Decline of book reviews

Derek Wrissoff, Book Work -  While we all know that newspapers more generally have been closing, shrinking, or consolidating, the reality for book review sections is even starker. It’s no longer just the smaller market papers that have given up covering books, but now even the largest dailies have ceased or cut back. When I put together the list back in September, the Associated Press had just announced that they were no longer publishing reviews. And we were dealt another big blow a few weeks ago with the shuttering of The Washington Post’s “Book World.” This brings the current list to just the following:

The New York Times Book Review (and its daily review)

The Boston Globe

The Minneapolis Star Tribune

USA Today

The Wall Street Journal

Financial Times

The Guardian

The Chicago Tribune

With occasional coverage still to be found in the LA Times & NY Post

What about magazines?

Magazines have been facing similar pressures to newspapers, with print circulation dropping dramatically. And online, in the world ruled by click-rate analytics, book review coverage has never drawn impressive numbers. Thankfully, despite all this, there are still mainstream glossy magazines that are covering books and see it as part of their identity as a publication and something their readers expect. Outlets such as the New Yorker, New Republic, Atlantic, Harper’s, and the Nation are still giving much-needed space to reviews, particularly of nonfiction, and, of course, the New York Review of Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books remain dedicated to their book-focused missions. Nevertheless, you can see that everyone is struggling to earn the ad revenue that justifies the space, and in some cases, the overall space of the publication is still shrinking.