As the NBCC first reported on their blog, the Washington Post will drop its standalone book review section: “The last issue of Book World in print will be the February 15, 2009 issue. Thereafter, content will be split between the Outlook section and Style & Arts on Sundays. Daily book reviews in Style will continue. The promise is that there will be four additional broadsheet pages in Outlook for book coverage and one additional page in Style & Arts. That’s an equivalent of 12 tabloid pages. (Book World is 16 pages.) Jonathan Yardley’s reviews will appear in Outlook. Michael Dirda’s will appear in Style. The staff of Book World will be kept together under the editorship of Rachel Shea.”
As often happens, the Post got widely scooped on their own news. By the afternoon, their columnist Howard Kurtz posted a piece in which deputy Book World editor Shea (since there is no editor to replace Marie Arana, who took a buyout) says, “It’s nice to have a separate section with big display and a big shout-out to what the most important book is. But it’s not worth gnashing our teeth about too much.” Kurtz adds, “Shea said The Post would publish about three-quarters of the roughly 900 reviews it currently carries each year.” (That number likely includes books covered in “briefs” and group reviews. According to our PM Book Review Index, the Post gave full-length reviews to approximately 740 books in 2008, about the same as in the previous two years.)
Executive editor Marcus Brauchli makes the argument that “because Style and Outlook have higher readership than Book World, the paper’s book coverage will reach more people in those sections.”
In a NYT story, Arana says “I think it’s going to be a great disappointment to a lot of readers. I just hope that there’s enough coverage and emphasis and attention given on the pages where Book World will now appear in print in Outlook and Style and Arts to satisfy those readers.”
Consistent with the Times’ recent line of reasoning, it’s all your fault: “As it happens, Book World never garnered much advertising from
publishers, who generally spend very little on newspaper ads.
Publishers now [and for many, many years] focus their marketing dollars on cooperative agreements
with chain bookstores, which guarantee that certain books will receive
prominent display at the front of stores.” At least Shea says, in her own newspaper, “You can’t just blame publishers, because they have their own financial
constraints. There’s pretty much one publication they
advertise in, and it’s not us.” (Even that, by a casual appraisal, seems to be dropping.)
NBCC