In a just-released message, Greg Farrar, President of Nielsen Business Media, announced the company's decision to cease operations on two important publishing industry publications: Kirkus Reviews and Editor & Publisher. Nielsen will also sell eight other magazines, including Backstage and Billboard, to a newly formed company called e5 Media Holdings. Click here to read the notice (via Poynter Online and Jim Romenesko). 
 
 This is a big blow to the publishing industry, if not to the eBook sector specifically. With the closure of Kirkus, we do lose an important online source of reviews, though one that lives mostly behind a subscriber pay wall. 
 
 There is, of course, much talk about this news on Twitter. Notably, Ron Charles of the Washington Post said, "For me, they were the last reliable source of negative reviews." Charles also notes that the last tweet from the Kirkus Reviews was 17 hours ago. ||||| As if anyone still working with print needed even more bad news — more than 24,000 of us canned in the past year alone — today brings the news that Kirkus Reviews, which reviews 500 books pre-publication, and Editor & Publisher, the industry bible of newspapering are being shut down. No word whether their digital counterparts will live, although it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t. 
 
 No matter how much their insider information seems old-school to some, it’s essential to others. Any author hoping for decent sales liked to get a nod from Kirkus, Booklist and Library Journal, which tended, back when there were book reviewers for…oh, yeah, newspapers…to drive their reviewers’ decisions about what to pluck from the annual 200,000 books pumped out every year. With fewer and fewer places to even get a book reviewed, at least in print, anything that narrows a new book’s, or author’s, chances of being discovered, sold and read is a sad thing. 
 
 E& P, whose website bills it as “the oldest journal covering the newspaper industry” is only the latest casualty in the past few months, as trades and consumer glossies alike, such as Gourmet, have been closed for good. 
 
 Who’s next?
– Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews will shut down after the Nielsen Company today sold off most of its other magazine properties—including Billboard and the Hollywood Reporter—to a new media consortium. Nielsen spun the move as a chance “to strengthen investment in our core businesses,” reports Business Insider. But the loss of the prominent trade publications shook the publishing industry. The 108-year-old E&P is "the industry bible of newspapering," True/Slant observes, and the eBookNewser blog describes the shuttering of Kirkus as "a big blow." Other publications sold to e5 Global Media Holdings include Brandweek, Mediaweek, Backstage, and Adweek, which broke the story. Nielsen said it will “continue to assess the strategic fit of our remaining portfolio of publications.”