The plug gets pulled on Kirkus. Who will it hurt?

At the website for Kirkus Reviews, it looks like just another business day -- no notice of the shock wave created by the announcement by Nielsen Business Media that, as part of a deal the company reached with e5 Global Media Holdings, it would “cease operations” for two of its publications, Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews.

“Bad news for anyone who keeps close tabs on newspapers and books,” writes Dave Rosenthal at Read Street, the book blog of our sister paper the Baltimore Sun.

In the case of Kirkus, "anyone” doesn’t apply only to those booksellers who plan their stock with the help of that biweekly publication.

Who else depended on Kirkus?

“It was purportedly read by every Hollywood exec -- or more likely their underlings --  looking for literary properties,” writes Nick Kaufman at LiveJournal. He adds that its reviewers were “impossible to please. . . . If your book got a good review from Kirkus, that really meant something.” Boris Kachka at New York Magazine calls Kirkus "the Pepsi to Publishers Weekly's Coke when it comes to prepub press."

And what is going to happen to all those writers who supplied the impossible reviews?

Kirkus, the website notes, uses more than 100 freelancers (not including Kirkus staff writers) to handle about 5,000 titles annually. Yet another trusted freelance outlet is drying up. What do you think about this news?

-- Nick Owchar

Photo credit: Don Kelsen / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[vizionheiry]

Some thing doesn't add up. With all the content they were delievering, their advertising should bring an abundance of revenue. Maybe they don't understand how SEO works.

[Randolph]

In some respects, the news is quite sad since it is about people losing employment and an institution that has been in existence since 1933 closing its doors. On the other hand, the fact that Kirkus opened its doors in 1933 is instructive and should give all of us in the business of the word hope. After all, 1933 was the depths of the Depression and yet Kirkus started a 76-year run then. What does this tell us? First, let us hope that in the depths of our current economic strife, young guns are already preparing the way for the next cultural institution. Second, my guess is that Kirkus, like so many literary ventures, started small, responded to real needs in the market, met them with quality, but then grew beyond the market's capacity to support their infrastructure. Startups are nimble, 76-year old enterprises typically are not especially in response to revolutionary changes in the way information is disseminated (i.e., the Internet). Of course, the wrongheaded trend toward everyone thinking that their opinion about a book is just as worthwhile as anybody else's is part of the reason, but I can't help but wonder if in addition to this trend (the product of a widespread, self-satisified narcissism), Kirkus and other reviewers have helped to write their own grave by too often rubber stamping trash and not hewing to anything but subjective reviewing criteria (a recent review of Dan Brown's latest by Janet Maslin is a good example). Perhaps, people simply don't need the kind of reviewing that has been churned out in recent years and Kirkus' failure is telling us this. Also, as much as I love books, I cannot help but think that the numbers of books produced every year (of which Kirkus's astounding 5,000 titles reviewed represented but a small percentage of the total) is also a deterrent to the collective attempt to determine quality. Simply put who isn’t overwhelmed by the quantity of books to the point of drowning –how can a cultural direction be found in this kind of chaos, where taste and selection is governed by public relations budgets and strategic, highly-priced, store displays? Maybe, the real blame lies with publishers who have abandoned their role as gatekeepers of quality in a possibly suicidal preference to throw titles against the wall and see what sticks while rolling the dice on the high advance, big-ticket blockbusters.
Sincerely,
Randolph

[M. L. Skillin]

I find it one of the saddest days in publishing. With Gourmet gone, Kirkus going, where will the standard-bearers of intellectual and cultural be found? Blogs don't cut it as fun as they are to read. Sad, sad day.

[Donna Ballard]

what a loss for librarians-we will mis their ultra snarky reviews

[Magda]

Will Nielsen be open to selling the Kirkus structure and name, which has enormous 'good-will' value in the business sense? If not, why on earth not? If so, some kind of Kirkus is likely to rise soon from the ashes, though perhaps genetically modified (viz Murdoch's WSJ).

But in any case the socially wholesome extermination of the professional critic class will continue. Now that anyone can twitter to their cohort an instant 'you'll love this!', the content market will work just fine without those preachy don Quixotes telling us more than anyone wanted to know, and taking up media space in their pathetic quest for 'true' art.