Strength in Numbers -- starting with 365

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections matter.

THE NBCC's campaign to save book reviews took up so much time last week, we missed an opportunity to briefly celebrate this blog's first birthday. Just over a year ago we began, tripping, stumbling over ourselves, trying to squeeze the fox you see to the left into the frame. It was a bit ham-fisted at first -- and we got better as Rebecca Skloot and now also Lizzie Skurnick have steered us toward the light -- but it was in service of bigger goals. We wanted to continue the literary discussion we had in our deliberations online with a wider circle of people. We also hoped to make our awards more transparent without betraying the confidentiality necessary to picking our winners.

But now we've arrived at the blog's most powerful raison d'etre -- and the reason we're taking a momentary break from regular talk about actual books -- this campaign to save book reviews. At first glance it would seem there's an inherent contradiction in the structure of this cause: a group of mostly print journalists using the web to preserve print space. Especially if you believe in the generalizations out there that a blog is merely a vehicle for literary gossip and aspirational writing composed by angry young men minging away in their pajamas -- and a print book review is a piece of dying or dead old media written by tweed-wearing codgers with names like F.D. Rumplemeyer or J.R. Woatslittle who watch no television and enjoy their Wheatabix.

But as anyone who reads the book pages and blogs in this country knows these generalizations aren't useful at all. There are tweedy old codgers who blog and tweedy young reviewers who don't. Some of the best book blogs are run like a book review -- with assignments farmed out and (obviously) edited, interviews done, -- while some literary reviews don't seem to do much editing at all. The great thing about the web is you can sample all of them without running down to a research library to fish them out of the circulating stacks.

These generalizations are especially damaging because it gets in the way of an important truth --we're all pitching in to the same conversation. Whether it's on screen or in print, on a podcast or through the tabloid your subway seatmate has open on her lap next to you, this swirl of debate and opinion, cant and artful critique is all part of the same froth about books. It's how our culture thinks about itself, displays and digests its wisdom, gives a platform to intelligent (we hope) voices, and sifts signal from noise. Which is why the NBCC is prepared to fight for it -- smart, informed, well-crafted criticism is essential to our culture, to our democracy and to the improvement of our arts.

Some comments on the blog have suggested we believe print reviews to be the only venue for doing this, or that we want to save criticism by trashing blogs, or that we believe the NBCC and the NBCC alone can save reviews. That's not the case at all -- we wouldn't be staging this campaign from a blog, across the web, linking to bloggers and asking other bloggers to contribute posts if we didn't believe in the medium's capacity to bring intelligent debate to books. Nor do we believe that print reviews have a monopoly on good writing or contextualizing. Anyone who has taken a spin around the web realizes there is one site, after another, after another, after another and another which adds daily to our understanding of how literature is being written today.

But right now the fight that needs fighting is not for blogs (which are doing just fine), but print pages. In one year this blog earned us about a half-a-million readers -- an impressive number, perhaps, until you realize that's about how many people read the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review gets on any given Sunday according to their readership surveys. None of those people have to own a computer, go to the library, or turn on a single piece of equipment. They just have to open the front door and pick up the paper without their bathrobe flapping open.

In spite of the Chronicle Book Review's popularity, though, it was cut in half -- the first in what has become a waterfall of cuts recently, from the Tribune papers to the AJC, on down the line, with more looming further upstream. There are financial and media reasons for these cuts, sure. We realize the newspaper model is changing -- that the future of media is a combination of print and online venues -- that's pretty much for certain. Even Newsweek is banking on it.

But until we're all reading book reviews set to streaming video played from a dangling monocle, the print book review -- which is what we're talking about here -- is an essential bridge from writers to readers. It reaches people who didn't go seeking it, it reaches them cheaply, it fosters reading in general, and by and large, with some exceptions, it reaches readers with a certain degree of elegance and intelligence. It is in the preservation of that resource that we are fighting now -- and we're asking everyone who cares about it to join us. Even those of you -- print journalists or bloggers -- who write in your fierce pajamas.

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