Who Killed the Book Review?
Newspaper Book Coverage Is Dying, but Don’t Hold a Funeral for Literary Culture
Ages ago I was in Washington, D.C., for meetings with some of my authors who lived and worked in town. One invited me to the Washington Times HQ where he worked and was excited to show me the office of his colleague, the books editor.
Her office—this was about twenty years ago, but I’m pretty sure I remember the editor was a woman—was packed, hoarders-style, with books, many still in their mailers, stacked in waist-high piles and taller across every square inch of available space, excluding her desk and a narrow, precarious path to it.
After brief introductions and pleasantries, we stood there uneasily for a few minutes before I left. She wasn’t interested in talking with me. Publishers of every kind had sent her books of every kind, hoping for a review; the last thing she wanted was one more standing in her office, gunning for the same.
My memory of the encounter is somewhat fuzzy, but the news about newspaper book review sections isn’t. There are far fewer of them today than back then, for which there are many upstream causes and downstream effects.
Death Toll
To get a sense of that decline—what New York Times critic Dwight Garner recently called “a near-extinction-level wipeout of the American book review”—here’s a partial chronological list of major market papers where book coverage has either decreased or deceased. I’ve included approximate dates of their demise, but the timing is a little squishy in some cases.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2007). Books editor Teresa Weaver lost her position, same with most of the arts staff. The cut prompted the National Book Critics Circle to launch its Campaign to Save Book Reviews—with only, alas, marginal success.
San Diego Union-Tribune (around 2007). In a typical move, the separate books section was merged into general arts and entertainment coverage.
Chicago Sun-Times (late 2000s). Most book coverage was dropped except for local authors.
Boston Globe (early 2000s, then again 2014–2015). The book review section was merged with the opinion pages, then later folded into the Ideas section.
Philadelphia Inquirer (late 2000s). The separate Sunday book section was eliminated and coverage folded into arts and entertainment.
Los Angeles Times (2008). The separate Sunday Book Review was folded into the Calendar section, and two book editors were shown the door.
Hartford Courant (2008). Books editor Carole Goldberg was laid off the same week as the LA Times cut.
San Francisco Chronicle (2001, 2006, ongoing). The twelve-page pullout was folded into the Datebook in 2001, reinstated after public protest, then cut by a third in 2006, and has been steadily reduced since.
Cleveland Plain Dealer (2013, 2015). Books editor Karen Long left in 2013 and was not replaced; the paper dropped local freelance reviewers in 2015.
Chicago Tribune (2015). The separate weekly book-review tabloid, Printers Row, was discontinued and books coverage was radically trimmed.
Newsday (late 2010s). Books editor Tom Beer left in 2018, and books coverage has since been substantially reduced.
Tampa Bay Times (2024). Books editor Colette Bancroft took a buyout after seventeen years, ending dedicated books editing at one of Florida’s last serious book sections.
Associated Press syndicated reviews (2010, then fully in 2025). AP cut its monthly twelve-review package in 2010, then ended weekly book reviews entirely in 2025—removing a key source of book coverage for hundreds of smaller papers who already eliminated their own departments, if they ever had them to begin with.
Washington Post Book World (2009, again in 2026). The separate Sunday pull-out was folded into the rest of the paper in 2009. The section was resurrected in 2022 but then eliminated again during layoffs—this time taking critics Michael Dirda, Ron Charles, and Becca Rothfeld.
And that’s to say nothing of the Kansas City Star, The Oregonian, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and countless others where editorial positions were eliminated throughout the 2010s and replaced only by occasional book coverage. Cue the dirges.
The Why Behind the What
This decline represents one basic story told from two sides, demand and supply, all of which starts with the much discussed crisis in reading. Fewer people are reading books, which means fewer people are interested in reading about books, which means less ad revenue for the sections that cover them, which means cuts, which means lower visibility for books, which means still fewer readers. It’s a feedback loop in which each turn worsens the next.
Several developments have accelerated that cycle on the demand side, as Steven Mintz explains at Inside Higher Ed. Niche and genre-specific online outlets have siphoned readers from broad-market publications. The web has flattened the hierarchy of critical taste; blogs, Substack, Goodreads, BookTok, online reading groups, and the like have empowered readers and eroded the newspapers’ gatekeeping role, all while trust in professional, credentialed expertise has also eroded. Beyond that, what might be called the middlebrow project of the twentieth century—the effort to ferry highbrow ideas to middle-class readers—has declined, taking with it the audience the special Sunday book sections were edited to serve.
“Book reviews no longer attract sufficient eyeballs to generate the ad revenue that used to support book sections,” says Mintz. And that revenue collapse represents the supply-side of the story.
The rise of the internet didn’t just undermine cultural gatekeepers; it undermined the business model that kept all those gatekeepers employed. The standard account provides a decent if somewhat insufficient explanation. Classifieds migrated to Craigslist, display ads to Google and Facebook, and what funds remained had to buoy the shrinking newsroom. Book sections were among the most obvious places to trim—minimal ad dollars, an absentee audience, and they were easy to cut or squirrel away in other parts of the paper.
In that sense, book sections were the canary in the coal mine of newspaper collapse. The Rocky Mountain News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tampa Tribune, and scads more dailies eventually ended their book coverage when the whole enterprise fell apart—a reminder that the entire business was (and remains) as precarious as those teetering stacks in the Washington Times office.
I’d be hard pressed to say all of this is necessarily bad. It just is. But the simplest way to frame the current reality is this: If those pages got clicks, would they have gone away? We can say with Becca Rothfeld, who regrettably lost her perch at the Post, that “a newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing.” I sympathize and agree. But someone has to pay for it.
That’s not to say there aren’t downsides. I can think of several.
The Changing Landscape
I’ll skip over such negatives as the recession in local literary culture once fostered by the work of hometown critics. Instead, I want to focus on what it does to the publishing industry, which exacerbates the feedback loop mentioned above.
One immediate loss? The discoverability of midlist books. Local newspapers once provided the primary venue for general readers to discover serious new nonfiction and novels. That’s now fragmented into a thousand new channels—about which more in a moment. Major releases still get attention because they have large marketing and publicity budgets, but mid-tier authors miss out.
This hits nonfiction especially hard. These books have traditionally depended on the kind of nonspecialist—but still generally interested and serious—audiences that consumed daily newspapers. Without that avenue to raise awareness, the genre gets harder to publish, harder to sell, and harder to justify on a publisher’s P&L. Consequently, fewer such books have a chance to break out.
For both fiction and nonfiction this means the midlist suffers, a well observed phenomenon in the industry. But we can overstate the harms and miss the upsides. After all, the decline of newspaper reviews has been underway for two decades; meanwhile, the publishing industry as a whole has continued to grow, including nonfiction. One reason is that the kind of discoverability publishers relied on newspapers to deliver has migrated to other platforms and channels.
I saw a version of this when I first started in publishing in 2001. The imprint where I cut my editorial teeth published conservative political titles—hence the reason I was visiting the Washington Times. The majority of those books had a snowball’s chance of winning the affections (or even requisite ire) of books editors at mainstream newspapers or magazines to elicit coverage. But we still sold boatloads through talk radio when we were lucky. If you could get your author on the circuit, you’d find your readers and move inventory.
Publishers and readers are facing a version of that same challenge now as discoverability shifts to specialty publications like LitHub and Micah Mattix’s new Portico, plus X, BookTok, podcasts, and—most glorious among them all—Substack, which plays host to a rich and wide array of literary subcultures.
Weirdly, Dwight Garner makes nary a mention of Substack in his piece for the New York Times—probably because it complicates his “wipeout” thesis. “I’m cheered by the young critics out there,” he says, “swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn’t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.” Hello, Dwight! Lots of those folks—and plenty of the old guard too—are having a ball here on Substack.
What Are Reviews For?
Behind all this fretting and handwringing about the decline of book reviews is why they exist at all. I’ve already mentioned one reason with both demand and supply-side appeal: discoverability. Readers want to know about books and publishers want readers to know about the books they publish. But there are other reasons.
Book reviews are a form of literary expression all of its own. A well written review is a delight to read, whether the reader ever picks up the book under consideration. Newspaper criticism sometimes achieved—and still achieves—that status, but not always and not often.
“It does matter what an unusual mind, capable of presenting fresh ideas in a vivid and original and interesting manner, thinks of books as they appear,” said the midcentury literary critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick in a famous 1959 essay for Harper’s. Her complaint? Newspapers of the day oozed with uninteresting, uncritical, unctuous reviews.
“One had not thought they could go downward,” she said. “Still, there had been room for a decline in the last few years and the opportunity has been taken.” She lambasted the “sluggishness” of the New York Times and Herald Tribune and the “lobotomized” slop churned out by all the rest.
Hardwick was so disgusted that when the 1963 New York newspaper strike created an opening, she cofounded the New York Review of Books as a corrective. Which seems to me like the right way to respond to the decline of newspaper review culture: Start something new.
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A depressing list from American newspapers. More cheeringly, I can report from across the Atlantic that at least in Ireland there is still a vibrant culture including book reviewing. Every Saturday The Irish Times under Book Editor Martin Doyle has 10-15 reviews (I do some), which also make their way onto their website: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/
Easy to become complacent of course, but at the moment things are healthy here.
I mentioned that too at the end of this post: https://www.juliangirdham.com/blog/english-teaching-in-ireland-and-the-united-states
Are you familiar with Joseph Bottom's book, The Decline of the Novel? In it, he hypothesizes that the cultural importance of the novel has declined because we no longer see the novel as a form that can help us explain ourselves to ourselves.
If he's right (and he makes a good case), then the declining interest in book reviews makes sense. If a reader is reading purely for diversion and not expecting that a novel will help them understand themselves and their world, then it follows that they don't need a detailed review to choose a book. All they need to do is confirm genre conformance. And, of course, the publishing industry (and the indie publishing space to a great extent) has become expert at accurately producing and signaling genre-conforming books.
Or, to put it another way, you don't need restaurant reviews if everyone eats at McDonalds.
And if Bottom is right, it would also help to explain the slow death of the mainstream and the rising gulf between so-called literary fiction and genre fiction, each of which is driven by a fascination with the parts rather than the whole of the novel. The novel, having lost its cultural purpose, has been carved up the way a hedge fund carves up a dying company, selling off the assets to raise the most cash possible. Elegant prose and philosophical and psychological insight are sold to the academy. Plot, pacing, and excitement are sold to the genre mills. The old brand names have whatever value remains sucked out of them to sell the resulting slop.
What we can and must hope for from a book review newsletter is that it works to revive the old integrated model of the novel and to persuade the public that the novel can indeed do what it did for so many decades: help us explain ourselves to ourselves. (And so far, so good. Thank you.)