RIP Pitchfork: The quasi-demise of music journalism

By Lily Stern

I fell to my knees in the middle of the CUC when I received the text from my mother, the sickening, borderline devastating memo that Pitchfork, everyone’s favorite scathing music journalism site, would be merged with GQ. Chief Content Officer Anna Wintour herself laid off several high-level staff writers when her company, Condé Nast (owner of Pitchfork since 2015), stripped the outlet of its own identity — and the sunglasses stayed on.

“One absolutely bizarro detail from this week is that Anna Wintour — seated indoors at a conference table — did not remove her sunglasses while she was telling us that we were about to get canned,” former staff writer Allison Hussey tweeted. “The indecency we’ve seen from upper management this week is appalling.” Hussey and other tenured employees (notably editor-in-chief Puja Patel) were let go after years of working for the website.

This is upsetting on MANY levels for me and for every other aspiring music journalist out there. Pitchfork has managed to sustain itself for 28 years as a candid, almost irritatingly critical force in music reviews, but on Jan. 17, that came crashing down. It now lives in a luxury men’s magazine, a low-diversity section of Condé Nast that is generally complimentary of the media it reviews. The complete turnaround gives me zero hope for the future of Pitchfork continuing under the same name (as if the departure of many central figures didn’t already).

I’ll miss enjoying a new album and looking up a review to find out critics with a Real Brain^TM hated half of my favorite tracks. I’ll miss discovering underground artists on the Best New Music sub-section every six months, a.k.a. when I remember it exists. I’ll miss watching their rarer rave reviews catapult underground artists like Arcade Fire to fame they could’ve missed otherwise.

Criticism of art is a craft few have perfected, and I think Pitchfork came pretty darn close. It’s a shame and a massive blow to journalism to continue losing independent sites to corporations. The one bonus is that the music festival will continue, but what consolation is that to me when almost every music festival in the U.S. is in Chicago? I’m moving back.