As Old Media dies and Influencers take over, are there no “qualified” critics anymore? So asks Dwight Garner of the New York Times.
Time was, a multitude of newspapers and magazines employed Big Name book reviewers and critics to pass judgement on the latest titles. They could make or break author careers. Glowing or damning reviews set the public taste in books. Or so they had us believe.
They reviewed literary fiction, books deemed worthy or unworthy of readers’ time. Genre fiction took decades to capture their attention, if at all.
But who were these people?
The Right Sort
In order to get a job as a book reviewer, one had to have qualifications. The right degree from the right, elite, university. One needed the correct background in publishing, the wider arts, or traditional journalism. One needed to mix in the literary social or academic circles. Often heavyweight literary writers and academics themselves, these full-time reviewers wrote and spoke with highly educated precision.
Let’s set aside the cozy relationships of critics, publishers and authors. Or the commercial inter-dependency of publishers and the media; advertising, sponsorship, access to signed authors. Book reviews were never the unbiased, independent arbiters of taste that readers assumed.
Garner is the inheritor of traditions passed down from Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, T.S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin. He complains there are no book reviewers any more. AI and the Internet has gutted criticism and negatively impacted culture, he says.
He may have a point about current generation AI. It lacks insight, a true critical faculty or intellectual rigor. But Garner reveals an underlying bias in his legitimate diatribe against AI:
“Time, Newsweek and other weeklies had serious critics who mattered to the conversation and knocked their heads together like bighorn rams. So much of this is gone. The strangulation sounds of early dial-up should have served as warning.”
This is where the book reviewers are now: online, not in the old media of dead trees. Garner bemoans the loss of all those book review sections in national and local press, or literary periodicals. Instead we have reviewers by the millions, spear-headed by Influencers.
Barbarians at the Gates
Few of these are “qualified” according to Garner’s old-school standards. Anyone can review anything on Amazon, Goodreads, forums, social media or their own personal blog. The few remaining gatekeepers man the gates when the ignorant, uneducated masses already tore down the walls.
That doesn’t mean this brave new world is necessarily better. The democratizing effect of the Internet brings a multitude of opinions. All opinions are valid. Some of them may hold more validity over time.
There are insightful reviewers offering valuable comment on a range of books that would never gain any attention in Old Media. You just have to find it among the ocean of one-liner’s, star ratings and emoji’s. This is how the world works now, and Garner doesn’t like it.
Garner clings to an idea that harks back to the bad old days:
“Book reviews may survive if only because… publishers need praise for their new releases.”
Praise? That hints at the old, cozy co-existence of publishers and their favored outlets. But publishers no longer offer those cozy deals on reviews, advertising and access. The publishing industry has moved on. Meanwhile local and national press and periodicals see their circulation in free-fall. Both salaries and print costs increase per column-inch. It’s a wider journalism crisis.
The publishing industry used to throw their marketing dollars at Old Media for the captive audience. A declining audience: abandoning the dailies and subscriptions to establishment titles. Everyone is online.
It now makes economic sense for publishers to pay a handful of influencers, personalities and websites to feature their products. Pay-per-click advertising reaches far more eyeballs globally than quarter-page ads in the New York Times. It’s targeted, measurable, data-driven. The publishing budget goes where the audience is.
The Game Remains
Call it commerce, call it a racket: the players change, but the game remains.
This is why Old Media can’t afford to pay those professional, “qualified” critics, with their degrees and opinions and lunch reservations. An unelected intellectual elite, appointed as often for their social connections or ego-driven pronouncements, as any real merit.
And who were they to dictate the reading tastes of a nation, any more than Oprah, Kelly, or Ellen? Those Old Media ‘book clubs,’ operate on the remnants of Old Media deals. As broadcast and cable wither, those, too, will pass.
Garner laments the lack of “qualified” reviewers, but that kind of misses the point.
Was it Aristotle, Spongebob, or Freddie Mercury once said: “everyone’s a critic?”