Fresh Loaf

What’s the value of book reviews? Former L.A. Times cop reporter — and now successful fiction writer — Michael Connelly puts it best: Books foster reading and newspapers desperately need people who are interested in reading.

Here’s the money quote from an op-ed piece he did recently in the L.A. Times:

The truth is that the book and newspaper businesses share the same dreadful fear: that people will stop reading. And the fear may be well-founded. Across the country, newspaper circulations are down — and this is clearly part of the reason for the cuts to book sections. At the same time, the book business increasingly relies on an aging customer base that may not be refueling itself with enough new readers.

In the past, newspaper executives understood the symbiotic relationship between their product and books. People who read books also read newspapers. From that basic tenet came a philosophy: If you foster books, you foster reading. If you foster reading, you foster newspapers. That loss-leader ends up helping you build and keep your base.

What I fear is that this philosophy is disappearing from the boardrooms of our newspapers; that efforts to cut costs now will damage both books and newspapers in the future. Short-term gains will become long-term losses.

Connelly, by the way, is one of my favorite writers with his Detective Harry Bosch series. And he’s dead-on in his assessment. The entire column is well worth the read.

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Tags: AJC, journalism, newspapers.