NPR.org Expands Book Coverage

By Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 6/30/2008 7:00:00 AM

National Public Radio has expanded the book coverage on its website, adding weekly book reviews, and has hired six new book reviewers—including a graphic novel reviewer—and added more features to an already existing lineup of author podcasts, critics' lists and other book-focused content. Among the new slate of reviewers joining NPR.org are Jessa Crispin, founder of the literary blog Bookslut.com; John Freeman, book critic and a former president of the National Book Critics Circle; and Laurel Maury, freelance comics and graphic novel reviewer and a contributor to PW Comics Week.

“We’re building up our book coverage because book content really works for our audience,” NPR senior supervising producer Joe Matazzoni explained. “Books are among the top three topics attracting traffic to the NPR site,” he said. While the content on NPR.org is often coordinated through such radio shows as All Things Considered, Matazzoni explained that the Web site also has a mandate to generate original online content and the new features on the book page are part of that ongoing effort. Matazzoni said the site's standalone coverage “is a real model for us going forward and allows the Web site to adapt material more specifically for the web.”

In addition to its annual Summer Reading page (which offers a list of bookseller reading recommendations), Matazzoni said the NPR.org website is now offering three or four book reviews a week, including such newly added roundups as Books We Like, short reviews of favored new titles, and Three Books We Like, which allows each NPR critic to gather and survey three titles on a particular subject. The NPR.org site is also expanding the reach of its Book Tour feature, which takes recordings of author readings done at Washington, D.C.'s Politics & Prose bookstore and edits and repackages them into 40- minute podcasts available through the NPR.org book page. Beginning this fall, Matazzoni said the year-old Book Tour feature will expand beyond the Washington, D.C., area for the first time and begin using author readings recorded at the McNally Robinson bookstore in downtown Manhattan.

And Matazzoni said to look for more new book content going forward. “We can’t cover the book industry like PW or the New York Times,” said Matazzoni. “We’re here to try and point our audience to good books. Our audience identifies with our sensibility and looks to us for judgment and taste. We’re a filter.”