Book Reviews Aren't Dying; They've Just Moved Online.

<This guest post was contributed by Kitty Holman, who specializes in writing about nursing colleges.  Questions and comments can be sent to kitty dot holman20 at gmail dot com.>

In recent years, much has been said of newspapers's budget cuts and subscription troubles, but no one industry has had as much to worry about regarding the unhealthy state of print journalism today than the book publishing industry. In the past decade, we have seen a remarkable drop in our newspapers's literature coverage: the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other major print venues have cut books sections. (The Wall Street Journal's recent launching of a book review section - which has been well-received - is an exception to that trend; we'll have to wait and see how well this section does in the coming years.)

Nevertheless, where newspapers's books coverage has suddenly faltered, there is a new opportunity for other forms of media to take its place, namely the quickly rising in-depth literary coverage and discussion common to online magazines.
 
John Palattella, literary editor of The Nation, disagrees.  In his essay "The Death and Life of the Book Review," Palattella explains the history of journalism and how the many forms of media and coverage have shifted over time with and against readership and audience trends.  From an economic perspective, Palattella argues against the commonly held belief that books and literary coverage in print newspapers is dying because such coverage doesn’t "turn a profit." Instead, he suggests that "cultural forces" - such as what he calls "the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers" - have harmed book coverage, while other, less intellectual sections remain despite losing money.

 
Palattella hypothesizes that the rise of the Internet and other forms of new media has greatly affected how we consume text, words, language, and other kinds of information.  He suggests that free content has made internet browsers more inclined to bounce around the web.  He also points at our reliance on search engines and hyperlinks as characteristics that hurt forms like book reviews which encourage in-depth and patient critical thinking.
 
While pointing to the rise of the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books - which both began in the 1960s and 1970s to fill the then absence of the New York Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement - Palattella argues that the current system has not yet produced a solution to the present day sudden decline in books coverage. 

Incidentally, his article implicitly anticipates the April 2011 launch of the Los Angeles Review of Books, an online literature and long-form critical production that aims to fill the gap caused by the death of print journalism's book reviews.  Palattella also acknowledges the presence of smaller boutique literary sites, but he dismisses them based on his aforementioned criticism of browsing habits; the one site he points to, the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass, is supposedly just "used primarily to promote the work of NBCC members published in other venues."
 
And that's where I disagree with Palattella's argument.  For one, his examination of online in-depth books coverage is cursory and sloppy: Critical Mass functions not as an in-depth sort of venue, but rather one devoted to aggregating information about the contemporary literary world.  Palattella looked in the wrong place; he fails to mention many other online literary magazines that continue to fill the hole left by withdrawing newspaper book review sections. Palattella overlooked the work of critics who write for The Quarterly Conversation.  He failed to acknowledge The Millions, which has been providing wonderful online and in-depth literary coverage since 2003.  Other online magazines which publish critical and thought-provoking essays and reviews include the following: Daniel Green's The Reading Experience and Omnibus: American Fiction 1945-2001; N1BR, the online book review supplement of n+1; The Critical Flame; The Nervous Breakdown; and many others.  All an interested reader has to do is find one or two of these magazines, and then follow the links to discover that the critical consideration of literature is alive and well online.  And, just as good newspaper coverage of literature had its own select, but loyal audience - which Palattella asserts early in his essay - so too does the critical work being published on the Internet.