BOOKMAN BEATTIE, BLOGGER - AN ENDANGERED SPECIES?

Who will write the future?
By David Milofsky in The Denver Post
Posted: 09/06/2009

If you download a song on your MP3 player, you pay a modest fee for the privilege. Before any of the reruns of "Law and Order" can be broadcast, fees are negotiated for the actors, directors and producers of the episodes.
If a story from a news service like The Associated Press or Reuters runs in this or any newspaper, or if an article from a magazine is reprinted in a book, someone, somewhere, has negotiated for the publication rights.
The one significant exception to this general rule of paying for news is the Internet, where consumers are accustomed to think they should receive everything free.

Recently, Google and Yahoo have begun discussions with major newspaper publishers regarding payments for articles they reprint or link to on their "news" pages, but the fact that the Internet has been able to poach on established news sources for so long is part of the reasons newspapers all over America are failing and failing fast.

My small corner of this large media story has to do not only with books but with reviews and coverage of new books, which are, like the rest of the newspaper business, endangered species. This is a matter of concern to bookstores, which rely on reviews to move their products, and to publishers who send out thousands of advance reading copies of their books in hopes of finding sympathetic reviewers. If readers don't know about books, they obviously can't buy them.

One bright spot in recent years has been the emergence of literary blogs that are often more enthusiastic than professional, but nevertheless provide expanded coverage of literary fiction. Linking to newspapers and magazines all over the world, the "litblogs" provide lively and informative reading but they are generally run out of the proprietor's home on a shoestring, though some accept limited advertising to keep going.

To a certain extent, this has been a good thing for publishers, who now routinely send review copies to bloggers, as well as established reviewers. But no one has demonstrated that litblog readers are a significant part of the book- buying public.
More to the point, litblogs, like other Internet sites, pay nothing for the privilege of linking to the publications on their websites. If Google is thinking about paying for the news it reprints, why not what some have called a paywall for litblogs?

According to Mark Athitakis, whose American Fiction Notes is one of the most intelligent spots in the blogosphere, "Litblogs are being forced to change, but I don't think it's because they anticipate paywalls. There's simply less material out there. Arts sections have been hit hard as newspapers cut costs, so more and more litbloggers are writing their own reviews and conducting more interviews.
"But five years from now, no sensible person will argue that there's a lack of commentary or reporting about books online; the real question is, who will have the same authority and reach that newspapers have long enjoyed, and who will adhere to the standards that the best newspapers have established? If more paywalls get built and more newspapers close, that's not the death knell for book reviewing — but it is a challenge to those who take litblogging seriously to start filling in those gaps."

Sarah Weinman (Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind) has a somewhat different take. "The litblog as we once knew it is dead, dead, dead," she wrote in an e-mail. "And what's emerged in its wake are sites that veer more toward producing original content than outright linking. So now is the time to be an entrepreneur, to figure out if there's money to be made from our respective websites and what form that will take . . .
"Stories behind a paywall stand less chance of being talked about. If newspapers can determine how to balance that paradox, they'll hit the proverbial goldmine."

According to Weinman, most of the best litblogs are linking less and producing much more original content. What's more, bloggers like Maud Newton, Athitakis and others have turned to Twitter rather than posting extensively on their blogs.
One who has stuck with the more traditional form is Mark Sarvas, whose The Elegant Variation is consistently among the more interesting and provocative of the litblogs.
"I think it's entirely reasonable for (newspapers) to charge for their content," Sarvas writes. "I'm just not convinced people will pay. I would be disinclined to pay for links, since I already run TEV at a loss. But I think the blogs have proven rather nimble and adaptable, and I suspect you'll see anything from an increase in original content or perhaps a rolling precis of coverage elsewhere."

Sarvas, Weinman, Athitakis and Newton all write reviews for newspapers, as well as maintaining their blogs, so they all have a figurative foot in both camps. None is inclined to pay for material they run online; all are concerned about the declining number of print outlets for reviews; and all feel there's a future for commentary about books online.

What is perhaps most striking is that no one is questioning the continuation of book publishing as we know it, despite the wretched financial statements issued by all major publishers and large-scale staff layoffs in New York.

No one has a crystal ball, but some kind of symbiotic pairing of online commentary and small publishers could conceivably be a way for literary publishing to survive, regardless of what happens to newspaper book-review sections.
For those of us immersed in print, this would be a sad development, but to expand on what Sarvas says, writers and publishers have been nothing if not nimble — and they may well continue their athletic ways in the future.

David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University. You can reach him at david.milofsky@colostate.edu.