NeimanLab – “So this independent bookstore decided to start publishing its own. When The Washington Post’s management axed Book World in February, it wasn’t just one casualty among hundreds of layoffs; it was the latest high-profile death blow to a newspaper book review section in more than two decades of a thousand cuts. The AP stopped publishing book reviews last fall. Metro dailies like the San Francisco Chronicle whittled down or eliminated standalone book sections a quarter century ago, leaving The New York Times Book Review “the last discrete newspaper books section standing,” former Washington Post nonfiction book critic Becca Rothfeld wrote in The New Yorker. (After the Post layoffs, The New Yorker hired her as a staff writer.) Bookseller Josh Cook has taken note of the black hole swallowing newspaper-published book reviews. In the past, “you could just encounter [book reviews] in your world” via the physical presence of local newspapers, he told me in the back office of Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., on a recent Friday afternoon. (He pointed to now-shuttered alt weeklies The Boston Phoenix and DigBoston as another extinct source of book reviews.)

So Cook, a co-owner of PSB, decided to do something to bring newspaper-style book reviews back. The Porter Square Review of Books launched this month. The store’s booksellers and writers-in-residence have begun publishing weekly(ish) book reviews on its website, on Thursdays; at about 500 words, these are deeper looks at books than the couple of sentences you’ll find describing “staff picks” in-store (or on your Goodreads or StoryGraph). The team shares them on Bluesky and will round them up in a monthly newsletter…”