In the course of blogging about how the NY Times needs to focus on delivering news that’s “true” and “important,” Seth Godin has a complaint about the paper’s limited books coverage:
“Monday featured TWO stories about Barbara Walters and her new book. Why? We don’t need the Times for ‘truth’ here, and while it may be important to Knopf and to Barbara, it’s not really that important to us… The Times needs 50 more bestseller lists, 20 more trusted stories about real political fact and insight, ten more cultural touchstone features… and a lot less filler, a lot less copycat stuff and nothing, nothing about Barbara Walters.”
It’s not that he’s picking on Walters, Godin says, just that “a link to the other sites that can happily review and sell me her book is far more effective than wasting time and resources flogging a book that needs no flogging.” (That point may be worth extra consideration, given the book’s precisely calibrated media drive.) His solution?
“Pick 20 books a day and point to them, don’t write vapid features about three every week. The Times does better when they find something we don’t know about and celebrate it instead.”
Setting aside the no-doubt robust argument we could have about how often the Times book coverage actually finds “something we don’t know about,” let’s focus on the first half of that statement, which sounds an awful lot like Arts & Letters Daily on steroids…. and, of course, is a near-perfect match for Godin’s “lens” model of online information aggregation. For starters, how practical is it? And where would they find “something we don’t know about” to point to, given how mainstream book review coverage tends to coalesce around a small batch of “big” books by “big” authors? Discuss.