Journalistic Idiocy

By now, any of you who are going to buy the 7th and last Harry Potter book (which some Internet wags have already started calling “Harry Potter and the Truckload of Money”) have already done so; most of you have already read it. Some of you are probably still outraged at the New York Times for publishing its “early review” of the book, two days before it went on sale. I will leave the debates over free trade and freedom of speech to those individuals (and bloggers) better informed about such things, and just point out to anyone who may be reading today that from a business standpoint this was the height of journalistic idiocy, a move that can not benefit (and can greatly harm) the Times. It is, oh now there’s that word again… STUPID!

And it’s not even the dumbest thing the Times has done regarding the Harry Potter series…

Needless to say, the Times is defending its right to review the book once it was available for purchase. A spokesperson for the paper went on record as saying “Our feeling is that once a book is offered up for sale at any public, retail outlet, and we purchase a copy legally and openly, we are free to review it. We came across a copy of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ at a store in New York City and we bought it.”

I’m not sure if any of this is legal; certainly no retailer in North America had the contractual rights to sell the book before 12:01 am on July 21st. Even if it is, it does not excuse the blind stupidity of the exercise. With something like 9,000,000 copies of the book pre-ordered and tens of thousands of people lining up for release parties around the world, there are very few people who are going to make their purchasing decision based on the New York Times review. Either you don’t read the series, or you were already planning to read the book. Which means that this early review serves no purpose beyond displaying the fact that the Times got a copy three or four days early.

Then there’s the whole business about reorganizing the bestseller list. As blogger Michael Giltz points out in the Huffington Post, the change in recent years that makes “children’s books” a different category is a direct result of the success of the Harry Potter series, and guarantees that “Deathly Hallows” will never make the New York Times bestseller list, despite being the hottest-selling book in the past four hundred years or so.

Of course, as Giltz points out, without the early volumes’ success on that very list, the series might never have found its current audience. In which case, it’s possible that the later volumes would never have been written, and it’s almost certain that the millions of children who have become interested in reading because of the Potter series would be off playing video games instead.

I can’t see the advantage to the New York Times of lowering the number of readers going forward, since they depend on readership to stay in business. Leaving aside the issue of when the book review page became part of the op-ed page (the bestseller list is just supposed to TRACK sales, not comment on them!), all this does is undermine reader confidence in the Times itself, and decrease the paper’s credibility in a time when, following the Jason Blair scandal, they are already suffering.

Again, I can’t say if this violates journalistic responsibility or not. I can only tell you that, purely from a business standpoint, it’s amazingly (there’s that word again…) STUPID!