Wednesday, January 28, 2009

WaPo shutters book section

A couple of months back, the highly regarded Christian Science Monitor announced they were ending their daily print format and switching to a weekly news magazine with updated online content. Now, WaPo is ending their standalone book review section, Book World, and moving the content to other sections in the paper. That leaves the NYT and the San Francisco Chronicle with the only widely read book review sections left in the US.

The Fourth Estate is dying the death it so richly deserves.

But canning book review sections is a lousy way to save costs while bailing out of the storm. How do we expect people to think when the crisis is over? As for the CS Monitor, it also had great editorial content as well as pointed book and movie reviews -- changing to a weekly format debases its credibility and doesn't leave much room for those reviews.

All hail, Web 2.x!

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