UPDATE: Please note this, from the comments section, which gives some hope:

The story in the Post was completely debunked by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., The New York Times Publisher. In an email to staff today he wrote: “…The New York Times Magazine and our Sunday Book Review are two of the most successful and popular products in our very powerful arsenal. We will not cease producing them in print.”

Also, the New York Times‘s David Leonhardt tweeted the following today:

In email to newsroom, Arthur Sulzberger debunks bizarre NY Post story claiming @nytimes may shut Book Review, Mag, Metro. Crazy talk.

— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) August 12, 2016

At the end of June, Politico said that Leonhardt was “overseeing a sweeping strategic review by a team of seven Times  journalists known as the 2020 Group.” They quoted him saying, “The Times has changed enormously in the past few years, but it still hasn’t changed enough,”

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In another gloomy indicator of the lack of value newspaper owners place on book review sections, the New York Post reports that the NYT may discontinue the print edition of the Sunday Book Review, publishing it online only.

It is just one of several possible cost-cutting measures under discussion. Others include ending the print edition of the Sunday magazine and folding the Metro section.

The NY Post reports that the potential cuts are in response to a fall in print advertising and the continued shift of readers to digital sources. Back in April, the paper reported on the financial troubles of their much larger rival (but did not mention the Book Review as being under scrutiny), causing Vanity Fair to take a dim view of the story and NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet to dismiss it on NPR as nothing more than “cheap guess work.”

However, Vanity Fair admitted in an update to their story, that “A portion of the Post‘s report was validated … as the Times said it was closing its print production and editing operations in its Paris bureau … About 70 staff members will be laid off or relocated.” The journalism site Poynter reported in July that “At least 49 journalists at The New York Times have accepted a standing buyout offer from newsroom leadership and will leave the paper in the coming months.”

If the changes to the Book Review do occur, they will follow a long sad march of such contractions.

In 2007 author Michael Connelly wrote about “The folly of downsizing book reviews” in a story in the LA Times, which had just merged its own standalone book review into the Sunday Opinion section. In his piece, Connelly recited the litany of shuttered or reduced book review sections at newspapers across the country, including the Raleigh News & Observer, the Dallas Morning News, the Orlando Sentinel, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Connelly was looking at an already reduced reviewing landscape. In 2001, Salon published a story titled “The amazing disappearing book review section.” At that time the San Francisco Chronicle was cutting back, following in the footsteps of many other papers, Salon noted “The Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Boston Globe have all put their papers on a diet by cutting back on book reviews.”

Since those stories were published, the Washington Post also abandoned its standalone review section, Book World.

The NYT Book Review currently publishes as a stand-alone pull out section each Sunday that includes dozens of reviews. If it becomes digital-only, it is likely, based on the experience of other such moves, that the number will decline.

This, of course, is part of a larger problem facing newspapers, a subject John Oliver addressed in his HBO show this week:

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 11th, 2016 at 12:57 pm 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.