Last week, I told you about an upcoming panel on the future of book reviewing, featuring former LA Times Book Review editor Steve Wasserman, who’s about to launch a new book review section at Truthdig.com. The latest issue of Columbia Journalism Review, which is sponsoring that panel, has a sneak preview of what Wasserman’ll be saying—from his assertion that the so-called “crisis” in book reviewing is nothing new to an even bolder accusation: “Book coverage is not only meager but shockingly mediocre,” Wasserman writes. “One is tempted to say, perversely, that its disappearance from the pages of America’s newspapers is arguably cause for celebration.” (I’m going to hit some bullet points in the next few grafs, but you should really read the whole thing.)
A good chunk of the essay retraces the arc of Wasserman’s tenure at the LA Times, where he challenged himself, he says, to be “three times as good [as the NYTBR in one-third the space” and “focus on books as news that stayed news.” (Compare to Sam Tanenhaus‘s famous goal to cover books as “news about the culture.”) So it’s his own experience losing about a million dollars of the paper’s money a year on the Review that informs his belief that “the argument that it is book sections’ lack of advertising revenue from publishers that constrains book coverage is bogus.” If newspapers wanted to run serious literary criticism, the implication seems to be, they’d do it, and cost be damned. The problem, from a financial standpoint, is simply that “a mass readership will always elude any newspaper section dedicated to the review of books.” Nevertheless, Wasserman recalls, “I was convinced that because readers of book reviews are among a paper’s best-educated and most prosperous readers, it might be possible to turn a cultural imperative into a profitable strategy.”
But does the shrinking coverage of books in newspapers, which has caused so much frantic commentary in recent months, really sound the death knell for literary culture? Maybe not. “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,” Wasserman argues; the real problem is that the people who cover literature for newspapers haven’t figured out how to tell that story. Which is why, although he still has a healthy skepticism about the literary blogosphere, Wasserman still thinks online criticism as having the potential to becoming a viable alternative: “What counts is the nature and depth and authority of such coverage,” he says, “as well as its availability to the widest possible audience.”