I was excited to learn that Kassia Krozser (aka Booksquare) would be on PBS’s News Hour tonight. Hooray for book bloggers! Also exciting: she would be appearing with former LA Times book review editor Steve Wasserman.
(She couldn’t see him, though: instead of having him on a monitor, they had a picture of Ren — or was it Stimpy? she couldn’t recall which was which — in his place.)
As a contributor to the book review and a blogger for Jacket Copy, it’s been hard for me to hear about the changes at the LA Times. I wish that people weren’t losing their jobs. I wish the paper and its book coverage were not just surviving but flourishing. I wish that resources were boundless and column inches long. But I understand that the situation is tough at the LA Times, if not dire, and that if wishes were horses I’d be cantering up La Cienega by now.
On the show (mp3 here), Steve Wasserman spoke fairly about the issues of newspaper contraction and somewhat snidely about internet book criticism/coverage (“bloviating” is not nice). Then, near the end of the interview, Wasserman said:
The Los Angeles Times — as well as other newspapers around the country, the Hartford Courant, which only recently let its book editor go — has constricted its space not only in the print medium, but they have not added people to expand what they do online either.
OK, my dad faithfully watches the News Hour (he also reads this blog. Hi dad!). He is under the impression that I am freelancing with the LA Times to expand what it does online. Mr. Wasserman, you’re bumming my dad out.
See, you’re making him think I am a bad daughter, one who’s either fibbing about her responsibilities or is failing at them. Oh, I’ve done that before, sure — the time I forgot to mention, for a couple of months, that I’d dropped out of college, that was both a failure and a fib — but in this case, I’m hard at work at Jacket Copy. And I think it’s pretty good.
Check it out. Today we posted a man-on-the-street video about what Angelenos are reading. I think videos count as an expansion. Fun expansion, even.
I agree with you, content is king. Come and consume some bookish stuff online at the good old LA Times.
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