Frankly, My Dear, You Should Give a Damn

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 and book culture matter. Shannon Byrne, an Atlanta-based publicist for Little, Brown,offered this response to Mark Sarvas's two-part post earlier this week on Critical Mass and on his own literary blog,The Elegant Variation.

Sorry, Mark. Time to wake up from your misguided dream that “newspapers are dying” and should be learning from bloggers about how to evolve. See, I’m afraid that the food chain does not move in that direction when it’s called progress. Last time I checked, which was 5 to 7 daily e-newsletters ago, bloggers stay pretty busy sorting through, and hyperlinking to the major newspapers and other media each morning (often throughout the day), so that they can send all the rest of us, who are ostensibly too busy to sort through the chaotic, information-overloaded world ourselves, the Cliff’s Note’s version of all of the major headlines and gossip of the day. Seems to me, then, that the majority of bloggers (not all of them) actually function to critique, organize, and sort actual media rather than to generate much original literary criticism or innovative content themselves. You illustrate my point right off by positioning your post in response to the Los Angeles Times and New York Times.

The best blogs are wonderful tools and welcome simplifying resources. The worst of them are mini-altars of self-worship, which are obsessed mostly with how many “hits” and how much “traffic” they get than with the quality of their offering. How can you claim that a newspaper’s “wider readership” is a fallacy when one could just as easily allege that the number of pings and pongs and “hits” a blog gets can be fixed by strategically linking to the most googled topics and names of the moment and to the sites of all of your blogger buddies? Why bust on Publishers Lunch for tracking and archiving book reviews, when clearly the reviews here are used by a variety of people within the publishing industry.

Seriously, though, blogs are kind of like parasitic microorganisms which feed off of a primary host. For the sake of this discussion, the host is clearly print media. Some are the good bacteria and some are transient and viral. Or maybe I can upgrade blogs to the status of some sort of interstitial or synovial fluid, buffering the vital organs of the media (newspaper, television, radio, the Internet)? But, c’mon, if newspapers are dying, then blogs are the maggots come to feast upon their corpses.

Those in the business of publishing quality newspapers should take a look at all of the clutter and sheer chatter ping-ponging around cyberspace and continue to print good, even better, newspapers. These newspapers will stand out in a less commoditized way precisely if they do not make the mistake of simply remodeling themselves into primarily digital formats. Maybe now that attention’s being called to the perceived dispensability of book review pages, then a major paper like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution will see fit to do something radical like be the third among only two others in the country to publish a stand-alone book review section.

And who said anything about “the death of reading?” Or that the disappearance of newspaper book sections would “kill books?” Why does this campaign need to be called a “saga?” How did you make the leap from the NBCC’s goal to raise public awareness to somehow being able to see the future, a future involving a newspaper industry collapse and more glory for bloggers like you? Talk about false prophets (dead giveaway is to deny that one can see future). I just cannot get over how condescending it all sounds when bloggers act like what’s happening with newspapers is something they’ve known about all along. Whatever. You say you know that deep inside there should be no opposition between the online and print sides of book reviewing, but clearly you have some sort of triumphant smirk about all of this.

I think it’s fair to say that the point has always been that book culture is at risk with the continued reduction in space devoted to print books coverage. To be clear, the NBCC has asked the important question of whether we’re just going to watch this happen, and if we have given any thought lately to just how meaningful print books reviews have always been and continue to be, or if we’re going to be proactive. I think it reflects a particular genius that the NBCC board and their blog, Critical Mass, have brought together, in one place for all to see, the staggering details of the spate of downsized book review sections across the country.

How can you suggest that the NBCC is just pittling around with “the short-term problem in Atlanta?” What is happening in Atlanta can have a critical bearing on what happens at other newspapers. The Atlanta Read-In and the print and online petitions which have circulated here have demonstrated action, garnered national attention and further galvanized the literary community here—and the activism has only just begun. Atlanta is the latest major city to axe its book review editor and was therefore the clear choice as the NBCC’s focus of their national campaign. It is completely ridiculous for you to speculate about how many Atlantans or actual AJC subscribers signed the petition. What, am I supposed to feel guilty for not paying fifty cents a day for the paper and therefore ineligible to sign the petition? Back to your argument that a newspaper’s circulation is a fallacy: many non-subscribers read the papers lying around at coffee shops. Some grab from recycling bins. Some buy here and there. Anyway, I can tell you that a majority of the signatures are from Atlantans—except for one Dinty W. Moore, a beef stew brand, and Zora Neal(e) Hurston, who died in 1960 in Fort Pierce, FL to be sure.

Look: I am proud of Atlanta’s literary community for not sitting on its ass when the news hit that Teresa Weaver would be out of a job and that the paper would not have a book review editor forward moving. The petition and Read-In have stirred up a lot of dialogue and have genuinely gotten people excited. I’m sick and tired of people thinking that the only American thing to do is to hit someone in their pocketbook when you’re not pleased. To them that’s the only form of political action they know. To buy or not to buy. Spending power. To sanction or to endorse, and to act entitled in the almighty role, not of citizen, but as customer, consumer.

There are other ways to be heard than to kick the AJC while it’s down by demanding that people cancel their subscriptions. We can do more than simply dump our proverbial tea into Boston Harbor. I knew we had somehow gotten through when the editor of the AJC said that she recognized a number of her own friends’ names on the petition. We’ve promised to present the AJC with ideas of what they might consider doing, so as to protect the integrity of the books coverage to come. Maybe after the new features editor goes to BEA the paper will realize that they need a book review editor after all. I sure hope so.