pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

I mean that was just Ryan at his folks’ place, pretty much.

This feels so much more brutal that they were folded into fucking gq and not, like, the New Yorker. Whcih would make a lot more sense for the actual content they produce (ie news and criticism)

But ok I guess the place that panned the dare can be part of the magazine that gave weight to buzz about the dare, or whatever

i use an adblocker and I assume a good percentage of pitchfork's reader base did as well, I can't imagine ads there being hugely successful for revenue

folding it into gq is really about the cruelest and saddest thing they could have done with it

Folding it into GQ must be some kind of joke, that's like the smallest dent or compensation into the void being left behind. Something has to take its place. Some benevolent patron that cares to put money down to start something and use the capital to protect the independence of the editorial line ? Is that a trend in the US ?

This reminds me of being a young kid and my fave comic got 'merged' with the Beano or Dandy and it appeared on the cover for 2 issues "The Dandy now incorporating..." then that was it.

the better trend is worker-owned publications like defector and the wire

I've been reading since the early doofus days and I was happy about the broader coverage. I always read the Taylor reviews and I'm not even a big fan; I wanted to see what Pitchfork specifically was saying about this musician that was inescapable but I hadn't really listened to. I like to think that a lot of the old timers grew out of their indie phase and wanted to hear about more music. Pitchfork heavily shaped what I listen to and this sucks. Money ruins everything.

I remember when Entertainment Weekly was really good, and then it went to shit. AV Club too. I hope some of the writers can get something else going on a new site.

xp is tridentmedia.com available?

I pdf’d every album and track review I wrote, finally.

was hoping i’d wake up today to realize this was all a bad dream

i’ve been a freelance writer since i was in college but i think i became a “real” writer when i started writing for pfork in 2015, it was just the most consistent writing-editing relationship i’d had up to that point, and around the time they started doing the sunday reviews i felt my work dramatically improving. however much writing for the internet totally sucks (the money is bad until it’s ok, the audience thinks you’re the publication and hates you by proxy, it is a ton of work for something that ppl are barely aware of), it was an incredible resource for developing writers to figure out how to do something that is pretty difficult to do well + get paid for it, and then it was pretty much the only resource, and now pitchfork as i recognize it doesn’t exist, and now…. what

real cinderella “don’t know what you got til it’s gone” hours

it just occurred to me that it's probably the only website that I've been reading for 25+ years

^same, in shock

i want to email everyone i know who got fired and im realizing ive only ever used their pfork emails in the vast majority of cases. gonna have to hope they weren’t immediately nuked or at least end up forwarding to another address. idk, fucked!

I've had a number of longterm gigs, the best of which were with Stylus and SPIN, but the line editing I got at Pitchfork and The Pitchfork Review was more rigorous than the legit complaints posted earlier in this thread suggest. I hit my stride at Pitchfork as the pandemic, actually, although I'd started a few years earlier.

My sincere condolences to all ilxors with personal and/or professional connections there. This sucks. It's been unfashionable to like pitchfork since the late 00s in my world (though this faded a bit as people grew up), but I've always appreciated it--you just had to learn how to read it for your own purposes and not freak out if you saw a name you didn't like in a headline. I'm genuinely a bit worried how this affect my capacity to track certain kinds of new music!

Kinda funny that it's Taylor Swift some keep mentioning as a sign of decline, when two of the biggest music nerds I know irl are both nuts about her. I'm not a fan, but ignoring her was v dubious.

also just realized that Anna Wintour wrote the email that was posted on twitter...something very odd about that.

As a friend of mine put it somewhere, "the actual apotheosis of ad funded services is just a sea of robots creating 'content' for other robots to consume, cutting the pesky humans out of the loop." That's the true singularity of late stage capitalism.

also just realized that Anna Wintour wrote the email that was posted on twitter...something very odd about that.

― rob, Thursday, January 18, 2024 9:25 AM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i do not think it was wintour, pfork has a staffer named anna

could’ve been wintour, she’s the “chief content officer” for conde nast and these messages usually come from high up

The articles on this that I've read are attributing it to Wintour

oh lol what do i know then

By volume, Pitchfork has the highest daily site visitors of any of our titles; their higher consuming segments generate more unique page views by volume than any title. This despite scant resourcing, esp from corporate. Well-placed in a post-scale era (or was)

— Claire Willett (@clairedwillett) January 17, 2024

re: visitor stats

is that English

Was definitely Wintour

p4k gets (or i guess got) the most daily visitors of any conde nast publications & has dedicated readers who generate more unique page views than their other publications, despite conde nast giving it less resources?

lol everything about this is so surreal and wrong

So they did post a new review today (Bruiser Wolf album) which I'm sure was ready to go already. I'm wondering, since so many here are talking about Pitchfork in the past tense, whether anyone thinks it's going to continue in any kind of recognizable form? They didn't lay off the entire staff after all. Will those of you who have written for them keep sending them pitches?

Arguing over whether Pitchfork was too populist or not populist enough is pointless. Music publications went out with the ark (unless you have a boomer fueled readership like RS or Mojo)

Realized this morning that Pitchfork is easily the longest running site I've checked at least weekly, if not daily. Predates even ILX by several years. Can't remember exactly when I first discovered it, but I would guess Fall of '98, which would mean at least a quarter of a century. Kind of amazing to realize that.

Not to say I didn't get annoyed and/or frustrated by their focus and approach many times, but there were always just enough great writers popping up to make it worth the visit.

So they did post a new review today (Bruiser Wolf album) which I'm sure was ready to go already. I'm wondering, since so many here are talking about Pitchfork in the past tense, whether anyone thinks it's going to continue in any kind of recognizable form? They didn't lay off the entire staff after all. Will those of you who have written for them keep sending them pitches?

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes)

Depends.

Most of the criticism Triassic-era Pitchfork received was earned! Homophobic and clueless. I didn't read them semi-regularly until at least 2006 and even then at Stylus I thought we were their superiors by a margin of a 100 (it made sense that when Stylus went under Pitchfork hired several of our best). But impressions become adamantine. 2018 Pitchfork wasn't even 2014 Pitchfork.

So they did post a new review today (Bruiser Wolf album) which I'm sure was ready to go already. I'm wondering, since so many here are talking about Pitchfork in the past tense, whether anyone thinks it's going to continue in any kind of recognizable form? They didn't lay off the entire staff after all. Will those of you who have written for them keep sending them pitches?

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Thursday, January 18, 2024 9:54 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

i mean the two ppl i primarily pitched to and have been edited by are still there, so idk! but the entire structure around them has been deleted and is getting replaced by gq people so that's a wildly different environment in which my pieces go up. obv i'm grieving bc writing for a pitchfork without amy phillips on the masthead seems inconceivable to me, even though i never wrote for the news section

I assume one of those is Jeremy Larson?

i figure it just hobbles along as a shell of what it was for a while and gradually turns into just being gq's music section that no one cares about

https://x.com/Marcissist/status/1747745164024766546?s=20

Marc Masters 🌵
@Marcissist
If yr bummed about P4k news today one thing you could do is stop paying for or using streaming services. It’s all connected. If there were more money in making music there would be more in writing about it. And in human recommendation rather than algorithms.
5:18 PM · Jan 17, 2024
·
68K
Views

sorry for weird formatting, but this is the take I am here for

Eric Harvey waxes nostalgic:
https://ericdharvey.substack.com/p/pitchfork-and-me

UFO’s prediction is what will probably happen

maybe it the brand basically stops existing eventually and someone else buys it. that's probably the most positive outcome for the idea of p4k lol

*it as a brand

Nonprofit, subscription-based site with commitment to independence — “We will never sell!” — I think that’s the most likely model for somebody to put together a good music-writing site. Cheap subscriptions, like $5 a month/$40 a year. Get some good names on board as contributors, launch with a GoFundMe or whatever, add more talent as revenues allow. It’s doable I think, for the right five people with good leadership. (lol I know there are a whole lot of ifs in that equation.)

For all the criticisms of Pitchfork I’ve voiced in this thread (and some I haven’t), it the only (non social media) site I visit daily, and have done for years. I’ve discovered artists & gotten into entire genres from it; I genuinely wonder what else (if anything) that exists now could do the same, and as rob said above, I'm unsure how this will impact my discovery of music (i.e., my life may genuinely be poorer without Pfork). I also do/did love some of the writing.

I don't really want to call them out by name, but I had to unfollow a certain one person niche review site that had a heroically bad take about this that was disappointing to see.

i('ve) visited pitchfork daily for over a decade (had it been born earlier it would be longer no doubt). definitely had a huge impact on my life ever since - discovering artists and, early on, probably really streghtening my enthusiasm for music writing at the right age. this is a miserable one.

Even as the site expanded its coverage beyond indie music (a transition that began 20+ years ago, fwiw), it retained a distinct editorial perspective. Sure, it was more likely to review mainstream artists, but it didn't just uncritically embrace anyone on the pop charts. For me, the site was a great way to discover which mainstream artists were worth paying attention to. And anyway, in Pitchfork's world, someone like Caroline Polachek was considered as big of a star as Olivia Rodrigo. That kind of curation, across genres and levels of fame, was incredibly valuable.

I started reading pitchfork in ‘02 or ‘03 — likely ‘02 based on what I’ve since seen on the wayback machine, haha. It took me a couple years to realize that I deeply despise the type of indie rock it promoted — anything along the lines of Sufjan Stevens, Broken Social Scene, the Microphones I really can’t stand — but it was exciting to be a teenager and realize that there was an entirely alternate musical world out there that offered something different than what classic rock could. They did always review more interesting stuff as well even if it didn’t always take the top headline under the reviews.

That said, Pitchfork has felt as corporate, consumerist, and vapid as anything else out there for at least a decade, so other than the layoffs, I’m surprised that this is causing such an upheaval in the music world. It doesn’t really even feel like it presents itself as a place to learn about music anymore — you get the same major artist news updates that Rolling Stone etc probably cover and the reviews seem a mix of radio garbage, payola publicity, and hopeless attempts to appear relevant in a changing digital landscape.