When Newspapers Cut Book Coverage, Communities Lose More Than Reviews
By: Amaris Castillo for Poynter
Laurie Hertzel remembers the old building on Portland Avenue in downtown Minneapolis and the space it had carved out just for books. At the time, she was the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s books editor, a fitting role for the daughter of a librarian and an English professor.
The book room was in the basement, deep in the bowels of the building. Hertzel wheeled an old grocery shopping cart onto the elevator and down to where the printing presses once stood. Nobody, she remembers, went down there. Except maybe the mice.
But there was the book room.
“It had a locked door and you’d walk in and turn the light on, and it was just this wonderful space because it had shelves all the way around and it had this long table for sorting books,” Hertzel said. “It had no windows, but you could shut the door and you could just be down there, and it was like a clean, well-lighted space.”
Each month, Hertzel received about 1,000 books in the mail from publishers and authors eager for coverage. Piles of advance reader copies and books filled the room. At the time, the Star Tribune devoted two open Sunday pages for book reviews and literary news. Hertzel later expanded coverage by penning and commissioning reviews on Tuesdays, the industry’s standard release day for new books.
She would load the cart with books and head back up to the third-floor newsroom.
The U.S. publishing industry is massive, generating about $30 billion of annual revenue, according to the Association of American Publishers. But despite all that money, newspaper book coverage is disappearing. The Associated Press ceased its weekly book reviews last year, and The Washington Post ended its book section earlier this month amid mass layoffs.
For more, click here.