pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

carpe patreon

and tbh i really do think some Defector-style site could wildly succeed, they've just get out there and seize the opportunity.

― omar little, Thursday, January 25, 2024 1:24 PM (thirty-one minutes ago)

not a criticism of this post specifically but i think in general when people bring up defector they have to remember a couple of things

1. deadspin was a part of a group of websites where what would now be called something like "community building" was prioritized from the very top of management and threaded through everything the company did. writers were encouraged to interact with and cultivate relationships with commenters, commenters were encouraged to write blog themselves, the line between writer and reader was constantly being blurred, the connection between the two was to be as tight as conjoined twins

2. the deadspin staff quit in a highly publicized event, amid arguments w/ comically evil bosses, during the trump administration, when people (liberal website readers, the press) were highly attuned to stories about i.e. malfeasance of power, people being silenced for their political opinions, unions etc

3. so when they walked off the job you had an easily packaged news story that hit hot button sociopolitical topics (bernie sanders tweeted his support) *PLUS* a very loyal readership base that had been built up over a decade-plus who were ready to follow an equally loyal set of writers & editors to the ends of the earth to keep the website alive

this combination of leveraging a sizable and passionate audience as well as catching run off subs from people who saw supporting defector in the same light as subbing to the washington post, or who maybe just read about the drama in the news and liked the idea of an independent sports site, is very hard to impossible to replicate. a group of writers banding together to start a new music site would have a really big hill to climb that the defector guys, to their immense credit, had already spent 5-10 years scaling

It's also possible that Pitchfork won't change as much as we assume.

you're correct on all those points, which created a perfect storm, and also i'm sure there was a lot of righteous anger remaining from those who had followed the gawker saga and wanted to support a group of writers who were related to that site and to an extent represented the best aspects of gawker media.

he energy of the people who made it what it was, both readers and writers, still exists.

― beard papa, Thursday, January 25, 2024 1:17 PM (one hour ago)

i'm of two minds of this. i think this is somewhat true, and i also feel excited by the future of a return to blogging for music criticism, i think it will lead to some really good coverage that would not fit in a more institutional setting. no bells already a great example of this

by the same token, if there's no money in music writing, it will continue to be a young person's game, even accelerating along that path, and young music writers are good for a lot of things, like translating culture and surfacing new artists and being canon breaking shitheads, but they are also bad at a lot of things, like being stewards of history, bringing real life experiences to their writing, being good writers... etc

so i think there will be a lot that we lose even as we possibly gain some stuff in whatever rises from these ashes

I've been seeing this like this pop up on social media: A new music magazine (via Broccoli)

Also, Defector and Pitchfork are fundamentally different things because people's relationship to sports (the way they think about it, the way and the degree to which they argue/obsess over it) is fundamentally different from their relationship to music. Just look at how music people talk about the Super Bowl halftime show (scoffing, shrugging) vs how sports people talk about the Super Bowl (the most important thing to ever happen).

J0rdan S. otm, just also want to chime in with the so-obvious-it-barely-needs-restating fact that sports coverage is historically way more popular than music coverage. Feels relevant to the Defector story

xp

looks like i xp-ed with unperson making the same poitn more eloquently

and I've got old-timer friends who lament what ESPN did to sports reporting

Just look at how music people talk about the Super Bowl halftime show (scoffing, shrugging)

A better Super Bowl analogy is probably something like the Grammys or RRHOF inducion... which do generate a lot of scoffing & shrugging, but also online chatter among "music fans" (although not so much here)

and I've got old-timer friends who lament what ESPN did to sports reporting

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, January 25, 2024 1:40 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

these are pretty prevalent opinions especially since ESPN switched over to a Stephen A. Smith hot take format for the most part

The RRHOF is so stupid but it was the catalyst for Loutallica.

A better Super Bowl analogy is probably something like the Grammys or RRHOF induction

Fair enough. I muted the word "Grammy" on Twitter several years ago because I felt so bad for all my putative peers having to pretend to give a shit (or, worse yet, actually getting excited) about that shitshow.

That explains why you missed my tweets offering you $50K to help promote Grammy Crackers, my new snack product

i also think that sports journalism was more easily able to adapt to having less access to talent, as well as that talent becoming more media trained and less interesting, than music and other celebrity journalism. people consider the analysis of sports to be part and parcel w/ the basic act of consuming the sport -- every TV broadcast of every game has multiple people training a critical eye to what is being broadcast, synthesizing information for the audience in real time etc. sports journalism has been pretty hard hit (check the LA times and ESPN layoffs) so i don't want to go too far, but the idea that you watch the game and then read (or watch or listen to) analysis about it is simple muscle memory for most sports fans. sprouting from this is the idea that deadspin -- whose motto was "sports news without access, favor, or discretion" -- could not just survive but thrive in a role where the lack of access is highlighted as a selling point.

the same just isn't true for music... there's a much, much smaller portion of music listeners who hear a new song or new album and then, to put it in a sports parlance, think to themselves "my experience here is not complete without a post-game break down." so the market for analysis is just not as robust even as a matter of percentage of interest w/in this readership bubble, which puts more emphasis on the need for access -- a music publication "without access" is, essentially, a blog, and we're pretty aware at this point that you can't employ 12-15 people by running a music blog. so if you were trying to run a business (as defector is) you would need some level of access, but who is going to give access, good access, to a fledgling music site? which musicians are even open to giving a good quote? and anyway what is even the point of the access? (everybody in culture journalism knows the answer to this now: there isn't one)

once you start thinking about music writing as a business it's really hard to bridge some of these gaps in the way that lay people just intrinsically think of the product that this entire journalistic apparatus exists around

Just to reinforce the point that Deadspin had writers whom readers were eager to follow elsewhere: Drew Magary has 173K Twitter followers, and David Roth has 137K. Both of them have their own Wikipedia pages. Meanwhile, of the people listed on the Pitchfork masthead before last week, it looks like the one with the most Twitter followers is Philip Sherburne with 26K, followed by Puja Patel with 25K. Neither of them have their own Wikipedia page (nor, as far as I can tell, do any other former staffers, including Ryan Schreiber).

a music publication "without access" is, essentially, a blog, and we're pretty aware at this point that you can't employ 12-15 people by running a music blog. so if you were trying to run a business (as defector is) you would need some level of access, but who is going to give access, good access, to a fledgling music site? which musicians are even open to giving a good quote? and anyway what is even the point of the access? (everybody in culture journalism knows the answer to this now: there isn't one)

You may not be able to run a successful mainstream pop music website anymore (for multiple reasons, from lack of access to big stars to fear of stan armies and on and on), but it's my belief that there's absolutely room in the world for smaller, more niche music websites. If you narrow your focus to just, say, country music, you'll a) still be able to get access; b) reach a devoted audience, even if that audience only numbers in the thousands; c) quickly earn respect within the industry if you do the work properly. The same is true of jazz, and within jazz there's a hidden economy — music schools and instrument manufacturers do heavy ad buys in DownBeat and Jazziz (and, once upon a time, in Jazz Times, before that magazine was bought and set on fire by its insane new owner). Look at AllAboutJazz, a website that just keeps plugging away year after year. No one in the broader media ecosystem is paying attention to it, but it's self-sustaining, and therefore successful.

but the idea that you watch the game and then read (or watch or listen to) analysis about it is simple muscle memory for most sports fans.

I literally spend a week listening to sports talk radio and podcasts and reading articles about the upcoming Vikings game, then watch it, the spend the next day reading articles and listening to podcasts about the game that I just watched.

A nice post by Mark Richardson, reminiscing about some of the Pitchfork staffers who were let go:
https://markrichardson.substack.com/p/early-encounters-with-future-pitchfork

xpost MetalSucks still stays afloat too, it seems

(to unperson)

Just to reinforce the point that Deadspin had writers whom readers were eager to follow elsewhere: Drew Magary has 173K Twitter followers, and David Roth has 137K. Both of them have their own Wikipedia pages. Meanwhile, of the people listed on the Pitchfork masthead before last week, it looks like the one with the most Twitter followers is Philip Sherburne with 26K, followed by Puja Patel with 25K. Neither of them have their own Wikipedia page (nor, as far as I can tell, do any other former staffers, including Ryan Schreiber).

I know it was previously mentioned that there's really no such thing as a "household name" music critic, but it does feel to me that p4k, as good as the writing could be, didn't often publish writing that overwhelmed the institutional voice, if that makes sense.

It had a lot of great, admired writers, but doesn't really have a "break-out" voice like Magary or Roth, or like Charles Aaron in Spin, or even like the AVClub writers a decade ago. Not sure if this was an institutional prerogative, or if it's the difference between how Pitchfork related to its readers, compared to Gawker/Deadspin (as J0rdan S. described) or AVClub.

for the record i'm not saying i wish that p4k was more like the circa-2010 avclub

I mean that was essentially The Dissolve.

"Pitchfork" wasn't even a "household name" tbf

i've been thinking this week about an interaction i had a pitchfork festival some years ago where a random kid in the crowd noticed my VIP bracelet and asked me how i got it, and when i said "well, i write for the site" he said "what site?"

straight out of a Greta Gerwig script

A music Defector would need to be more like the columns section of Punk Planet than PFork, developing the personalities and engagement through snark.

I wonder what happened to that Veronica Mars character who got a Pitchfork internship

AllAboutJazz, Metal Sucks ... there are a half-dozen equivalents for country music and punk and maybe others. I actually think there's more room for these kinds of sites now than there used to be, and that they get better access to artists / artists are more open to talking to them than ever before. Every week, I see what I think is a reasonably "big" artist doing an interview with some website I've never heard of. (Granted, my reasonably big is probably two levels below the artists J0rdan is talking about that wouldn't give access to a fledgling music site.)

Of course, I don't think any of these kinds of places can actually make a living for more than one person, maybe two ... and certainly not 12-15.

thank you for the link jaymc, I enjoyed reading that long post by Mark Richardson

I wonder what happened to that Veronica Mars character who got a Pitchfork internship

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Thursday, January 25, 2024 5:39 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

He reviewed a Swedish indie-pop album:
https://pitchfork.com/artists/5248-sakert/

(In his Rolling Stone piece, Marc Hogan wrote, "When a character on the TV show Veronica Mars mentioned getting an internship at Pitchfork, the editors playfully slapped his byline on one of my reviews.")

Playful slapping in the Pitchfork office

i've been thinking this week about an interaction i had a pitchfork festival some years ago where a random kid in the crowd noticed my VIP bracelet and asked me how i got it, and when i said "well, i write for the site" he said "what site?"

papal hotwife (milo z) at 5:36 25 Jan 24

A music Defector would need to be more like the columns section of Punk Planet than PFork, developing the personalities and engagement through snark.

Buddyhead's time has come again

Buddyhead: For when early ILX hot takes don't go as far or hard as one would want.

I sometimes still wonder if those Buddyhead bros ever saved up enough trade-in credit to get that Velvet Underground box set.

I will never understand a world where Buddyhead so thoroughly and meticulously destroyed the idea of "emo" as anything but the lamest, most poser-est loser shit around, and now we have to pretend this didn't happen as modern critics tell us we need to get serious about its return

whiney, have you met my friend MISTER DISCOURSE?

i said whiney don'tchu know that things go in cycles?

p4k, as good as the writing could be, didn't often publish writing that overwhelmed the institutional voice, if that makes sense.

yeah i think this was a relative weakness of the approach, especially as the institutional voice is what everyone got particularly weird about

A better Super Bowl analogy is probably something like the Grammys or RRHOF inducion...

ehhh i don't think there is a good super bowl analogy at all because there just isn't anything so central to music, and even by awards show standards the grammys are a weird perpetually out of touch joke that no one really takes seriously as meaning very much.

Mister discourse
Oh the time has come

Pitchfork maybe overcorrected in moderating wilder impulses, but I thought there were plenty of distinct voices there. Maybe not promoted as such, exactly, but still quite clear. (Some writing was better than others, as everywhere.)

she thought it was a literal festival for pitchforks

https://i0.wp.com/www.onesnladay.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/12-5-2009_0.30.17.01.jpg?w=624&quality=89&ssl=1

Tbf the kid was just there to see R. Kelly

am i remembering that there used to be another pitchfork.com that was a family website or something? in the early years? or am i confusing it with something else?

It was a livestock website

yeah the music site was pitchforkmedia.com until they bought the pitchfork.com domain in the late 2000s

have i really been reading pfork for half of my life? my goodness.