Publishing Trends

Amid Booming Book Biz Coverage, Critics See ‘Gaping’ News Holes

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.”