Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverbladden.

Today I'm taping at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival at the University of California,

at Los Angeles.

My guests today are Steve Wasserman, the editor of the LA Times Book Review, and novelist Jack Fuller, who is the author most recently of the novel The Best of Jackson Payne, a novel about jazz published by Knopf.

He is as well the president of the Tribune Publishing Company that owns the Tribune Papers, including the L.A. Times.

And I thought it was fascinating to meet someone high up, who is also a serious novelist at a time when books, serious books, and serious book reviews are becoming scarcer and scarcer.

And I thought these would be the perfect two guests to discuss a situation in American publishing,

American literature, American culture that those of us who love and care about books are concerned about or suffering from.

Mr. Fulmer is the author as well of four other novels and a book called News Values, Ideas for an Information Age.

And I wondered, what do you feel about book sections and things that appeal to, perhaps

one might say, a more segmented audience?

Your premise is correct that the audience for serious writing of any sort, whether it's

serious journalism or serious literature, is a small one.

It happens that newspapers appeal to that audience to begin with.

And the appeal of a book section in a newspaper is to its really most serious readers.

And so just as a commercial proposition,

...