The End of Books Coverage at the Washington Post

There are inactive plentifulness of places to work astir literature, galore of them excellent. There are older and much established outlets, similar the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books; cult favorites, similar Bookforum; and irreverent newcomers, similar The Drift and The Point, the second of which I edit. These magazines are delightful and, successful their ain way, consistently surprising; I emotion speechmaking them, and I person loved penning for them. But they are produced for an assemblage that already knows it cares astir literature. The books conception of a paper plays an altogether antithetic role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks caller recruits.

Unlike the specialized literate mag and its informal cousin, the literate blog, the general-interest paper has a benignant of noble rapacity, an encyclopedic ambition to wrapper its arms astir the full of the world. The Times insists that it strains to people “all the quality that’s acceptable to print,” and the Washington Post’s ain principles, written by Eugene Meyer successful 1935, erstwhile helium became the paper’s publisher, proclaim that it “shall archer ALL the information truthful acold arsenic it tin larn it.” (They besides committedness that “the paper shall beryllium prepared to marque sacrifices of its worldly fortunes, if specified people beryllium indispensable for the nationalist good,” thing that the paper’s contiguous proprietor appears to person forgotten, if helium ever knew it.) Whether the Times and the Post unrecorded up to their ain standards successful immoderate fixed instance, oregon whether immoderate paper can, determination is an important quality betwixt the completist perfect and a niche one, betwixt “ALL the truth” and the truncated information that a scholar has already demonstrated she is consenting to wage for—or, worse, the bladed sliver of half-truth that her algorithm feeds her, mirroring her ain existing tastes successful a dismal mise en abyme.

A paper is—or ought to be—the other of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism successful an epoch of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that determination is simply a scope of subjects an educated scholar ought to cognize about, whether she knows that she ought to cognize astir them oregon not. Maybe she would similar to scroll done the day-in-the-life Reels that Instagram offers up to her connected the ground of the day-in-the-life Reels that she watched previously, and truthful overmuch the worse for her. The maximalism and somewhat uncompromising presumption of a newspaper, with its warren of sections and columns and byways, is simply a quiescent reproach to its audience’s astir parochial instincts. Its ngo is not to indulge existing tastes but to situation them—to make a definite benignant of idiosyncratic and, thereby, a definite benignant of public.

It is true, of course, that the nationalist is lone a utile fiction. No 1 has ever seen 1 successful the wild. Some readers garbage to articulation one, stubbornly persisting successful flipping to 1 conception and ignoring the rest. But adjacent if nary paper tin win wholly successful cultivating the nationalist that it imagines, it tin inactive win to a greater oregon lesser degree—and Book World did succeed. Philistines are ever declaring that nary 1 reads literate criticism, but the grounds shows that publishers systematically underestimate the popularity of publication reviews. When the San Francisco Chronicle axed its stand-alone books section, successful 2001, the paper’s editors were overwhelmed by an ensuing crush of vitriolic mail. “The fig and passionateness of complaints we received were beyond thing we got implicit different changes successful the paper,” 1 elder exertion told Salon. If the outlet’s enforcement exertion had “anticipated this benignant of absorption to doing distant with the stand-alone section, helium wouldn’t person done it.” Book World amassed a dedicated readership, too. Though I took the sanity-preserving measurement of ne'er learning however to cheque the information myself, my exertion told maine that postulation accrued successful 2023 and 2024, adjacent arsenic the fig of visitors to different sections of the insubstantial was stagnating. Our clicks dropped disconnected lone aft Jeff Bezos’s archetypal New York Post-ification of the sentiment section, erstwhile helium spiked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris’s Presidential candidacy and thereby caused the insubstantial to suffer hundreds of thousands of subscribers.