In the Folds
RIP Washington Post Book World, and all the publications I loved before
Ours was a magazine family. The shelves on our living room end tables were laden with my dad’s back issues of National Geographic; our coffee table featured fresh copies of whatever magazines my mom ordered for herself and my brother, John, and me. She always got Redbook and Glamour, which I perused as a preteen, confused about what, precisely, a blow job was (I thought it involved a hair dryer). I remember looking at the recipes in Family Circle and Woman’s Day, too. John got Sports Illustrated and ESPN; we shared Nickelodeon for years. I progressed from American Girl to Seventeen and Teen People, dabbling in grocery store checkout copies of Teen Vogue, CosmoGirl, Elle Girl, and other magazines purportedly for teenage girls but truly for tweens.
(Thank you to thankyouatoosa for these gems. I was a devotee of the Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul series and even had the board game, and I wanted but never got the gURL books. The pic of Noah Bastain of 2ge+her from Seventeen was def on my bedroom wall, IYKYK.)
I was almost seventeen and at journalism camp at Northwestern in 2006 when Teen People, my favorite “teen” mag, folded, or ceased publication. That summer must have been when I first heard the term “folded.” It was also when I learned about freelancing—the inherent instability of which gave me anxiety (sweet summer child).
By then I was subscribing to TIME and devouring issues of New York at my grandma’s house. If you’d have asked me what my five-year plan was, it would have been to get a job writing features for a magazine like that, maybe for Newsweek like one of our Northwestern instructors. He’d told us about getting hired after a summer internship. That seemed like the move. The folding of Teen People hadn’t made me nervous about getting a career in journalism. Though I knew the industry was adjusting to the internet age—in fact, I’d opted to work on the camp’s website over its newspaper—it seemed stable enough.
LinkedIn tells me that Newsweek guy ended up staying on staff there for more than a decade, until just before I graduated college in 2011. That coincides with massive upheaval at the magazine, after a disastrous restructure that led to a bleeding subscriber base. In 2010, Newsweek’s longtime owner, the Washington Post Company, sold it to stereo mogul Sidney Harman for $1 in exchange for taking on $47 million in liabilities. Harman soon merged the mag with The Daily Beast, and in 2012, Newsweek folded its print edition. (It later returned, but damn, Newsweek is a shell now.)
Needless to say I did not get a job at a glossy mag out straight out of college. By then, it was clear to me that the path of that Newsweek guy was no longer feasible and maybe never had been. Getting a gig at a website also seemed out of reach. I remember being absolutely furious as a senior when a columnist for Slate told a group of us journalism students that the best way to establish yourself was to go to Yemen to independently cover the revolution—advice that assumed an appetite for risk and independent wealth of the kind he had likely grown up with, given that he had attended one of the country’s toniest boarding schools.
At some point during my undergraduate years—maybe it was after I was passed over for a college-sponsored internship at Rolling Stone in favor of a very rich girl whose parents were donors—I shifted my five-year plan. I settled on the MFA path—itself a huge gamble—and started thinking of myself as an essayist rather than a journalist.
When I graduated from my MFA in 2016, I started freelancing in earnest, adding it to my other unstable income stream of adjuncting. I wrote essays and reviews for many web publications that no longer exist: The Toast, The Hairpin, Real Life, Catapult, Gawker 3.0. The last three on that list succumbed to the waning support of fickle funders: Snap, the Snapchat company, had bankrolled Real Life; Elizabeth Koch, daughter of Koch Industries CEO and chairman Charles Koch, owns Catapult, which still puts out books; Napoleon hat asshole Bryan Goldberg was responsible for Gawker under the Bustle Group.
Each time one of these publications folded, it felt familiar and to a certain extent expected—the internet is, in fact, not forever. The gutting of The Washington Post this week, though, was a devastating blow to what was once one of the most stable and storied newsrooms in the country. Its scale was shocking but not surprising: yet another publication felled by the waning support of a fickle funder, this time one of the world’s richest men, who has overseen horrific mismanagement in recent years and taken the editorial and opinion pages on a disastrous rightward path.
Amid that mismanagement, there was a bright spot: the revival of Book World in 2022. After folding the books print section in 2009, the Post had brought it back and had hired the brilliant John Williams to helm it. I started writing for the section in 2023 after editor Jacob Brogan took on this takedown of The Body Keeps the Score based on a tweet (can’t even get into the loss of journalism and literary twitter here).
I went on to write a bakers’ dozen reviews for the section1, and was working on another last week when I woke up to the news of its decimation. (I’m still waiting to hear what the plan is for pieces in progress, though I’m confident that John is fighting to get us paid.) In the past two-and-a-half years, Book World has been my favorite place to write for, and John my favorite editor. He was unobtrusive yet meticulous, smoothing and strengthening everything I wrote while still keeping it mine. I hope to write for him again elsewhere.
The folding of Book World is a loss for me as a critic—it was my most stable and consistent outlet. It’s a much bigger loss for the book world. It was one of the last venues for straight reviews that still felt substantive. It covered a huge range of genres and many more titles than the New York Times Book Review. And I know everyone is mourning the staff critics, especially Ron Charles, but I have to emphasize that Book World ran on the backs of a wide stable of sharp freelancers who will likely never get a staff job in this industry.
I don’t have any solutions or silver linings to offer here, just a lament for yet another fold. Fuck Bezos.
all linked here: https://www.kristenmartin.net/writing
I've so appreciated your thorough and thoughtful reviews in the Post, and I thought of you when they gutted the section. It's all so awful. I'm sorry.
I still haven't forgiven my sister for throwing away my back issues of Sassy magazine when I was away at college. I even had the iconic issue with Kurt and Courtney on the cover.
I graduated in 2004 and was always a bridesmaid, never a bride, interviewing multiple times at Conde Nast but never getting hired. They seemed omnipotent at the time, but I suppose every empire falls eventually.