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There's continuity to the history of technological transformations, Darnton suggests, and what
is ever-present, is the experience of rupture. Anthony Grafton, another historian of the
book, makes a similar point in his excellent little book, "Codex in Crisis". He writes,
"The current drive to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical projects
in the very long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently.
It will result, not in the info-topia that the prophets conjure up, but in one more of
a series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers,
and producers of text have learned to survive and flourish." Now, if this point lingers,
I think it's because of one of its implications is that technological innovation, whether
the printing press, the telegraph, the television, or a digital device, though it delivers information
in a new form, is not necessarily the root cause of controversies about reading and writing
that have arisen in its wake. Now tonight I'm going to talk about a meltdown, one that's
occurring not on Wall street, but on what I refer to as "Grub street". And it's worth
stressing that while the problems of Grub street are matters of pretty big cultural
importance, they're pretty slight compared to the hardships that millions of people have
suffered thanks to Wall street, and other political and economic factors. It's important
have a sense of proportion about all of this. Now on Grub street for nearly a decade, and
especially during the past three years, people have been wailing and otherwise voicing their
displeasure over the deterioration of book coverage in the United States. During some
of this talk I'm going to discuss newspaper book coverage because, rightfully or not,
it has long been regarded as an accurate barometer of the delicate ecology of literary life.
I mean who hasn't lost count of the number of times they've heard someone in a bookstore
say, "Do you have that novel the Times raved about?". I'm also going to talk about publishing
literary journalism at a print magazine in the current economic and cultural climate,
and I'd love to take questions on that afterward, it's what I know best. Frankly, I think there
is no better time than right now to be covering books and ideas, especially since the reigning
assumption, which is one I do not share, is that digital technology has turned the landscape
upside-down and that print is dead. I mean, if you can't take chances now, if in such
a climate you cannot seek an air both legitimate and rare, then when can you? I mean, there's
no herd to follow, so there's no better time to take chances. That a steep erosion in newspaper
book coverage has occurred is undeniable. Newspapers that have killed or reduced book
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 Memphis
Commercial Appeal, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Dallas Morning News, The Sun-Sentinel,
The New Mexican, The Village Voice, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution, just to name
a very, very few. Jobs have vanished and lives have been upended. But this decline, though
precipitous, is not at all recent with the exception of The Nation, The New Yorker, The
Atlantic, The New Republic, and Harper's, weekly magazines began rolling back their
book coverage in the 1990's. 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 was editing
The Book Review in the 1970's, an era generally regarded as that publication's golden age,
on some Sundays he could count on having 80 pages to work with, which is astonishing.
In 1985, The Book Review averaged 44 pages. In the mid-1990's, it averaged 36. In recent
months it has been averaging 24-28. It's still the country's most visible newspaper book
section, but there's just not much to read in it anymore. Some questions then, to serve
as boundary stones for the ramble ahead. Is it true, as many people who've commented on
the matter have claimed, that the recent decline in newspaper book 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 internet? Why are weekly and monthly magazines, despite
producing a glut of thoughtful essays and reviews about books, generally left out of
the conversation about book coverage? Can quality book coverage, by which I mean not
reviewery, but scrutiny, a deliberate, measured analysis of literary intellectual questions
without obvious or easy answers, can such coverage originate online and also find a
loyal audience there? And finally, are today's complaints about the inadequacy of book coverage
really all that different from the darts thrown at book reviewers since the beginning of the
18th century? As Gale Poole writes in her book, "Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing
in America", "For two centuries book reviews have been lambasted by critics, often reviewers
themselves, who have complained that reviews are profligate in their praise, hostile in
their criticism, inaccurate, illiterate, or just plain dull." now, has it always been
thus? So now I want to talk a little about newspapers. The newspaper that many of us,
or many of our parents grew up reading, was a product of the sweet spot of the 20th century,
the postwar boom. By mid-century, the occupation of news-gathering had been thoroughly professionalized,
and during the following three decades abundant ad revenue enabled newspapers to expand their
newsroom 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 as well. As Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson explained recently in the Columbia
Journalism Review, "during the boom, newspapers began to gravitate away from a long-standing
preoccupation with government, and with pegging coverage to specific political events." They
still covered those beats, but they also begin to cultivate what Schudson and Downie call,
"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". In some cases, newspaper editors were reacting
to the lessons of the Civil Rights and Women's Movements. Politics isn't the exclusive domain
of white men. The personal is political. In other cases, editors were reacting to changes
in the media market. They needed to slow or reverse the loss of readers turning to broadcast
or cable television for their the news coverage, or to magazines that offered depth instead
of breadth. Or they needed to remain relevant to readers whose news diet had changed, since
they had left the city for the suburbs. And so newspapers endeavored to broaden their
reader base by adding or expanding coverage of business, sports, health, real estate,
food, and film, and books as well. There are two examples that I think really drive this
point home, one is The Los Angeles Times Book Review, which was launched as a 12 page Sunday
supplement 1975. The Washington Post Book World is the other, it debuted as a Sunday
tabloid section in the 1960's. It was folded into the paper in the 1970's, and then resurrected
again as a stand-alone book section in the early 1980's, and neither of those sections
exist today as a stand-alone Sunday tabloid. The New York Times Book Review is not a boomer,
but a centenarian. It has been a section of the paper since Adolph Ochs bought The Times
in 1896. Nevertheless, the rest of The Times is a boomer. In the early 1970's, managing
editor Abe Rosenthal sectioned the paper to expand arts, science, and business coverage
and to introduce ad-friendly service sections, and that's generally the paper we're still
reading. Although newspapers remain the country's prime source of news, in print or online,
as we know, their economic base has been undermined by the internet. In some cases it has also
been undermined by a newspaper becoming a publicly traded company, and therefore being
beholden to shareholders who want 10% or 15% returns. The digital realm's pernicious culture
of free and low-cost web advertising have broken the grip of newspapers on audience
and advertisers. Newspapers began losing national and retail advertising with the advent of
broadcast television. As a response, they doubled down on classified advertising. During
the last decade they lost much of their classified advertising, as we know, to websites like
craigslist. Now what they did was, as we also know, instead of charging for news online,
newspapers decided to pillage themselves, and offered news for free, as a way to attract
audiences and advertisers. There was an uptick in ad revenue in the early to mid-2000's,
but it leveled off with the recession, and even at its peak the tiny sums from online
ads fell well short