Sam Tanenhaus: Now he'll run Week in Review AND NYT Book Review
Last week, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced in a staff memo that the editor of the paper’s Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus, would also head up the Week in Review section.
Some reacted to the appointment of Mr. Tanenhaus at Week in Review—where he replaces Katherine Roberts, who’ll move to a senior editorial job at NYTimes.com—with concerns that the quality of the Book Review could decline as its top editor is pulled in two directions. The move comes at a time when many national papers have either been folding their book-review sections, or merging them into other sections. And a few weeks ago, Mr. Keller had announced that the paper would seek to fill new jobs from within.
“It certainly signals the demise of newspapers, that they would have two such important sections run by one person,” said one publishing executive at Random House. “It reflects how unimportant books seem to be at The Times.”
Mr. Keller had already prepared for that response from the book world in his memo announcing the news: “Nobody should mistake this for a diminution of enthusiasm for either the Book Review or for the Week in Review,” he wrote.
There’s no doubt the move is unusual. While there are some editors who head up multiple sections—Trip Gabriel oversees the Thursday and Sunday Styles sections, while Trish Hall runs Real Estate, Dining, and Home—it is rare for the paper to employ one person to head up two major Sunday sections of the paper. Not since the days when there was a Sunday editor—most recently, Max Frankel in the 1970’s, according to a spokeswoman—who oversaw everything from the magazine to the Week in Review, has it happened....
Read entire article at NY Observer
Some reacted to the appointment of Mr. Tanenhaus at Week in Review—where he replaces Katherine Roberts, who’ll move to a senior editorial job at NYTimes.com—with concerns that the quality of the Book Review could decline as its top editor is pulled in two directions. The move comes at a time when many national papers have either been folding their book-review sections, or merging them into other sections. And a few weeks ago, Mr. Keller had announced that the paper would seek to fill new jobs from within.
“It certainly signals the demise of newspapers, that they would have two such important sections run by one person,” said one publishing executive at Random House. “It reflects how unimportant books seem to be at The Times.”
Mr. Keller had already prepared for that response from the book world in his memo announcing the news: “Nobody should mistake this for a diminution of enthusiasm for either the Book Review or for the Week in Review,” he wrote.
There’s no doubt the move is unusual. While there are some editors who head up multiple sections—Trip Gabriel oversees the Thursday and Sunday Styles sections, while Trish Hall runs Real Estate, Dining, and Home—it is rare for the paper to employ one person to head up two major Sunday sections of the paper. Not since the days when there was a Sunday editor—most recently, Max Frankel in the 1970’s, according to a spokeswoman—who oversaw everything from the magazine to the Week in Review, has it happened....