At some point in journalism school, I decided it was my dream to write for Pitchfork. I wanted to be an “arts and culture writer,” not because I thought it was a job I’d actually get but because I was one of those artsy gay J-school kids who didn’t want to be in broadcast and didn’t want to write news. To deepen my knowledge of music, I committed to reading Pitchfork every day, which was known for its regular, incisive music criticism. I used to fill my notebook with handwritten album reviews, bastardizing Pitchfork’s trademark verbose style. I’d study how Stacey Anderson described Lorde’s “percussive delivery” in “bacchanalian bangers” in her 2017 review of Melodrama, or how Paul A. Thompson wrote that Pusha T’s 2018 record Daytona skews “grim and steely.” I graduated from my Moleskine years ago, but I still sneak Pitchfork-esque turns of phrase into my writing.
I’m a religious Pitchfork reader, but I don’t think my dream of writing for them will come true. In January, Anna Wintour, the chief content officer of Pitchfork’s parent company, Condé Nast, announced that her company would fold the music site into its marquee men’s fashion title, GQ. The news was accompanied by a slew of layoffs at the publication, including the dismissal of editor-in-chief Puja Patel. The layoffs are endemic to the industry: notable publications like the Los Angeles Times and Sports Illustrated have also let go of huge portions of their staff. As Ezra Klein writes in his New York Times eulogy for Pitchfork, “the middle is collapsing in journalism,” meaning that unless a publication is an enormous operation or a boutique blog, it can’t sustain itself in the current media ecosystem. Marrying Pitchfork with the more robust GQ is another step in this hollowing out of the middle. The future of niche but mighty publications like Pitchfork is shrouded in uncertainty, but we can be certain of one thing: Pitchfork will be a shell of its former self.
