pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

there is potentially possibly not really but let's just run with this idea perhaps one person on planet earth who if they devoted their entire life to reviving coverage of the music that was foundational to pitchfork for several years could at some point down the road eke out a modest full time living via a small subscriber base that loves indie rock music journalism enough to pay for it monthly

That’s one example. You can’t tell me there hasn’t been a massive increase in coverage of Taylor Swift. And im not complaining, so please save your energy in piling on the idiot or whatever. If they are folding it under fucking GQ, then I’m probably not that far off in my assumption.

You can’t tell me there hasn’t been a massive increase in coverage of Taylor Swift.

this is like the one example in pop that's more recent because they didn't review her at all until 2019 which was a real notable absence in their coverage of the pop landscape at the time

but again, they definitely haven't stopped covering indie rock and no one is disputing their coverage has gotten broader over time

Anyway, I figured someone on here would have some insight into the readership numbers so we could skip all the speculation or bemoaning how it’s unconscionable.

very sad news. i love pitchfork

https://www.similarweb.com/website/pitchfork.com/#traffic

11.8M total visits in November
vs.
23.1M Rolling Stone
17.6M Billboard
9.1M NME
3.1M Stereogum
1.5M Spin

(Can't see traffic over time without a paid account.)

Xxpost so which numbers do you need? How much less Pitchfork would have made without the Taylor Swift news? How much more they would make if they turned into indie Mojo and just did oral histories of the Moon and Antartica or whatever? Some insight into why a huge corporation might decide to slash a bunch of jobs?

kinda amazed nme still gets that much

another better website will emerge that isn’t owned by a massive corporation

when was the last time you saw a new website?

That new weight loss website ro or whatever.

12 million should be more than enough but that is just an uneducated guess.

how does the quietus stay afloat? do they pay writers? is there an actual 'company' that runs it now?

@left - what i meant was that maybe a door could open for an existing website (like a Quietus) to capture readers that never ventured beyond pfork. Probably unlikely but theres clearly a market with 11 million monthly readers that probably dont want to moce on to NME or RS.

they have a subscription model which gives access to some exclusive articles & a podcast i think, in addition to advertising, but last year they mentioned cutting back significantly and publicly did a subscription drive because they were struggling

the quietus is not going to be able to fill the large niche pitchfork did, nor do i think anyone involved in it is really interested trying to be the new pitchfork. the closest in terms of general vibe is probably like, stereogum (though definitely more indie-oriented and less interesting) but they put out an order of magnitude less reviews as-is. the idea of an album reviews section is probably just dead now, or won't last much longer

Fwiw GQ.com only got 12.1M total visits in November. And to pick a few other Conde Nast titles:

17.5M Vogue
17M New Yorker
13.4M Bon Appetit
12.2M Vanity Fair

But these numbers obv don't tell the whole story when it comes to ad revenue.

they have a subscription model which gives access to some exclusive articles & a podcast i think, in addition to advertising, but last year they mentioned cutting back significantly and publicly did a subscription drive because they were struggling

Hi, tQ writer/subscriber here -- without pretending deep knowledge, the more recent state of things is that said drive really helped and in general the vibe has been more positive of late on these fronts. But no, it won't replace Pitchfork and won't try, it's on its own particular plane.

i'm glad to hear that things are working out there at the moment!

But these numbers obv don't tell the whole story when it comes to ad revenue.

i'd guess that there's some nonsense about p4k's demographics not being favourable enough to advertisers for very silly reasons that the ad industry, conde naste execs, etc. nonetheless take completely seriously

gotta chase that millennial male audience after all

No new content has been posted for Jan. 18, and there’s a big “Sign In” link at the top of the homepage :/

RIP

It's amazing they had been around long enough to have reviewed Ok Computer on release.

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