On February 4, The Washington Post laid off 30 percent of its staff across the board in a “strategic reset.” International publications were reduced, sports journalists who survived the cut were moved to sections, and the section of books – known as “Book World” – was completely eliminated. Although the Post’s editor-in-chief, Matt Murray, cited financial difficulties as the reason for the layoff, “Book World” maintained interest in reading and engaging with its publications.
For Becca Rothfeld, a former fiction critic at The Post, the decision to cut “World of Books” — one of the last sources for book reviews by a major news publication — made her “crazy.”
“Our numbers were increasing all the time, and even when every other paper’s numbers were going down, our numbers were increasing.
Although the closure of “Book World” is linked to the wider problems facing journalism as an industry, The Post’s decision also suggests a shift towards the idea that people engage with literature as entertainment rather than an emotional process that informs their personal and social lives.
“We covered interesting books that might not have been covered elsewhere,” Rothfeld said. “I think there was a sense that we weren’t belittling the reader, that we were taking them seriously, challenging them intellectually and introducing them to books they might not have heard of before.”
General interest newspapers like The Post are unique because they give people who might not otherwise interact with books access to high-quality articles. If newspapers like The Post stop publishing their books, popular social media platforms will not adequately replace them. Although the tag #BookTok on TikTok has 75.1 million posts and generates excitement in the book industry, the short format – with segments of 11 to 18 seconds recommended for virality – makes it impossible to talk about difficult or difficult texts. After all, the kinds of books that tend to explode on social media aren’t the same quality that The Post would normally review.
Despite the weakness of social media, investigative journalism and traditional interpretations have fought hard with the arrival of the digital revolution, and the fate of the book parts is inextricably linked to the wider trends of the industry.
“You have the problem that a lot of people may not see the importance of journalism and may not understand that much information. [they see] it is being spread to them indirectly because of reporting what the journalists did.” “They can get it on social media so they don’t understand the importance of media organizations,” Rothfeld said.
Faced with such structural challenges, The Post’s editor-in-chief Murray announced in a January interview with The New York Times that The Post “cannot be all things to all people” and limited The Post’s coverage of national politics, business and health.
However, this conclusion does not assume that books can also contribute to these discussions – whether they are biographies, pieces of fiction by professors, or fictional stories that criticize contemporary events and ideas, books are a powerful way to understand the real world.
James Wood, Professor of English at Harvard, believes that literary criticism in the newspaper media is a social necessity.
“The idea of the newspaper analysis was that it was a kind of drag net, and it caught its ordinary readers, and encouraged them that there are things that they can be interested in, and that there is a level of ordinary life that is not only found in news or politics, but that exists in books and art, dance, film, etc.,” Wood said in an interview with The Crim.
For Wood, breaking down the formal book delivery system has been going on for decades, even as an independent auditor in the 1980s in London.
“Everywhere I’ve written about books, there’s always been a feeling that the opportunity to write about books will only last a few years, and inevitably the suits will come in and basically say, ‘Who cares about books?’
However, breaking up “Book World,” showed that many people still care about books. Widespread outrage followed The Post’s announcement, and hundreds gathered to celebrate the “World Book” in Washington, DC last February. Popular readers as well as academics criticized the decision to cut the section, including Harvard Senior Fellow Maria Tatar, whose work on storytelling and fiction has been reviewed by “Book World.”
“We’re losing something. We’re losing voices, we’re losing the golden standard of criticism, and, to me, it’s just a dark day for the spirit of journalism,” Tatar said in an interview with The Crimson.
Some critics, including Glenn Kessler, a former columnist for The Post, and current contributor Sally Quinn, have said that the disruption of the traditional art business to the public culture is the current owner of The Post, Jeff Bezos, who is expected to be a billionaire by the end of the decade.
Tatar said: “It is ironic that Jeff Bezos, a man who built his empire on the back of books and writers, is the one who pulled the most powerful machine of literary culture.
In 1994, Bezos named his startup “Amazon” after the largest river in the world, because he believed that his company – which started as an online bookstore – would become the largest bookstore in the world. He bought The Post in 2013. Since then, cost-cutting measures, according to analysts, have contributed to the decline of the newspaper’s bottom line.
Tatar said: “It was a practical method, effective in everything. And I think it is a great loss for us, because we need not only books, but stories. We need stories to protect us against real tyranny.
The end of book publishing in the once perfect environment of newspapers is a devastating effect on intellectual freedom. When book reviews are limited to 30-second TikToks, our ability to tell stories and critique will be replaced by mindless consumption. Recent research – including studies from the National Bureau of Economic Research – has re-examined how digital technologies can damage our ability to focus and think critically.
If parts of books are devalued – or if books themselves lose their place in cultural knowledge – people will lose the ability to see themselves in books, and think about their place in the world.
“It doesn’t have to be a one-way street to silence and oblivion,” Wood said.
Without continued financial support for book parts, that would be the case.
– Staff writer Laura B. Martens can be reached at [email protected].
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