Recently, Stephanie Zachariak reviewed "Sense and Sensibility." I enjoy her writing, but find her criticism frustrating. She complained about the kind of sophisticated movie goers who snobbily avoid popular romantic films like "Sense and Sensibility.

Such an affront demands response from her editor, or another writer (Charles Taylor, anyone?)It is irritating that one or two critics have so much influence -- think of the Pauline Kael cult, or M. Kakutani of the New York Times. Ms. Kael helped bring Scorcese to the masses. But she also had a self-indulgent quality, a frequent inability to look beyond her own world. She even dismissed Howard Hawk's Red River as a "horse opera." This is but one example.

Yes, it's great to have the tastemakers, and I have my favorites: Sasha Frere Jones, J Hoberman, and Elvis Mitchell. But, there are very few film critics iconoclastic enough to criticize Godard, for example...

What makes the blogging so effective is that it facilitates a conversation. No one critic is supposed to dominate, ideally. When it works, such exchanges come closer to a deeper analysis of art.

my two cents. in an age of google, conversational familiarity and arcane referencing no longer cut it. we require our critics to project an air of knowledge. i for one advocate a post graduate qualification, nothing less. 'tis the age of specialisation still!

The Internet is the force to be reckoned with. When I consider buying a book, I read reviews but they are usually online reviews.

As for myself, I quit writing book reviews for print publications. I now post reviews on Amazon.

Why? When I used to write published reviews, there were tight deadlines and the pay was MISERABLE. Let me emphasize that again: the pay was awful, awful, awful. And the editors acted like they were doing a huge favor printing the review in return for that measley check. Alas, I am not a famous writer or heavy-weight literary academic--surely those people can strike a better deal. But it seems that the editors have ever-shrinking budgets and ever-shrinking space reserved for book reviews. (And if you write for booksellers' publications, they only want reviews that sell the book, even if it's a bad book. You're a flack, not a reviewer. Forget that!)

Then I discovered that I can write a review, without a deadline, and post it on Amazon. (I'm a decent writer, with some credentials, and reading has been my passion since I was 5 years old). I do it for free, rather than the measley little check from the magazine or paper--but it's on my own schedule. It was a small step to take, from dismal pay to no pay.

When I discover a good book, it's like falling in love and I want to share that discovery. (And when I read an awful one, I want to warn people off.) Granted, many of the reviews on Amazon are garbage. But I hope that prospective book buyers will scan the reviews and find something in mine that will give them a good sense of whether they will like the book. Just as I scan them myself.

Even though there's no "gatekeeper," the Internet reviews serve the interests of the reader who is looking for something good to read. And I believe that as a writer of book reviews, I probably reach more eyes on the Internet.

The memorable critics mentioned here have always been a very rare breed. And with Helen Vendler covering poetry, and several competent people covering prose, I don't feel any loss, particularly when you consider the wretched path taken by criticism two decades ago, which is thankfully dying or on tenure-sponsored life support. The internet has opened up space for a few good book sections, including this one.

What has been lost, I think, is the second-tier who populated newspaper book sections. The New York Times chopped down its book section to the point that it ceases to be serious -- People magazine, with the inherent implication, publishes longer articles. Regional dailies eviscerated their book sections. Some of the historically significant book reviews in southern newspapers -- in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the St. Petersburg Times, some Alabama papers -- which used to offer brilliant context for a place-identified reading public, are no more. This is part of a larger financial crisis for newspapers.

And so what if, say, The New York Review of Books has lost its cultural cachet? They deserved to lose it, having made so many bone-headed political stands over the years. Far better that they concentrate on the task of writing and reading, preferably with no sharp items in their reach.

Meanwhile, not enough bad things can be said about the terrible quality of academic writing. We have decimated a generation of minds, or they decimated themselves. In any case, the splatter will take a long, long time to fade from view.

Anyone who tries to develop a sweeping intellectual theory about the decline of criticism -- and uses the loss of critics at daily newspapers in America as confirming proof -- is making a serious mistake. The same holds true for the supposed rise of book blogs at the expense of newsprint reviewers.

The loss -- like my departure from The Dallas Morning News after 20 years, along with the departure of the TV critics, the book editor, the arts editor, the art critic and the film critic -- has been purely a business decision. One might as well link this theory to the newspapers' closing of their foreign bureaus. It's about the decline in ad revenue and the rise of newsprint costs and the desperation of newspaper owners to maintain their ridiculously inflated profit margins to appease stock investors. A rather elaborate case could be made that this somehow reflects changing tides in readers' habits of mind, but I suspect that an academic blaming the academy for all this is a perfect example of a backward inflated sense of self-importance, i.e., he's inhaled a fair amount of his own hot air.

You can read an extended discussion of these issues here: http://www.artsjournal.com/bookdaddy/2007/03/the_disappearing_book_pages_pa.html.