Are blogs the reason for decreasing book coverage by newspapers?

Last month I wrote a post about the Chicago Tribune moving its Books section from the usual Sunday paper to Saturdays (see Chicago Books section is moving). The move appears to be part of a larger national trend that is growing among the major papers – trimming down the Books section or cutting it out altogether.

However, the debate goes much deeper than newspapers trimming back. Much of the controversy surrounding such moves is fueled by, you guessed it, the blogosphere! There’s a war of words between bloggers and the more traditional print media jockies. The following quote taken from the LA Times is a good illustration of how those in print seem to feel about blogs:

"If you were an author, would you want your book reviewed in the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books, or on a web site written by someone who uses the moniker NovelGobbler or Biogafriend?" Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, wrote in the Washington Post. "The book review section … remains the forum where new titles are taken seriously as works of art and argument, and not merely as opportunities for shallow grandstanding and overblown ranting."

Shallow grandstanding? Overblown ranting? I know there are some pretty bad blogs out there, but come on, give credit where credit is due.

What the blogosphere is doing, and not just for book reviews, is leveling the playing field. For the longest time newspapers and those lucky few who wrote book reviews for those newspapers, such as our friend Michael Dirda, have been the gatekeepers. The usual books written by the usual authors and reviewed by the usual critics are what graces the pages of the few surviving Books sections today.

The advantage of independently run blogs is that they can review books that are probably of the same quality as those reviewed in newspapers, but because the author is still an "unknown" or the author’s readers are primarily local, the award-winning, nationally-known book critics won’t touch them with a ten foot pole (pardon the cliche`).

But what about the quality of book reviews on blogs versus those in newspapers? Well, one blogger appears to confirm what Dirda above has said:

And although many newspaper reviews are shrinking, Dennis Loy Johnson — an independent publisher who started Moby Lives, one of the pioneering literary blogs — believes they continue to offer more solid content than most online efforts. "It’s a dirty word in 2007, but blogs have not raised the level of intellectual discussion," he said. "Book blogging is for the most part book gossip and fresh commentary, or opinion. It’s vital, but it’s not true literary criticism."

Again, I think credit needs to be given where it’s due. As the blogosphere has evolved from an online journal of one’s mundane daily life to an online virtual dialogue about everthing ranging from politics to car tires, more of the former are dropping off the radar while those blogs that offer something fresh and new that people want to read, are growing ever bigger.

In other words, yeah there’s a lot of crap out there, but there’s also some good blogs being written about books and they shouldn’t be shrugged off as just "shallow grandstanding" or "book gossip".

Hopefully newspapers and other print media will embrace and even welcome digital content even more. If they don’t, they risk falling into the same trap as the recording industry, which for years they ignored the emergence and popularity of mp3s by continuing to push overpriced cds onto a market that was changing before their very eyes.

In order for the print media industry to embrace digital technology, I don’t just mean throwing up an online version of their paper onto the web. No, I’m talking about, at least for the Books section, that they should be paying attention to the literary blogs out there and find things that are new and fresh. Instead of blaming them for decreased readership, use them as allies. There are a lot of books out there and more being published every day. There’s no need for such petty bickering as the book market alone can handle print and blogs at the same time.

Read the entire LA Times article here:
Battle of the book reviews

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