Laurie Hertzel remembers the old building on Portland Avenue in downtown Minneapolis and the space it had carved out just for books. At the time, she was the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s books editor, a fitting role for the daughter of a librarian and an English professor.
The book room was in the basement, deep in the bowels of the building. Hertzel wheeled an old grocery shopping cart onto the escalator and down to where the printing presses once stood. Nobody, she remembers, went down there. Except maybe the mice.
But there was the book room.
“It had a locked door and you’d walk in and turn the light on, and it was just this wonderful space because it had shelves all the way around and it had this long table for sorting books,” Hertzel said. “It had no windows, but you could shut the door and you could just be down there, and it was like a clean, well-lighted space.”
Each month, Hertzel received about 1,000 books in the mail from publishers and authors eager for coverage. Piles of advance reader copies and books filled the room. At the time, the Star Tribune devoted two open Sunday pages for book reviews and literary news. Hertzel later expanded coverage by penning her own weekly Tuesday review — the industry’s standard release day for new books.
She would load the cart with books and head back up to the third-floor newsroom.
The U.S. publishing industry is massive, generating about $30 billion of annual revenue, according to the Association of American Publishers. But despite all that money, newspaper book coverage is disappearing. The Associated Press ceased its weekly book reviews last year, and The Washington Post ended its book section earlier this month amid mass layoffs.
“I don’t know why newspapers have done it, and they’ve done it across the board almost,” said Colette Bancroft, former books editor for the Tampa Bay Times, who has witnessed this hollowing out for more than a decade. “I’m not sure why. I have never understood it.”
There are a number of culprits: Staff reductions, shrinking newspaper budgets, reader habits that are rapidly shifting towards the digital realm.
When a community loses book coverage, it creates a ripple effect. Writers lose visibility, stunting their reach. Readers lose out on books and ideas they may not come across if they’re not already plugged into Bookstagram or BookTok. Local arts lose support. Freelancers and critics lose income.
“What we’ve seen in the last decade is diminishing coverage for books across the entire country, and it is really devastating for writers,” said award-winning author Cleyvis Natera. “Because for many of us, we’ve been working on our books for years, and it is still very difficult to have a direct path to connect with readers outside of our local environment and outside of our own personal networks.”
Both of Natera’s books — “Neruda on the Park” and “The Grand Paloma Resort” — received reviews in The New York Times, which she described as very meaningful. Her debut also received some coverage from local outlets in New Jersey, where she lives, but it was minimal. Her latest book received even less local attention.
“I had my publicist reach out and, unfortunately, a lot of the newspapers are no longer running book reviews or (have) limited resources.”
Before Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s widely acclaimed short story collection “Sabrina & Corina” was published in 2019, she spent years as an independent bookseller in Colorado. The National Book Award finalist recalls how someone would always bring in The New York Times Book Review, the weekly Sunday supplement dedicated to books. “And we would look, what should we be ordering, what books are getting coverage,” she said.
Fajardo-Anstine has since published “Woman of Light,” an award-winning novel about a tea leaf reader and laundress who fights to save her family’s stories in 1930s Denver. But neither of her books received a standalone review in major U.S. newspapers like The New York Times. The Boston Globe did review “Woman of Light.” So did The Guardian. Locally, The Denver Post did a feature on the author.
For the award-winning Fajardo-Anstine, navigating the lack of traditional newspaper coverage has been confusing. Smaller papers in Denver and word-of-mouth have helped her work gain traction. She remains hopeful about future books.
Allison K Hill, chief executive officer of the American Booksellers Association, said independent bookstores can relate to the challenges newspapers face. But, she noted, cutting book coverage is a missed opportunity to reimagine it rather than retreat from it.
“On a Venn diagram, the circles of book readers and newspaper readers overlap significantly; book coverage is an opportunity for newspapers to lean in, not out,” Hill told Poynter in an email.
There are now fewer staff book critics at newspapers, which Adam Dalva says is a shame. He is the president of the National Books Circle, an organization of more than 800 members that supports book criticism.
“I love when critics have this kind of perch where they can say, ‘I’m going to build a corpus, or a body of thought, around books, instead of exclusively using freelancers,’” he said. “There are so few full-time book critics left in America.”
Dalva, himself an author, said newspapers and magazines now more often commission reviews from other authors. But he wants people to remember the cultural importance of books.
“In the long run, what we’re doing when we run book reviews is building a network of thought that can carry forward for many years. And we find that books offer the kind of slow thinking and careful deliberation that reflect on society and feed into every form of culture and politics and life,” Dalva said. “I think a book section, if it’s robust and vibrant, is able to provide commentary on everything that’s happening, say, in America or in the world.”
In 2024, Colette Bancroft took a buyout, leaving her role as books editor at the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tampa Bay Times after 17 years. For roughly the first half of her tenure, she had a budget to pay freelancers. Then it disappeared.
Bancroft recalled the common sentiment that book coverage doesn’t get enough readers.
“I know they swear by the clicks, and those clicks are real, but I don’t know, to me it’s part of serving your community to cover arts in your community,” she said. “And it makes it much harder for local arts organizations to survive if they don’t have support from news organizations in their community.”
Bancroft, who has since returned to Arizona, continues to write for Bay Magazine, the Tampa Bay Times’ luxury lifestyle magazine. She knows she’s not the only books editor whose role disappeared and wasn’t replaced. It’s part of a broader trend she still struggles to understand. News outlets need readers, and people who love to read, she said, tend to read both books and newspapers.
“And if you dump newspaper coverage, you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot.”
Back in Minnesota, Laurie Hertzel retired from the Star Tribune in 2023. She now teaches in the low-residency MFA in narrative nonfiction program at the University of Georgia in Athens and also reviews books as a freelancer for The Boston Globe and, until recently, The Washington Post.
Book coverage, once a core part of newspaper criticism, has undeniably diminished.
“I think it’s very sad, because newspapers traditionally have been kind of a generalist outlet. … It’s supposed to be an array of things that are important to the community that the newspaper covers.”
Hertzel said those decisions are made by higher-ups, a role she never held.
“But it seems very shortsighted to me, to start cutting things that people do read. And does everybody read book coverage? No. But I will tell you, the ones who do are fervent about it.”
