This is a rather touching story. In an effort to cut costs, The Dallas Morning News has offered buyout packages to most of its reporters in the Arts and Entertainment section. One casualty: the book column will be no more. Jerome Weeks wrote his final column this week, which incidentally, newspaper management chose not to run.
“What’s more, book culture may seem a dwindling, quaint endeavor to advertisers in mad pursuit of illiterate teens and at a time when arts coverage in general is getting dumped or fragmented into a million Web sites,” writes Weeks in his column. “But there are hundreds of thousands more new books released per year than TV shows, sports programs, movies or CDs. For all the talk of the death of print, more people have access to more books now than at any time in history.”
