The State of Writing 2025
Depending on your media diet, you may have seen the news that the North American Guild of Beer Writers announced their annual awards over the weekend. I want to extend my congratulations to all the winners, and especially to former NAGBW President Kate Bernot, who was cited as the group’s first ever Writer of the Year. Kate submitted ten pieces and won six (!), including four golds. Tremendous!
A few other notes:
The awards now feature some new categories, including academic writing, other beverage writing, PR and corporate comms, and in the best of, best emerging writer, best writer, and best publisher.
Twenty-three of the 52 awards (not including honorable mentions or emerging writer acknowledgements) went to foreign writers.
Women were winners in twenty of the categories.
Over all 78 different people submitted 246 different works. As you can infer from these numbers, it is a worldwide competition of the best writing in the subject of beer in the world. Only 21% of the entries won an award (put another way, 79% didn’t win). So celebrate everyone who entered and won and go check out the list, which includes links to the articles.
For the first time in some years, I didn’t enter the competition. I’ve been thinking of pulling back for some time as younger and more diverse writers were entering the profession, but that wasn’t the reason. I was just too tired and overscheduled to get it done. I expect to be back in the mix next year.
These awards give me an opportunity to discuss the state of print and writing more broadly, which is something I think about regularly. At this moment, near the end of 2025, we have two competing realities. On the one hand, we’ve never had more people writing better stuff than we have right now—that’s true in beer but also in other fields. On the other hand, however, we’ve never had a weaker information environment. Closely related to that, we seem to be hemorrhaging readers.
I am going to focus on the realm that affects me the most—book writing. I haven’t had a book project for quite a few years. This is largely because my time is already limited, but also because the effort to get published has become so immense that it’s not worth the effort. Since I published The Beer Bible 2nd Edition, Hachette purchased my publisher, Workman, and swept up a number of independently-run imprints under its umbrella—including Storey, which published The Secrets of Master Brewers. For writers looking to publish beer books, there are just fewer options each year. (Even Brewers Publications appears to have at least paused new projects.) Writers have a lot of options to get books into print, including self-publishing, but as a career move, which means actually getting a decent advance for the book, the options are very limited. I have a couple books I’d like to write, but I don’t know if I’ll ever have the energy to try to land the deal for an amount I could afford to write the book.
We’re also reading less, and I do mean “we.” I have almost entirely switched to audiobooks, which I can consume when I’m walking the dog or riding my bike, and I consumer fewer of them than I did twenty years ago, when I read 30ish books a year. Today I’d peg it at about half that. I’m not alone:
The number of Americans who read for pleasure has fallen by 40%, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Florida and University College London have found that between 2003 and 2023, daily reading for reasons other than work and study fell by about 3% each year.
A big part of this is the way we consumer media, which increasingly means via social media apps on our phones. When I post a link to this article, there’s a very good chance someone will respond to it on social media in a way that tells me they are responding to the title, not the post. We read headlines. Maybe we click through to read the lede and the second or third paragraph. And that is all before the AI apocalypse that’s about to hit. All the information I and others have produced has been hoovered up and is now served back, gratis and royalty free, to the public. (Two of my books have been identified as sources for Anthropic’s AI engine, and I may actually get some money thanks to a recent settlement with authors.) Even worse than that, now Google offers summaries at the top of searches that obviate the need to ever click through.
It won’t completely destroy the market for independent human-generated writing, but it’s going to force more publisher consolidation and substantially reduce the number of eyeballs that ever go to a book or article. We’re all seeing it in our traffic, and it’s going to get worse.
All of this is by way of saying, for those of you are reading these words—thanks. We writers don’t have a product as marketable as the subject we cover. We value our readers more than they realize. Please know that every time you do click through to an article and read it to the end, you’re supporting journalism. There’s the question of the whole funding model, but that’s a different post. Keeping readers engaged and reading is the first order of business. So thanks!