pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

The second decimation of music journalism as gainful employment after alt-weeklies had to stop publishing escort ads that paid the bills.

That is actually true. Classifieds killed alt-weeklies.

as in, the elimination of classifieds

conde is saying two things at once

1. this brand is not valuable enough to us for it to have a staff
2. this brand is too valuable to us for us to sell it

the conversations about whether pitchfork went too poptimist are missing the forest for the trees. if conde had an issue w/ pitchfork's editorial direction they could have fired the editor and changed the direction, this happens all the time. if pitchfork had been run completely into the ground they would have just sold it and recouped whatever money they could. instead what they're essentially saying is that the value of the work of the site -- the writing -- is reaching its endpoint and they no longer have any reason to pay people to produce it. this is a much larger commentary on the state of music writing & its value to corporations, that transcends any decisions made within pitchfork about its editorial direction

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Thursday, January 18, 2024 12:40 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

My guess is they see pitchfork as having strong brand equity through its reputation but don't seem to believe that it currently functions in a way that produces the best ROI, which is something they would judge by measuring the operating costs versus the engagement with their weekly content.

one of the signs of the death of alt-weeklies: LA Weekly running car accident fatality news stories as advertisements for local ambulance chasing attorney "Sweet James".

you'd also probably not be surprised how many executive vice presidents of digital content or whatever the fuck fake titles are idiots and know nothing about content or editorial or anything about websites and are just making bullshit gut decisions based on nothing but their own inflated sense of their own brilliance

That's how public universities are run these days.

AV Club's current "uselessness" is the direct result of corporate decisions like the one made yesterday, btw. (Fucking Spanfeller... although he's obviously just a symptom of a larger problem.)

Yeah I was gonna say, AV Club is just farther along the corporate destruction path than Pitchfork.

Yeah, what G/O Media did to the former Gawker Media properties was a glimpse of that kind of executive incompetence. I'd like to think that Conde Nast has a better idea of how to manage a portfolio of websites, but...

yeah AV Club at present is a direct result of all that obv, it even has some AI "articles"

I guess I don’t understand the overarching take here — we’re in a thread whose premise is all of the reasons Pitchfork is dumb, I’ve literally been reading all of the individual reasons why music fans “don't read” or “don’t take seriously” Pitchfork across wide reaches of internet message boards for 20+ years now, but make any changes to it and you think that the collective arm of critical music universe had just been amputated.
― Slim is an Alien, Thursday, January 18, 2024 12:36 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Does the aphorism “a rising tide lifts all boats” have an opposite? Maybe “a storm at sea sinks ‘em all?” I’d bet half of this board have at one time or another been music writers, musicians, label owners, DJs, booking agents, what have you. However one feels about Pitchfork, it served a vital role in keeping the engine running, even if it was occasionally the site we all loved to hate. This move will have disastrous consequences beyond Pitchfork.

instead what they're essentially saying is that the value of the work of the site -- the writing -- is reaching its endpoint and they no longer have any reason to pay people to produce it. this is a much larger commentary on the state of music writing & its value to corporations, that transcends any decisions made within pitchfork about its editorial direction
― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Thursday, January 18, 2024 12:40 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

in other words, exactly this

not mentioned here yet, as far as i can tell, is that condé nast is currently being run by a ceo with absolutely no experience or demonstrated interest in the publishing business. he does, however, play guitar in a classic rock cover band, so yay.

of course he does

instead what they're essentially saying is that the value of the work of the site -- the writing -- is reaching its endpoint and they no longer have any reason to pay people to produce it. this is a much larger commentary on the state of music writing & its value to corporations, that transcends any decisions made within pitchfork about its editorial direction

Just bolding for emphasis here, because this is where so much public misunderstanding about media comes from. They hear about cuts and layoffs and profit struggles and assume that it means there's just no audience interest or the quality of the content has declined or whatever. But none of that is necessarily true. For big media companies, especially publicly traded ones but even private ones like CN (which is possibly trying to make itself more attractive for acquisition), value is almost always related to growth potential. We made this much this year, how do we make this + 10 percent next year?

The idea of a sustainable product with niche appeal that can basically pay its expenses and salaries while producing something good for a dedicated audience is just not interesting. But that doesn't mean it can't work for people who are not trying to build an empire or start something with the goal of selling it and cashing out in 5-10 years. It just takes a different model.

off topic nice to see you maura and shakey!

for real

I do definitely understand this hurting from the point of view of this being one of the last outposts of the general type of journalism that used to be abundant even 20 years ago, and that for a music journalist in the 2020s Pitchfork probably provided the best opportunity to have any sort of career in that field, and that these layoffs are just another example of the entire industry crumbling before our eyes explicitly in the name of greed and no one can really do anything about it.

Yeah I was gonna say, AV Club is just farther along the corporate destruction path than Pitchfork.

I feel the Gawker implosion was a sort of contemporaneous inflection point. In lots of ways, come to think of it, given the interference of Thiel and the rise of the pubic billionaire asshole.

you'd also probably not be surprised how many executive vice presidents of digital content or whatever the fuck fake titles are idiots and know nothing about content or editorial or anything about websites and are just making bullshit gut decisions based on nothing but their own inflated sense of their own brilliance

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, January 18, 2024 12:55 PM (forty minutes ago)

this is correct but it's also goes back to the concept people need to internalize which is that there isn't an objective way to make decisions based on the data gleaned from 12 million clicks per month. by which i mean, this data only tells you so much -- it tells you how many people clicked your site, and their demographic info, and how they may have gotten to your site, though in reality these days the majority of web traffic is coming from "dark" sources i.e. group chats, DMs, discords etc that traffic companies can't actually locate. but none of this data tells you *why* people are clicking, or how they feel about your site, or whether they know it exists, or what their perception is of it based on their one visit and why or why they might not come back. so putting a value on a website does actually require gut feelings -- the ability to see the present and future of the business and how you may be able to make that work for you -- or simply the desire to protect a site because you find it intellectually/socially valuable. but all the people who are smart enough to make good gut decisions about websites or who care enough about journalism to protect it are no longer in positions of power either because they've been forced out of the industry or left to make more money doing other things. nick denton, for instance, was a dynamic thinker who cared deeply about the societal function of journalism & tried to create websites that could be as journalistically valuable as they were monetarily valuable -- none of that applies to roger lynch. these conversations make it consistently clear that people want to believe that you can simply look at a line graph of traffic and be like "well this website's business is healthy and that one's isn't" but it just is not that simple

great posts, J0rdan

More layoffs in wider media. Not much is making enough money for the people at the top.

Media news: A big round of layoffs is coming at the LA Times. A week after editor Kevin Merida quit, the newsroom union emailed members late last night saying management has notified them of a coming major round of layoffs.

Union email: "Folks, this is the Big One." pic.twitter.com/vWBROkE9on

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) January 18, 2024

Laura Snapes:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/jan/18/pitchforks-absorption-into-gq-is-a-travesty-for-music-media-and-musicians

RIP

― famous instagram dog (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, January 18, 2024 12:24 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Classic Shakey.

I don’t understand Conde’s decision, but the problems at Pitchfork didn’t start with Conde, they started when companies like Apple stopped giving Pitchfork fat checks for display ads.

— Tal Rosenberg (@talrosenberg) January 18, 2024

Advertising-supported media is a dead-end post-2008, for all but the hugest companies. It just is. And even for, like, the NYT, ad revenue has been eclipsed by subscriptions — it makes about 4x as much from digital subscriptions now as from ALL advertising (print and online).

the solution staring us all in the face: p4k crossword

how's The New Yorker doing these days

https://defector.com/music-journalism-cant-afford-a-hollowed-out-pitchfork

the solution staring us all in the face: p4k crossword

love that Laura Snapes piece

6 Across: GAPDYX

The Music Review, 1966-2024, R.I.P., basically

xp to the tweet jaymc posted

i think part of the problem pitchfork had is that if you're writing a check to spend a lot of money advertising with conde nast, why would you want your ad to appear on pitchfork vs vanity fair, vogue, the new yorker, gq, bon appetit etc? maybe your brand is after an audience that you can narrowly define as being pitchfork's strictly, but i don't think that can be an entire business at the scale that conde nast requires.

but it used to be! it's important to remember the context of what was happening in 2015 when conde bought pitchfork. this was the peak of brands pouring money into some vague idea of (hipster runoff voice) "alt" music, music as culture etc -- red bull music academy events all over the globe, sxsw brand activation culture, chipotle writing huge checks to fiona apple and frank ocean etc. there were scores of journalists whose jobs were directly subsidized by one time ad spends... one was the vice brisk bodega, which was a festival series w/ a new web vertical attached that required hiring a handful of journalists, including the guy who would go on to run noisey and then fader before being me too'd. conde bought into a bubble, frankly, and when it popped they still had a healthy website but not one that was part of a culture that was going to make apple (or converse or...) raise their hand and say "we're writing a multi million dollar check to pitchfork". i want to emphasize again how much of this is related to broad cultural trends that far transcend any decisions pitchfork made about its editorial direction, anything directly related to poptimism as a critical framework etc

so what is left of that culture now? the answer, essentially, is music festivals. what part of pitchfork can survive w/o an editorial staff producing journalism? right. it's all connected

paging carles

― nxd, Thursday, March 8, 2018 9:28 AM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

don't kill the whale

I was part of the entire staff of XLR8R being let go in 2011– in 2010 I had forfeited my in-office position because I was being pressured to “clean up” my reviews to please advertisers, and my interests were being drawn elsewhere.

I can honestly say that writing about music professionally was the best job I ever had, at least in terms of satisfaction and learning that occurred. Just like I feel pity for younger generations who don’t have to search and seek for “the weird stuff,” I also pity those would-be music writers who will never get started now. It really sucks.

That said, young people love zines and esoteric website, at least the art school kids that I teach tend to like these things, so there’s some hope beyond the broad reach that P4k embodied. That is to say— I don’t think music or album reviews are over. But a clearinghouse website like P4k might never be in the cards ever again.

i mean if we're gonna really go digital diy and create the new generation of zines, angelfire still exists.

how's yall's html game?

(wonder if i can still log in to my old one??)

Lol @ the pic

I write about the collapse at Pitchfork—which will be merged into GQ magazine.

Link in the thread below. pic.twitter.com/C83tKeZLJN

— Ted Gioia (@tedgioia) January 18, 2024

Terrifying AI turntable/typewriter

I don't know if this means anything, but https://pitchfork.com/ad/ says that the site receives "more than 7 million monthly unique visitors," which is a more significant data point in the digital ad business than the total number of site visits.

A version of that line has existed on the page ever since 2009 (I think that's when they acquired the pitchfork.com domain), when it said there were 1.8 million monthly unique visitors. After that, it climbed a little bit each year, reaching 5 million at the time of the Conde Nast sale in October 2015. By the end of 2015, the figure had been updated to 7 million ... and it hasn't been updated since.

Meanwhile, the Pitchfork media kit for advertisers on the Conde Nast site says that Pitchfork has 4 million monthly uniques as of 2022.

So, that figure seems to have either plateaued or declined since the sale. Not trying to make a point one way or another, just thought that was interesting.

It's a useful metric for thinking about potential audience size. Like, what if you could convert 1/2 of 1 percent of 4 million to a paid monthly subscription? That's 20,000 people, if you got them to pay $5 a month each that's $100k a month. You can't conquer the world on $100k a month, but you could sure start something.

Working out for Elon

Fuuuuuck Ted Gioia.

As you were.

ted gioia can fuck off, and no, i haven’t read what he wrote.

Fuuuuuck Ted Gioia.

As you were.

Working out for Elon

lol well it helps to not start $44 billion in debt

Bob Lefsetz + Jeff Jarvis = Ted Gioia.

Racket MN does annual reports, probably the most detail, transparent financials and metrics you could find for any subscription based website

https://racketmn.com/rackets-year-in-review-august-2022-july-2023

Marc Hogan's piece here is key

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/pitchfork-music-gq-1234949447/