When newspapers cut book coverage, communities lose more than reviews
Authors, critics and booksellers say shrinking coverage weakens local arts, literary culture and the bond between readers and newsrooms
Laurie Hertzel remembers the old building on Portland Avenue in downtown Minneapolis and the space it had carved out just for books. At the time, she was the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s books editor, a fitting role for the daughter of a librarian and an English professor.
The book room was in the basement, deep in the bowels of the building. Hertzel wheeled an old grocery shopping cart onto the elevator and down to where the printing presses once stood. Nobody, she remembers, went down there. Except maybe the mice.
But there was the book room.
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