In the summer of 1992, I interned at the monthly incarnation of LIFE magazine in New York. LIFE was one of those magazines people talked about, not just read. I wrote and reported for a small front-of-the-book section called "Our Times," which ran short pieces on quirky subjects such as the fight over improvements to Sinclair Lewis's original Main Street in Sauk Centre, MN. My triumphal moment was when I pitched the editorial board a cover story on the 25th anniversary of the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, which they did in fact use. At the end of the summer, I got them to keep me on as stringer while I went back to my last year of college in Missouri, sending in
bits of news from the heartland they might find interesting or useful. I went through my senior year taut with the hope that when I graduated in the spring, they might hire me back.
Alas, it was not to be. In February 1993, the magazine announced some major changes in its format in an attempt to cut costs and stay in the black. They most certainly were not hiring. I temped there for a week that summer when the managing editor's assistant was out of town, but that was my last time in the LIFE office. I took a job with Highlights for Children in Pennsylvania, and LIFE did what it could, for the next few years, to stay in print.
The issue was how did a general-interest magazine survive in the modern era, in which niche markets were increasingly the rage? How did a magazine known for its photography stay relevant in a world in which every home had a television? LIFE had a readership of 1.5 million when it went out of business, which apparently in the bottom-line world of 1990s publishing was not enough. Any book writer would weep with joy to have 1.5 million readers, but to Time, Inc., that was a drop in the bucket.
Today, the New York Times is running a piece on how book blogging is picking up the slack for book reviewing when many newspapers are cutting their review pages. Ironic, since the internet has been widely blamed for the death of newspaper readership in general. The question, though, is why would newspapers cut the one section guaranteed to appeal to the only proven group of readers they have left--people who read? The answer is quite simply that in a world of declining overall readership, newspaper editorial boards have to cut costs to try to pump up their profit margins. Readership of 500,000 isn't enough to guarantee the health of a newspaper's book review.
Obviously I'm a fan of blogging, but whether it can replace the newspaper book review remains to be seen. If so, I think it will have to be in a format we haven't seen yet, something more mature and careful than most of the book blogs that are out there. There's nothing new, of course, about book reviews reflecting the personal tastes and quirks of their authors, but blogging doesn't have the same power to make news, for better or worse, that the newspaper book review has. Making news makes books. I wonder how many people would even have noticed, for example, that Anthony Swofford had published a novel if William Vollman hadn't ripped him a new one in the NYTBR. People talk about newspaper book reviews. They don't talk about blogs. At least not in the numbers that would make a difference to unknown authors and their publishers.
Maybe that will change. Maybe not. But I can't help but feel that a readership of 500,000 is nothing to sneeze at, certainly nothing to sacrifice for the sake of a 5-cent increase in newspaper stock prices. It's a short-sighted decision, in other words, made by short-sighted people. Local book reviews fill an important niche, and when they go, they won't be coming back.