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Give the Los Angeles Times some credit. Rather than fight its critics, it sometimes gives them the opportunity to sound off in its own pages. Such was the case this past weekend when Michael Connelly, a writer of mystery novels, was given space to lament the quickly diminishing number of pages devoted to books in American newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times.
The casualty list grows longer every week. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently eliminated its books editor to save money, so did the RaleighNews & Observer. The Chicago Tribune is shifting its book section to the less vital Saturday edition. At The Dallas Morning News the book critic preemptively quit before losing his job. And in the most high-profile move, the Los Angeles Times dropped its stand-alone books pages and added a shortened book review section to its Sunday Opinion.
At first, Connelly offers the sentimental argument about why newspapers should hold on to their books coverage. It’s almost the only argument one can make, since, unlike travel or styles sections, there’s not much advertising money available for book reviews. But he does say something more, and it’s a convincing plea we don’t often hear: “In the past, newspaper executives understood the symbiotic relationship between their product and books. People who read books also read newspapers. From that basic tenet came a philosophy: If you foster books, you foster reading. If you foster reading, you foster newspapers. That loss-leader ends up helping you build and keep your base.”
He worries that newspaper owners–including the owners of the Times–have forgotten this bit of enlightened self-interest: “What I fear is that this philosophy is disappearing from the boardrooms of our newspapers; that efforts to cut costs now will damage both books and newspapers in the future. Short-term gains will become long-term losses.”
Connelly makes a good point. Even though there are other venues where people could get news about books–the plethora of literary bloggers out there, for one–book reviews allow newspapers to serve an important role as cultural arbiter. While newspapers find themselves challenged by other media in the news department, nothing in the hard-news pages can compete with the cutting authority of a Michiko Kakutani. Do newspapers really want to sacrifice that authority, one of the few things that keep them still uniquely relevant? Owners would never dream of cutting movie reviews–those full-page ads deliver big money–but are books any less important? Is that the message that the institutions on journalism’s front lines want to project?
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