Industry & Advocacy News
February 4, 2026
On February 4, Ron Charles learned that his services as a book critic at The Washington Post were no longer needed. After twenty years at the paper, working in three different buildings under four different editors, his position was eliminated as part of the Post‘s latest effort to reinvent itself.
In a Substack post announcing his departure, Charles wondered aloud how a major national newspaper would carry on without someone on staff dedicated to covering books. He noted that he’d received his layoff notice while eating one of the pears the Post had sent to mark his twentieth anniversary there.
Charles was not just a critic but a tastemaker who made literary coverage feel lively and accessible. He received the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2008, one of the highest honors for an American book critic. The American Library Association (ALA) praised his reviews as “highly readable, smart, and timely,” noting that he “connects books to the current cultural moment and to past literary history, broadening the conversation readers may have with a book.” He created the deliberately silly “Totally Hip Video Book Review” series, which used sight gags and bad jokes to draw broader audiences into serious literature. He hosted a weekly podcast for thousands of listeners and became a regular book commentator on CBS Sunday Morning. As the ALA put it, “a review by Ron Charles can spike interest in a title and bring readers into the library.”
Charles’s departure is both a personal loss and a symbol of something larger. As he put it, newspaper book sections have long been the canaries in the journalism coal mine. He would know. When he left the Christian Science Monitor three decades ago to seek work elsewhere, a large Texas paper informed him they’d just laid off their own book section editor that very day.
The numbers bear out what Charles experienced firsthand. In 2009, the Post had already shuttered Book World as a standalone Sunday section, folding reviews into other parts of the paper. At that point, only The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle still ran dedicated book-review sections. By 2022, the Times stood alone, and media scholars estimated that no more than a dozen full-time newspaper book-critic jobs existed to serve a nation of 330 million readers.
Then came another blow. In 2025, the Associated Press informed its freelance reviewers that it would end weekly book reviews, citing low readership and the resources required to plan, coordinate, write, and edit reviews. Because AP content is syndicated to hundreds of local papers, this single decision dramatically reduced the volume of professionally edited book coverage available nationwide.
The reasons behind these cuts are structural. As advertising dollars migrated from print to digital platforms, newspaper culture sections became what industry analysts call “anachronistic luxuries.” Book pages draw small audiences compared with other news, and in an era when editorial decisions are driven by traffic analytics, that makes them vulnerable. Book advertising compounds the problem. Display ads for individual titles rarely move enough copies to justify their cost, so publishers concentrate shrinking budgets on a handful of lead titles and digital campaigns.
For authors, especially debut and midlist writers, the loss of institutional review platforms narrows the already difficult path to visibility. Without newspapers serving as discovery hubs, publishers rely more heavily on celebrity, algorithmic recommendation, and marketing muscle. Attention concentrates on fewer titles, while quieter or more formally ambitious work struggles to find its audience.
For readers, the disappearance of edited book sections represents something harder to measure. It is a loss of shared cultural space, of our collective literary conversation. Professional book criticism doesn’t just evaluate, but it contextualizes and offers an opportunity to discuss books that the topics they cover.
