About a week ago, the New York Times syndicate sent out a press release, offering America’s newspaper editors Times book coverage. While many papers are cutting back on their own coverage of matters of literary interest, the memo runs, “reader interest in books seems to be growing,” so the syndicate reminds editors that, for a price, it can provide “features and services that might help you satisfy your readers’ appetite for book news and reviews—without breaking your newsroom budget.”
Late Friday afternoon, Huffington Post columnist Rachel Sklar noticed a slight disconnect between what the Times syndicate was telling potential clients and what the Times culture section was telling readers, as “‘reader appetite’ gets nary a mention in [Motoko Rich‘s] piece on the Great Book Review Slashfest sweeping the nation.” Sklar also observed that by framing the death of newspaper book reviews as a cagematch with bookbloggers, the Times dropped the ball in terms of providing hard data instead of handwringing. And, as Josh Getlin points out in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, readers have a lot of resources to learn about books today. His article may not be the industry analysis Sklar was looking for, but it’s definitely worth reading closely, especially for its recognition that the reviewer/blogger feud is a figment of the media’s imagination.
And I’m not just saying that because I’m quoted in the piece, because I don’t have nearly as many interesting things to say as Mark Sarvas does about how “the best of the blogs take a deeper, more nuanced view about coverage, and the best newspapers think about how to leverage what the Internet offers.”
Less sensible are the comments from Laura Miller of Salon: “I used to write for peanuts, and you can’t make a living doing that,” she says. “So it may be that the friction between bloggers and reviewers is just another version of this age-old resentment that aspiring journalists have always felt toward more established journalists.” That would make sense, if it weren’t for the fact that, at this point in time, a sizable portion of the resentment flows in the opposite direction—or that, as long as the term journalist is being expanded to include book reviewers, an increasing number of the bloggers are already “established” by Miller’s own standard. It’s worth distinguishing, too, between bloggers who criticize print reviewers for statements they find boneheaded and book reviewers who accuse bloggers of waiting to dance on their graves or make up condescending blog names. Even if both categories might be classified as “resentment,” they would strike me as being of two very different kinds, and it’s the print journalists who appear to be ganging up on bloggers as a class. More evidence, perhaps, that the feud is all just media hype…