In the latest o tempora, o mores-type essay about the endangered species known as the newspaper book review, Steve Wasserman writes a (very) long essay for the Columbia Journalism Review. Wasserman is well-placed to comment on the decline of the book review, having served as the Los Angeles Times‘ book editor for almost 10 years, ending in 2005.
Wasserman does not spend the essay tearing his hair out or rending his shirt over our book-hostile times – in fact, he suggests that the erosion of the book review section is neither new nor, in some senses, unwelcome, given how mediocre so many printed reviews can be. He also puts paid to the notion that it is a book section’s unprofitability that dooms it. Book sections have always been unprofitable. What is at least partly to blame for the decline is the anti-intellectual bias firmly in place at most (North) American newspapers. In disdaining book culture, Wasserman writes, newspapers are not only neglecting a solemn cultural duty, etc., but missing an opportunity.
Never before in the whole of human history has more good literature, attractively presented, sold for still reasonably low prices, been available to so many people. You would need several lifetimes over doing nothing but lying prone in a semi-darkened room with only a lamp for illumination just to make your way through the good books that are on offer.
This is, strangely, a story that has not received near the attention it deserves. And yet its implications are large, especially if papers are to have a prayer of retaining readers and expanding circulation. There is money to be made in culture, if only newspapers were nimble and imaginative enough to take advantage of the opportunities that lie all around them.
The whole thing is well worth reading.
