Newspaper bollocks

Back in February I complained that even the London Times had taken to publishing articles about the book world which were ill-informed, credulous, and generally reflected no credit on modern journalism. Now it seems that the New York Times has fallen prey to the same problem.

In his latest Publishers Lunch newsletter, Michael Cader refers to an article on business books in the business section of the New York Times. In just seven short paragraphs Cader takes it apart and shoves it down the toilet, which is clearly where it belongs.

You can read the NYT article for yourself (link above), but here is what Cader has to say (quoted without permission and therefore a clear breach of copyright; or something):

It's quite clear that I am simply not cut out to be a star columnist for the likes of the NY Times business page.

It would simply never occur to me to declare that a book like Jack Welch's WINNING "has sold an estimated 440,000 copies" in my third paragraph without saying who is providing the estimate, and then circle back fifteen paragraphs later (after the jump) to add: "But even the 440,000 figure is somewhat speculative. The book has actually sold 321,000 copies at cash registers, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks the industry data."

And if I were trying to analyze that book's P&L, I would have been way too tempted to subtract the supposed sales from the reported first printing (650,000) to calculate a rough cost for unsold inventory, rather than saying "publishers traditionally print more copies than they sell, so they have to write off at least a portion of those costs."

I'm not nearly clever enough to write (let alone read and understand) a column whose thesis is that business book buyers want advice rather than memoirs, and then offer as evidence only one business memoir -- Welch's JACK: Straight from the Gut, which reportedly has outsold Welch's advice book by a two-to-one margin.

It wasn't until just today that I learned that we live "in an era where business has gotten even more complicated," and that's why "business books can clearly add value."

And I still haven't figured out what it means to say that Welch's new "book had advantages; For one thing, it was published by a company owned by the News Corporation." Is this an advantage over being published by a company owned by Time Warner, or a point of distinction among the 24,000 titles published annually by the 12 largest companies?

How could I have spent so much time in and writing about the book business and still understand so little?