Today, Nielsen announced that, as part of the sale of all of its publications, it would be shutting down Kirkus Reviews (and its 125-year old co-publication, Editor & Publisher, as per this New York Times report). This came as a shock for a number of reasons, but mainly because Kirkus has been a staple of the publishing industry for so long (since 1933) and because Kirkus is always the first publication to review forthcoming books, usually several months before their release.  It’s a good barometer for what is to come.

Nonetheless, I had mixed feelings about the impending end of the magazine. (Unlike the co-head of mega-agency ICM Esther Newberg, whose feelings were anything but mixed: “it’s never been a publication worth anything,” she says in a New York Observer story. “The reviews were almost always negative and not helpful in any way. And so that’s it. Good riddance.”) As a publicist, the only thing that I’ve ever used it for (or seen it used for) is that one pull-quote, along with that other pull-quote from Publishers Weekly, that’s used to promote the book post-blurbs, pre-reviews. I’ve never seen anyone leaf through an actual issue of Kirkus (probably because it costs a fortune). There’s no other content except reviews. As soon as something bigger and better comes along (New York Times? Washington Post? take your pick), you never see that Kirkus quote again. So I can’t say that it will be sorely missed. And as someone working at a small, independent house, it was a publication that only took our books seriously half of the time.

That said, Kirkus hired excellent reviewers to write smart but condensed evaluations of upcoming books. They were always honest, sometimes brutally so, and I didn’t always agree with the negative ones (because they were always of books I was trying to promote), but it was one of the last magazines to eloquently evaluate books in brief (sorry New Yorker, your “Briefly Noted” just doesn’t compare).

As usual, discussion broke out on Twitter post-announcement, and some accurate points were made (which Jason Boog over at Galleycat wraps up nicely): laments over the decline of book review space, worries about selling-in books without pre-pub reviews, and fears that blogs won’t be able to compensate for all of these changes in the media.  But as much as I’ll miss Kirkus and what it offered me as a publicist, I have to say that I think we’ll get on without it.  It’s just not the same bookselling world that it was when Virgina Kirkus first started sending her newsletter to bookstores around the country, giving them one of their only glimpses into upcoming titles.  Now there’s buzz way, way before the book publishes, and a much faster information system.

Still, it’s sad to see such an institution fade away at the end of the first decade of our new millennium.  So thanks, Kirkus.  And we’ll just have to wait to see what happens next.