While Others Downsize Literary Coverage into Oblivion, We’re Launching a Books Section
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While Others Downsize Literary Coverage into Oblivion, We’re Launching a Books Section
More reassessments, more polemics, more manifestos, more feuding!
IF YOU’VE BEEN following us online, you’ve likely noticed our aggressive pivot toward politics and breaking news coverage. Partly, it was an overdue overhaul for a media landscape that, from search engine optimization to aggregators, has reshaped itself around hard news. Partly, it was about meeting the national mood. Blame Trump. Alarm over Canadian sovereignty has produced a surge of interest in how the country works—or doesn’t. Readers are nerding out on industrial policy debates they would have skipped just a few years ago. Somewhat improbably, the civic nuts and bolts of institutional life have become a kind of clickbait.
But even as our audience has embraced this shift in commissioning—engagement has never been higher—we’re faced with the question of what a current affairs magazine should even look like in this moment. For a long time, The Walrus allowed itself to drift into something closer to a literary journal: reflective, essayistic, stylish, largely insulated from the forces actually shaping everyday life. There........
