Last exit to book land

An ex-book critic finds hope in the current campaigns to save newspaper book reviews and restore reading to the heart of American life.

By David Kipen

Read more: Books, Books Features

May 9, 2007 | "May I take your newspapers?"

The flight attendants always make it sound like they're doing you a favor. I fly a lot nowadays, and I know the poor attendant is only trying to save cleanup time later. But this question always riles me, because lately everybody and his Aunt Lillian wants to take away our newspapers. Circulation is down. Newsroom paranoia, never exactly dormant even in the best of times, is up. And editors are cutting book reviews like they're going out of style -- which, if we're not careful, they just might be.

To its credit, the National Book Critics Circle is not taking any of this lying down. It has posted a list of tips on how to help save book reviews here. It's circulating a petition here to reinstate Teresa Weaver, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's gifted, recently cashiered book editor. Most enjoyably, the NBCC's already compulsively readable blog, Critical Mass, has posted jeremiads about the crisis not just from critics but from a steadily massing murderers' row of authors: Nadine Gordimer, George Saunders, Richard Ford, Roxana Robinson, Andre Codrescu, Rick Moody, Stewart O'Nan.

Will this campaign work? The facile answer is, say you're a newspaper publisher. You've got some bolting stockholders on line 1 and some angry brilliant midlist writers on line 2. Which call would you take? But the intelligent answer is, as always, nobody knows. Newspaper publishers aren't stupid, just scared. I'd be scared too if I suspected my readers were dying off unreplaced. Come to think of it, as editor of the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review from 1998 to 2000 and the paper's book critic until '05, I used to suspect exactly that.

It was only a hunch, because a newspaper prefers its journalists to not know too much about their readership, just as it prefers them to not know too much about their relative salaries. So long as a paper withholds this information, it can still theoretically tell every employee that his or hers are the least-read, best-paid bylines in the building. Newspaper Web sites are only too happy to divulge the top 10 most read or e-mailed stories of the day; the bottom 10, not so much. Still, to judge by the torrential hemorrhaging of book coverage in just the past couple of months, you might think that book coverage owned a lock on last place.

Instead, strong anecdotal evidence suggests that book reviews fall somewhere near the middle. So why don't editors feel as sentimental about them as they do about plenty of other stories that won't ever knock terrorist attacks or wardrobe malfunctions out of the top 10? For one thing, freelancers contribute most of the copy to newspaper book review sections, and freelancers cost a few extra bucks. For another, trying to publish a review of every halfway interesting new book each week is like trying to review every new video on YouTube. It's beyond hopeless. So why should we blame some harried arts editor for thinking, "That beat's uncoverable. Let's just give up and run sudoku-plus instead."

That editor might almost have a point, if book reviews and the people who write them weren't what biologists like to call an "indicator species." An indicator species is the newt or worm in an ecosystem that nobody much notices until it starts to disappear. And even then, who really misses another polliwog -- until six months later when, suddenly, even the buzzards are dead?

Like it or not, the indicator species for American daily journalism is the book review. Newspapers were cutting book coverage before the current flurry, among other places in Detroit, San Jose and Boston. Without exception, losing their book pages failed to stanch either reader loss or red ink. Were these papers already in trouble before they started cutting book coverage? Of course, but what did their publishers expect by further alienating people who like to read -- the one constituency no newspaper can survive without? Put another way, how can institutions that cover electoral politics be so deaf to every campaign's first commandment, namely, "Shore up your base"?

Sometimes it seems as if embattled newspapers took the "Reading at Risk" report put out by the National Endowment for the Arts (where I work these days) as a rationalization for further cuts instead of a call to action. The study showed that only about 47 percent of Americans can say they read a book for pleasure the previous year. That marked a decade-over-decade swan dive from 1992, and a power dive from the decade before. Worse yet, as fast as the reading numbers are sinking across the board, for teenagers they're absolutely cratering. And teenage boys? Check out those demoralizing numbers, if you have a fainting couch nearby.

So maybe it's not surprising that the population of stand-alone Sunday book review sections in America is now down to about four: the Washington Post Book World, the New York Times Book Review, my dear old incredible shrinking San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, and would you believe the plucky, sainted San Diego Union-Tribune? Add in the Chicago Tribune, if you can get used to Saturday delivery. And if you don't mind a new reversible Books/Opinion hybrid (which looks a little like an old Ace Double sci-fi paperback), don't count out my hometown Los Angeles Times.

Less remarked on is the utter disappearance of regular, non-editing book critics outside Washington and New York. Three of the surviving half-dozen have won Pulitzers, which helps. But since 2001, Pulitzer criticism juries have stiffed the book beat and recognized automotive and fashion writers. This only testifies to the diminishing cachet of book reviewing in American journalism, even among that journalism's supposed guardians at Columbia University. Of course, there aren't that many ungarroted necks left to hang a medal around.

Next page: Picture a country where newspapers gut book coverage and everything else that made them worth saving