When I started as books editor at USA TODAY, I had to commission a certain number of reviews a month. I had a healthy freelance budget and a whole roster of novelists and writers I could commission for literary criticism.
Four years later, I had no freelance budget and had to fight for every review
Every book I wanted to write about that wasn’t a celebrity tell-all, I had to make a metrics case to justify the labor. I was told by a high-up numbers guy “We shouldn’t even have a books section, we lose money on every books story.”
It was incredibly painful to get to a position I was so proud of, believed in so deeply, as a champion of books who could help bring great reads to a bigger audience, and feel it disintegrate on my hands because of short-sighted and cutthroat metrics.
