if you accept these givens, anyone with publishing experience knows that reviews and ads are at best two of many factors in the complex process of book sales. In fact, conventional wisdom in the publishing industry says that ads don’t really sell many books (although it’s hard to find reliable data on this one way or another).

So if I’m a newspaper publisher, what’s to be gained by dedicating an entire four-color tabloid section of my paper to books? More people buy computer games than books, but most dailies don’t have a weekly Games section (yet). The book review section—as distinct from the reviews themselves—is an anachronism, allocating a great deal of precious real-estate to products that often only sell a few tens of thousands of copies. They’re a wonderful, noble vestige of an era before TV and movies and games and popular music and the online world started to monopolize the public imagination.

Yes, I understand that books have value beyond sales numbers (that’s why I quipped that I was playing the philistine). But even if I’m the most conscientious journalist in the world, how can I justify the expense of maintaining a book review section when my overall ad revenues are plummeting and my newshole is shrinking? Should I cut national news to save the book review? Or sports, even though far more people watch the Super Bowl (105 million last year) on a single Sunday, for example, than will buy copies of any given book in a lifetime?

I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but not lightly. The point is, it’s laudable to lament the disappearance of book reviews and of reviewing as an art form, but it’s quite another to pretend to ourselves that newspapers should act like libraries. The dailies have to make money to survive. This doesn’t excuse all options. Many of the efforts to solve the newspaper industry’s problems so far—by cutting news staff or foreign bureaus, prioritizing consumer and entertainment news ahead of national and international, etc.—have been fatalistic and sadly unimaginative. But as long as the papers have to make money to survive, it seems pretty clear that devoting a big chunk of page count to book reviews ain’t the answer.

It could turn out, folks, that this isn’t about the death of book reviews, but about the decline of the traditional newspaper. In which case reviewing, if it’s to save itself, is going to have to flee the dying world of the Sunday books section for more hospitable climes. Pace the fine work of Scott on the Interweb, or of the many fine reviewers working in magazines and journals, etc.

Reviewing hasn’t found a new home yet, but we’d best start looking for one now, instead of standing here shaking our heads.

Jim Reische, at 9:20 am EDT on July 24, 2008

Book reviews in magazines

I see book reviews in many of the magazines I read and in others I see for sale. Examples would include “Washington Monthly", “The Atlantic", “Harper’s", and “National Review". On the other hand, I don’t see any book reviews in the giveaway papers which have sprung up in one-newspaper cities. They review movies, restaurants, theater, musical performances and even video games, but no books. If newspapers eliminate book reviews, the only place to find them other than the Internet will be in magazines with at least some intellectual interest.

Is that bad? That depends on whom you think book reviews exist to serve. If you think the purpose of book reviews is to give book reviewers an audience for their opinions, then you will think it bad to narrow their audience. Moreover, since “Harper’s” has a liberal slant and “National Review” a conservative one, you may expect their book reviews to reflect that editorial slant and thus intensify either liberal or conservative groupthink. Or, if you think the purpose of book reviews is to guide readers to the types of books they want to read, then there is nothing wrong with readers finding book reviews mostly in the magazines they like to read.

I don’t see how the LA Times owes any “debt of honor” which obliges it to print material its readers don’t want. The logical conclusion to this idea would be that the readers also owe a debt of honor to read what they don’t care to read. I don’t see how you can convince them of that.

Jack Olson, at 11:10 am EDT on July 24, 2008

To edu2.0: Very little of what you herald about the advantages of the internet over the supposedly dying newspaper actually have anything to do with the decline of newspapers. The ONLY thing that the internet has brought to the media marketplace, the ONLY thing that is hurting newspapers badly, is a free resource for ads. Newspapers have lost many of their help wanted and classified ads to places like craigslist and eBay. If the internet killed every bit of immediate news reporting and blogging, if it killed all the “niche focus” and “interactivity” and the “mixture of democratic and hierarchical editing,” but kept craigslist and eBay and the other sites that let millions of people and companies place ads for free (more or less), newspapers would still be in the same fix.

They continue to exist — and even make profits, a small point that the “death of newsprint” advocates overlook — because department stores, food stores and car lots continue to advertise in them. The internet hasn’t figured out how effectively to give every household in a city a 10 percent off coupon, good today only. They continue to decline mostly because of the lack of faith and lack of brains of newspaper management.

You may find my extended consideration of these issues here: http://www.artsjournal.com/bookda...1/a_commonplace_connection_made.html

To Jim Reische: There is something to be said for the content of books. No computer game that I’ve played has brought me quite the same understanding of the failures of the CIA as reading Tim Weiner’s “The Legacy of Ashes.” It is policy books, history books, sociopolitical books and presidential bios that prompted many big-city daily newspaper editors to run book reviews — often, I note, in their “week in review” sections and NOT their art sections. It helped bulk up their op-ed columnists and the general discussion on their editorial pages with some intellectual gravitas. Despite my snarky tone here, I do believe the book pages have helped deepen and sharpen the public discussion in towns, and that was once a chief purpose of daily newspapers. After all, if “what sells ads” is the only criteria for what is printed in newspapers, then the letters page, the op-ed pages, foreign bureaus and investigative journalism would all get chucked. It’s running these things — and, once upon a time, book pages — that distinguished newspaper publishers from fishmongers or rag tradesman.

As I wrote in my essay on Gail Pool’s book: “The newspaper book page is worth fighting for, worth arguing about like this, because the Big City Daily remains the only American medium dedicated to providing a decent level of professional book criticism from a number of sources addressing a general but local audience — and all for a pretty cheap price. Commercial TV and radio do nothing like book criticism, even public television and radio are pretty slack on the job. Cable TV — what conservatives believe has already removed any need for public TV — is mostly a joke. Magazines are too small in circulation, too narrowcast yet too scattered. Book blogs are a fascinating new medium but they are certainly preaching to the converted. As cumbersome and faulty and cozily middle-brow as the newspaper book page is, it remains one of the best efforts (one of the only efforts) to engage a city’s readers in a common discussion about books and the issues found in books, to lead them beyond personal interests to something new or different in literature (or politics). The book page can also advocate for literacy and libraries and education — all the things that newspaper managements, if they had any brains, would see are vital to their own continuance."You can find all of it here: http://www.artsjournal.com/bookda.../07/gail_pools_faint_praise_the.html

Finally, to everyone who has debated the etymology behind and the percentage of ethnic insult in the word, “welsh,” please note Scott’s spelling. I feel certain that it’s a joke upon Jane Carlyle, whose middle (maiden) name was Welsch.

Or perhaps it’s a sly reference — never to be picked up by academics — to Roger Welsch, Nebraska country-boy author of “Old Tractors Never Die” and “Outhouses.”

book/daddy, at 11:15 am EDT on July 24, 2008

No book reviews in the freebie papers?

I think the editors of the Village Voice, for one, would be surprised to hear that, as would the editors of a number of alternative weeklies in our larger cities, including the Philadelphia CityPaper where I live.

The difference is that instead of being part of the paper’s routine coverage, most alt-weeklies that review books do so in special issues devoted to the subject. In Philadelphia, the CityPaper produces its Book Quarterly issue (as the name says) four times a year.

Sandy Smith, at 11:55 am EDT on July 24, 2008

Words: revenue vs cost

book/daddy:

Let’s consider the news we’re discussing. InsideHigherEd.com doesn’t offer free advertising space, but they do offer: niche-specific news & editorials; and near real-time discussion of articles. Even if print newspapers could manage a business model that gave away free ad space, they still couldn’t provide such a fast response on letters to the editor — to the point where we can have a multi-part conversation within 24 hours that becomes a part of the actual article being discussed.

As far as coupons, well... that’s one of my favorites! I saw recently that internet coupon use is up nearly 100% over the last three years, and I’ve found online programs that pay referrers to distribute coupons by compensating the referrer when a coupon is used.

Newspapers need physical capital: printers, paper, ink, AND intellectual capital. A web site needs cheap capital: a little server space and bandwidth that can scale with use — and someone with a passion about a topic to design and administer things. Website management software like Joomla, Wordpress, or Blogger all even reduce the need for internet start-up capital — its like an open-source printing press!

Going forward, internet is going to cut into printed media any way you look at it — revenue, content, competition for the best writers... The ads will always be cheaper because the costs of publishing online are lower, and online publications are going to offer better interactivity and organization of information due to the nature and capacity of the technology.

By the way: I like your book blog. Seems like its very existence helps prove the point I’m trying to make ;) We have our own websites, and we’re talking about it at an online newspaper. You can immediately point to a specific argument you’ve writen, and there on that “archive page” I have instant access to every article ever published on that site. Its as if every issue includes the complete archive of the paper’s history — linked & organized thematically.

As much as I love writing and reading, I just don’t think paper and ink can compete in the long term. Newspapers, as the biggest consumers of paper and ink, are going to be the first ones to take the hit.

edu2.0, at 2:25 pm EDT on July 24, 2008

Tweaking the Title

There seems to be some room for disagreement over whether the verb “welch” (also sometimes spelled “welsh” or “welsch") meaning to default on a loan or debt, started out as an insult against the Welsh.

I had never heard this complaint and certainly intended no offense. The Oxford English Dictionary says the origins of this usage are unclear. And so rather than risk being haunted by the ghost of Raymond Williams, I have changed the title of this piece.

Scott McLemee, Columnist at Inside Higher Ed, at 3:30 pm EDT on July 24, 2008

Well, I’m relieved that at least part of the discussion addresses the point of Scott’s excellent piece: the downsizing of the book section in the second biggest city (and second biggest book buying) market in the country by the dominant paper in that market. It’s arguable whether or not the L.A. Times is losing money or just struggling to meet its debt load but the accountants and financial analysts are probably best equipped to sort that out. To Jim’s point: without accusing him of philistinism (or trollery), I have to say I disagree with what he’s saying just about in toto (no offense intended to any toto-ites who might not like the derivation of the phrase.) He’s positing the usual false choice between sports and books (and who said book sections had to be in color, anyhow?) Although some of my best friends are sports editors and writers and the Superbowl is a pretty popular event, or so they tell me, it’s also one that’s exhaustively covered through this new invention they have called television, not to mention the internet, where they have these things called blogs, which cover the game on the day it occurs. Unless your home team is playing, or there’s an extraordinarily exciting contest, there’s little evidence that you get a huge bump in circulation the following Monday. It used to be the case, but no longer — those days have gone along with the decline in the rest of the business. There is also no proof that papers get a bump from Olympic coverage: they are covered because they’re important, not because they bring in new readers. They don’t; everyone’s already seen it on tv. And they get a largely male audience, not ideal for advertisers looking for female consumers. So which makes more sense: to invest in commentary on something with more depth and shelf life in a medium with a proven audience or rehash something that has already occurred? Newspaper publishers, editors, circulation managers and ad sales people tend to favor sports because they’re fans and it provides a comfort zone in which they feel like they’re vicariously identified with their favorite teams but NOT, in most cases, because of any immediate payoff unless their team happens to be on a roll to a championship. As far as how to “justify'’ book coverage — a newsroom argument frequently made under the guise of pragmatism — that’s a question that should be applied to every section of the paper, particularly these days. Throwing around words like “anachronism'’ is really just a meaningless epithet. I fully agree that book sections should and must adapt to the online world as well and that many of the book blogs, including the ones referenced above, are excellent but one need not come at the expense of the other. It does not seem unreasonable that a printed product which is the largest source of information for people in the second largest city in the country should provide “cultural news'’ about books of all sorts — highbrow, genre fiction, you name it. My sense is that readers want and expect such coverage.In fact, at the newspaper where I used to work, the book review was ranked in the same league as the real estate section in readership surveys. While continuing to seek new solutions, I suggest it’s a bad idea to drink the Kool-Aid (no offense intended to anyone of the Kool or Aid persuasion.) Mentioning that some of the recent moves have been misguided strikes me as a little different than “standing here shaking our heads.'’ Putting something in the paper for people who like to read still strikes me as a pretty good idea. That’s not highbrow or overly arty, just good journalism — and I also happen to believe it’s good business.

Paul Wilner, at 4:45 pm EDT on July 24, 2008

Thank you, Sandy Smith

Thank you, Sandy Smith, for correcting me. Since there are some free papers which print book reviews, will readers looking for book reviews in newspapers turn to those now that subscription newspapers like the LA Times are eliminating theirs? Or is it more likely the free papers will curtail book reviews for the same reason the subscription papers have?

Jack Olson, at 5:15 pm EDT on July 24, 2008

Now we’re skipping out? What about us walkers?

Paul, you’re absolutely right. Again, I was being intentionally provocative. But I will disagree with you on one point: the papers I’ve worked with have too often found that readers go to sports and entertainment first. That’s why we’re seeing newshole cut at dailies around the country—or, in the latest distressing development at the Chicago Tribune (http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/mag/article.pl?articleId=30282), possibly pushed to the second section so that page 1 could focus on important things like consumer news. Blech.

But I would urge some caution here. The New York Times doesn’t run a Sunday Book Review out of the goodness of its heart. It does so because it’s essentially an advertising supplement whose revenues pay for the review space. With book sales falling as they are, there isn’t enough of that ad money to go around. So the Times may keep its venerable section going, but everyone else has to fight for the crumbs. Again, if I were running a paper, I’d be hard pressed to argue that a book section is the best use of the limited space I had available. And despite the claims of several contributors in this discussion, newspapers really are starting to lose money. Book/daddy, you’re wrong on that point. It’s true that the major dailies are only making less profit than they used to, rather than losing money. But many midsize papers are hurting for real.

Sticking with book/daddy, I do very much agree with you that newspapers love nothing more than to cite books—especially nonfiction/current affairs—on their opinion pages, or to quote book authors as experts in their news coverage. So in this sense I agree with you that books fuel news reporting, which is very important.

But I still wonder who we all think the book review section of a newspaper serves. None of our discussion means much without solid data on who’s reading these sections—if anyone—and why.

Sadly, the newspapers themselves seem to be as ill-informed on this point as the rest of us. And therein lies the source of the tragedy.

Jim Reische, at 6:40 pm EDT on July 24, 2008

Fair enough, but somehow I doubt that the Times really makes money off its book section — if so, it’s nothing compared to the “T'’ style supplements, which seem to be driving their revenue stream, such as it is. As always, they’re the exception that proves the rule. I would be more comfortable with the debate if the other dailies made regular book criticism/coverage part of the entertainment section; instead they’re relegated to the back of the book, along with dusty wire stories.No one disputes (at least not me) that the business is losing money these days — the question, as always, is the best uses of the resources you have in keeping with the readership you have, the one you want and the one you’d most like to keep. To me, the answer to that question is obvious but most newsrooms seem to have moved, or are moving, in the opposite direction as they rearrange the deck chairs.

Paul Wilner, at 9:10 pm EDT on July 24, 2008

Jack Olson asks:"Since there are some free papers which print book reviews, will readers looking for book reviews in newspapers turn to those now that subscription newspapers like the LA Times are eliminating theirs? Or is it more likely the free papers will curtail book reviews for the same reason the subscription papers have?”

I am not that familiar with the economics of the alt-weeklies, but it looks to me like their business model isn’t suffering as badly as that of the paid-circulation press — quite likely because the alt-weeklies are more like the Internet in that they give the product away to the customers and make the advertisers pay for it. That means that, again like on the Internet, content rules at the free weeklies. No compelling stories, or reviews, or comprehensive listings? Nobody picks up your paper, and nobody sees the ads.

This probably augurs well for those alt-weeklies that review books, however infrequently, for it means two things:

—they have readers who are interested in reading about books; they’re the ones who pick up the book review issues—they can sell advertising in those issues to publishers and others in the literary trade

And it probably means that those of us interested in books who live in a city with a major daily that’s cutting out its book reporting will start reading that alt-weekly if we aren’t already (the CityPaper often has more interesting coverage of Philadelphia politics than the Inquirer, for instance).

Sandy Smith, Senior Marketing Writer at Activant Solutions Inc, at 2:10 pm EDT on July 25, 2008

reviews, newspapers, money

Jim makes a good point when he writes, “The dailies have to make money to survive.” But I think he makes an overall bad point about how book reviews work in that process.

First, one has to disperse some myths. The idea that nobody reads is a rather distorted view of surveys that show that are read for their first two groups, those who don’t read or those who read one book a year. What those surveys really show is that those who do read read a lot. The most important point for newspapers is this part of the NEA report:

“The most important factor in literacy reading rates is education, the report shows. Only 14 percent of adults with a grade school education read literature in 2002. By contrast, more than five times as many respondents with a graduate school education — 74 percent — read literary works.

Family income also affects the literary reading rate, though not as strongly as education. About one-third of the lowest income group — those with a family income under $10,000 — read literature during the survey year, compared with 61 percent of the highest income group — those with family income of $75,000 or more.

According to the survey, the most popular types of literature are novels or short stories, which were read by 45 percent or 93 million adults in the previous year. Poetry was read by 12 percent or 25 million people, while just 4 percent or seven million people reported having read a play.”

What that should tell newspapers is this: reading is what newspapers sell — you have to want to read before you want to read a newspaper. And that the demographic for readers tends towards the high end. Well, what do you know — that is the same demo for fashion and travel and books. Paul Krugman recently said something about the moneymaker for the NYT — it isn’t the news, the business news, sports, it is T magazine.

LA Times, by submerging their book review section, is not thereby reaching out to the computer game people. One of the things about the net is that it can cover digital media a lot more thoroughly and more lucratively than the newspapers. What it can’t cover as thoroughly and as lucratively is books. Book sections are probably going to be loss leaders, but the creative newspaper editor would look at the demo carefully and shoot for advertisers that want to reach that high end, and figure out ways to make book sections prestigious enough that they can establish synergies (terrible word) with other select sections. That is, in fact, the future for a daily that wants to make a profit. Low end stuff — want ads, grocery stores — and high end stuff — travel, fashion, luxury goods. Books, while not a luxury good, attract a high end audience. I would bet Jim hardly looks at the fashion section, the wedding announcements, or travel — big money makers, but with a select audience. The LA Times has lost its bearings by losing its sense of where it is competing. Being a huge entertainment town, vitally dependent on literature (look over the number of movies that have been made from novels — graphic novels, classics, middle brow novels — and you’ll note the economic truth about literature — it is a multiplier), the LAT has not only shirked a cultural duty, but has distanced itself from the audience that will consistently buy papers. The idea that newspapers “should get with the times,” or concentrate on computer games, doesn’t ask the vital question — who do newspapers reach? what is their future? I’ve gone around and asked those associated with U.T. about our paper, the one I write for, the Austin Statesman, and I’ve found surprisingly few who are aware of it — or of my academic book column. Why? Because newspapers haven’t tapped the market, instead spreading an image of themselves as either lowbrow or in the arms of the chamber of commerce. I have big doubts that newspapers that expanded their computer game coverage would reach gamers, and hence, generate advertising from game venders. Gamers are pretty set in their communications patterns, which fold into their interest nicely. Computer games unsurprisingly go best with computers. Newspapers need to understand that simple model. Right now, they are present themselves like meat venders trying to sell produce at a PETA convention. Don’t target the readers of one or no books — target the readers, who also happen to have the money.

Newspapers are dependent on the local. I don’t think the fashion section of the Bismark North Dakota paper will be the moneymaker that the fashion section for the NYT is. On the other hand, I imagine (having never been to Bismark), that much of the entertainment in the town consists of reading -since I just have doubts that there’s a huge club scene there, or a lotta muliplexes. In Austin, where I live, there is plenty of clubs and multiplexes — but there is also a huge university at the center of the town. And a highly educated and animated population. Book reviews can sell the paper to that population — which will continue to read, once it starts reading.

roger, at 3:25 pm EDT on July 25, 2008

Back to you edu2: Thank you for the remedial economics lesson in print v. web. In the happy minds of web promoters, their world is always cost-free — forgetting the huge initial investment for average folks that computers, monthly online service, electricity, calls to service departments in India, etc. represent.

I never said that print was forever. Quite the contrary. My point was — and remains — that all of the wonders of the web that you extol could vanish tomorrow and newspapers would still face the financial problems they have now: the loss of general ad revenue because of sites such as craigslist and eBay and the subsequent beatings newspaper stock prices are taking from Wall Street, even as the papers’ profits continue to be relatively healthy. Nothing else the web has offered has really affected their bottomline. Trust me: quick turnaround on letters to the editor or the proliferation of debate on blogs is not the internet “killer app” that newspaper publishers fear. If they could figure out a way to win back that ad revenue and not adopt a single marvel that fascinates web users (widgets! RSS feeds! social networking!), they would in a flash — and the future of newspapers would be assured for a long time.

As it is, newspapers may be the first industry to go out of business while still making handsome profits. This is from Allan Mutter’s Newsosaur site: “[Even with the drastic news from Wall Street,] the average operating profit among the six news publishers is 18.5%, as measured by earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). For all that ails the industry, this surpasses the EBITDA of such companies as Chevron (18.7%), Boeing (11.2%), Wal-Mart (7.7%) and Amazon.Com (6.0%).”

To continue with the economics lesson: We’re comparing Apples to oranges, the entire web to individual newspapers. Let’s shrink things down: Point out a single website that can field the depth of editorial staff that a big-city newspaper has and has the same local focus that a big-city newspaper has. I’ll make it simpler: Find a website that covers a city’s entire range of cultural offerings from classical music to books to the pop music scene with a range of experienced, full-time writers.

You can’t because the online economics don’t work — the narrow, local market won’t support the staff that’s needed. The fact is that covering the water board, the school superintendent and reviewing the city symphony or the local literary scene have never made much money. (Providing a ton of household readers to advertisers, on the other hand, has.) Such services cost a lot in expertise and manpower — and they’re what used to distinguish serious newspapers from woodpulp until the current frenzy caused short-sighted newspaper management to shed what had been their public-service commitments to their readers (hence, Scott’s “debt of honor skipped out on” line).

It should be noted that more people are currently reading newspapers than at any time in history — if you factor in their online readers. There’s something to be said for the value people see in the city newspapers’ tradition of (at least attempting) to report the facts and not mere partisan opinion, to serve the public as a watchdog and to generate civic reflection and discussion. People continue to turn to them for good reasons, and that newspapers COULD possibly transfer that allegiance online.

But the problem with online readers remains the bottomline. The increase in online newspaper readers has not remotely generated the ad revenue that has been lost on the print side. What props up newspapers remain the three sources I cited: department stores, food stores and car lots. And although online coupons may be proliferating, I suspect it’s entirely nationally-based. I’d like to see evidence that my local Kroger’s is offering a coupon for a decent price on grapes this weekend.

To Jim Reische: You accept my point about the reason book pages are in newspapers (to broaden and deepen the editorial discussion) but miss the larger reason: Book pages were once considered one of the unprofitable public services that a serious big-city paper took on — like a letters-to-the-editor page or a bureau in Washington DC. It helped elevate the public discussion, advanced the cause of literacy, make the paper look big brained, etc. The NYTimes Book Review loses millions every year, and yet for some reason not apparent to all other newspaper managements, the Times considers it worth continuing.

In this light, finding out through research that, say, only 5 percent of readers consult the paper’s book reviews would mean relatively little except to the bean counters who’d see a reason to cut them loose. Yet how many give a damn about the paper’s election endorsements? But those small numbers aren’t going to stop newspapers from supporting this or that candidate.

The research might be worth it, I agree, if, say, the newspaper finds that those 5 percent of book-page readers are all fabulously wealthy, diehard readers and the paper makes a determined push to sell them as advertising targets. But this was precisely the “rich niche” argument that Steve Wasserman, the former editor of the LA Times book review, claims he tried to advance while in office — to no avail. From his Columbia Journalism Review cover story:

“Among the paper’s most well-off and best-read demographic cohorts—whose members arguably make up any book review’s ideal readers—the Sunday Book Review was among the more favored of the weekly sections of the Los Angeles Times. Ed Batson, the paper’s director of marketing research, told me that in 2004 some 1.2 million people had read the Book Review over the past four Sundays out of 6.4 million readers. The core readership of what Batson called the paper’s “Cosmopolitan Enthusiasts” amounted to about three hundred and twenty thousand avid and dedicated readers for whom the weekly Book Review was among the most important sections of the paper....

“If newspapers properly understood such readers and the lifestyle they pursue, they would, in theory, be able to attract advertising from a diverse array of companies, including movie companies, coffee manufacturers, distillers of premium whisky, among others. Diversification of ad revenue is a key component of a winning strategy of growth. But apart from The New York Times, no newspaper has dedicated sales reps whose sole job is to sell space for book ads. And even The New York Times, with three such reps, finds it hard to drum up significant business....

“The real problem was never the inability of book-review sections to turn a profit, but rather the anti-intellectual ethos in the nation’s newsrooms that is—and, alas, always was—an ineluctable fact of American newsgathering. There was among many reporters and editors a barely disguised contempt for the bookish.”

book/daddy, at 11:10 am EDT on July 26, 2008

“People at newspapers – not a majority but any means, but a significant core – once held respect, verging on reverence, for the printed word as such.”

This is rich. University profs have spent the last 40 + years (or longer) deconstructing language and annihilating the meaning of all values. So “books” can have no meaning anymore except as entertainment. And there are much more stimulating forms of entertainment available today. So stop complaining. Academics destroyed all “reverence” for anything (except their salaries and egos) so why should anyone revere the printed word anymore?

mike, at 12:15 pm EDT on July 28, 2008

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