Jonathan Yardley, the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post since 1981, is retiring. Known as an iconoclast (if you’re not a fan of Salinger’s, you’ll enjoy his reassessment of Catcher in the Rye as “a maladroit, mawkish novel” that is suffused with “cheap sentimentality”), he also won a Pulitzer for criticism.

On Monday, it was announced that Carlos Lozada  will replace Yardley, leaving his current job as editor of the paper’s Sunday opinion section, Outlook.

Interviewed by Poynter.org yesterday, Lozada talked about his plans, which are focused on “building a digital audience,” by using “author interviews; short posts that highlight key nuggets from new books; deep dives on trends in nonfiction,” such as his piece, “The End of Everything” and adds, “while I know that lots of people use reviews to help them decide which books to buy and read, lots of them also see reviews as a substitute for reading the book. I certainly do – there isn’t enough time to read everything, right? And I want to respect those readers and their needs, too, which is where I hope these other forms can help.”

Asked whether he will cover book selling (the interviewer notes, “I can think of a company that might be really interesting to cover!”), he says that he’ll leave the business used to the paper’s “great business/financial writers.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2014 at 11:41 am and is filed under Review Sources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.