The
Book Beat
Amid
Booming Book Biz Coverage, Critics See 'Gaping' News
Holes
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (DECEMBER 2002)
First
there was Keith Kelly at the New York Post.
Then there were the hot-shots at Inside.com,
and thus dawned a new era of frenzied jockeying among
daily media scribes to fling arrows into the side of
the homely book publishing business. While stalwarts
such as Kelly have been in the trenches since the days
when editors from Condé Nast and Random House
were kissing cousins, it was the late ’90s promise of
electronic publishing — and the seductive story of Amazon.com
and all those other high-flying digerati — that brought
klieg lights shining down from every media outlet on
earth.
Ironically, however, you can blame the latest boom in
book-biz gossip on the demise of Inside, for
when the talent-packed media site backed by Kurt
Andersen went kaput in 2001, it drove a mini-diaspora
of hungry media reporters into the business pages, two
of whom landed at the New York Times — David
Carr as Media Reporter and Lorne Manly as
Deputy Media Editor — and another two of whom hit the
New York Observer, which is intently beefing
up its book page. But despite the tooth-and-nail rivalries
among outlets like the Post’s Kelly and
Paul Colford at the Daily News, or among
startups such as Publishers Weekly’s daily email
and Michael Cader’s Publishers Lunch,
some observers are wont to notice big-time holes in
industry coverage, not to mention shrinking book review
space, what with all those ad-poor book sections on
the newsroom floor. Still, one reporter’s news hole
is another’s opportunity, and there’s no shortage of
book-centric commentators on the prowl for buzz.
Inside
the Times
But
where’s the Gray Lady in this book-media blitz? Those
scanning the New York Times for book coverage
in recent months will have noticed that over the summer,
book beat reporter David Kirkpatrick abandoned
his alternating Dave Eggers and Bertelsmann
fixations to delve into the daunting conglomerate-scape
of AOL Time Warner — and he’s now serving up
(most recently) news on regulatory inquiries into beleaguered
e-tailer Homestore.com. Kirkpatrick (not himself
an Inside alum) gets credit for ramping up what
some considered a lackluster beat. “For the first time
in a long time on that beat, David came in and really
made something of it at the Times,” says one
publicity executive. “There was no human being on earth
who was going to out-work David Kirkpatrick.” In Kirkpatrick’s
stead, Times media scribe Felicity Barringer
has been filling in, writing on the plethora of political
books, and Bill Goldstein has written on book
launches that emulate opening day at the movies. Meanwhile,
the Times arts section has been cranking up its
books features. Recent arts-section front pages have
seen correspondent Stephen Kinzer covering the
Poetry magazine bequest from Ruth Lilly;
culture writer Dinitia Smith on the George
Orwell parody Snowball’s Chance; and Mirta
Ojito on the twentieth anniversary of Florida retail
stalwart Books & Books. The Times declined
to comment on plans for its book coverage, but we’re
told Richard Bernstein is leaving the paper’s
daily book review section to become Berlin bureau chief,
replacing Steven Erlanger, who will be heading
up the culture desk.
Sniffing an opportunity, perhaps, the New York Observer
has unleashed several reporters on the industry,
after a bit of a publishing-beat hiatus in the wake
of Elizabeth Manus’ departure in late 2000. Inside
alum Joe Hagan, who joined the paper last summer,
is now the Observer’s lead book reporter (he
was the first to write about the Langewiesche/blue
jeans at ground zero controversy), while former Inside
books editor Sara Nelson is contributing a biweekly
column called “Between Covers,” which she describes
as “more impressionistic and opinionated” as opposed
to the “real beat reporting” of her colleagues (a third
reporter, Rebecca Traister, has also been covering
book stories). According to Maria Russo, the
Observer Senior Editor who oversees publishing
coverage, a mandate has come down from Editor Peter
Kaplan to put the book biz in the same league as
the paper’s media coverage. “Obviously we have to break
news whenever we can,” says Russo, who came over from
the New York Times Book Review, and, before that,
was books editor at Salon. “But we can also give
people more of a broad view of the culture of publishing
and its place in the city. There’s no one doing that
anymore. Hopefully we’ve got a one-two punch that will
get people reading.” Indeed, it’s precisely those punches
that have made publishing veterans leery of the Observer’s
cutting style, even as they lap up its juicy tidbits.
“It’s fun to read. It’s less fun to be in,” says one
executive. “They’re always going to go for the more
personal detail, or the more unflatteringly revealing
fact.”
Even
the Wall Street Journal has increasingly tuned
in to pop culture where books are concerned. Witness
Journal editorial board member Nancy deWolf
Smith’s recent trashing of the Kurt Cobain journals,
in which she crinkled her nose at their “icky” content
and browbeat the mainstream press for sanitizing his
writings for public consumption. Meanwhile, book beat
reporter and news editor Jeffrey Trachtenberg files
stories such as the recent “Hogs, Liz Taylor’s Baubles
Are Big Subjects in Book World” (a look at the holiday
crop of coffee-table books), while also contributing
occasional reviews. “I’m looking for larger stories
that would interest people who aren’t in the book industry,
where there’s a good cross-section between culture and
business,” says Trachtenberg, who took over Matthew
Rose’s beat early this year. Since Trachtenberg
is also an editor in the media and marketing group,
books are not a 40-hour-per-week affair. “I spend a
lot of time with other reporters, so whatever spare
time I have, I fill in on the book beat,” he says.
It’s a similar case over at Business Week, where
Books Editor Hardy Green has been keeping the
flame burning with recent short profiles of George
Gibson at Walker & Co., and Adrian
Zackheim’s Portfolio imprint. But don’t expect
a cover story on Judith Regan any time soon.
“The bottom line is that we don’t do a lot of coverage
of book publishing per se,” Green tells PT. “I
have been writing these small stories. But my primary
responsibility is for book reviews and overseeing the
business bestseller list. Most of the other coverage
comes by way of reporting on larger media companies.”
Of course, the magazine gets mileage out of books for
other articles, such as Senior Writer Catherine Arnst’s
story based on recent books about working women, including
Bitch in the House (the William Morrow book
about the plight of career-oriented moms). Books get
in there one way or another, Green says. “But there’s
no expectation that we’re doing a comprehensive job
of covering publishing.”
Then there’s the Washington Post, where Linton
Weeks has been working book angles for the Style
section since 1995. “The Washington Post is more
intrigued by the cultural aspects of books — and of
reading and writing (which are national and international
enterprises) — than by the economics of publishing,”
Weeks comments. “Publishing is a New York business.
We don’t really track the comings and goings of editors
and publishers. On the rare occasion that there is publishing
news that is of vital interest to Washingtonians, however,
we are more than interested — we are competitive.”
Secrets
and ‘Outrageous Lies’
There’s
nothing like competition to fuel a news feud. Some in
publishing point out that the rise of electronic book
news — first at Inside, and then with Michael
Cader’s Publishers Lunch — has prompted Publishers
Weekly to beef up the content of its daily newsletter
PW Newsline (now $49.95 per year), as well as
the old PW Daily. And there may be more competitors
in the ether. MobyLives.com,
for example, is a book commentary site founded two years
ago by journalist and short story writer Dennis Loy
Johnson. The site, based on his syndicated newspaper
column of the same name, is “basically meant to be the
kind of magazine about book culture I would like to
read but felt was missing in the mainstream,” says Johnson.
“One problem with covering the book beat is that everybody’s
in bed together,” he adds. “The New Yorker runs
stories that are excerpts of books by Random House
and written by people from the New York Times.
Those places can’t cover each other objectively, and
I think they’re really missing the news. It’s a gaping
hole and an obvious one.” Last April, the 45-year-old
Johnson wrote a column about why book prices are so
steep, fanning the flames after Len Riggio’s
ultimatum to publishers to lower their list prices.
“People ought to know that B&N is making 60% of
that cover price, and the publisher is probably making
less than 10%,” argues Johnson. “You have to report
things like that. You can’t just report Len Riggio’s
outrageous lies.”
Along with partner Valerie Merians, Johnson also
runs Melville
House Publishing, which recently brought out
B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto, the
“attack on pretentiousness in American literary prose”
first published in the Atlantic. (Both that title
and the widely reviewed Poetry After 9/11 are
up to 12,000 copies in print, and there’ll be five new
titles next year.) Johnson’s syndicated column, however,
has not fared quite as well, with several newspapers
recently giving it the axe. “Some papers can’t pay twenty
bucks to run the column any more,” he says. “These are
grim times for book coverage, and that’s one of the
reasons the website has become so popular. People miss
that.”
©2002
Publishing Trends
