Pitchfork’s Demise Is About Corporate Greed, Not Bad Business
By stacy lee kong
Reggae singer Koffee at Pitchfork Music Fest ‘23 in Chicago. Image: Daniel Cavazos via instagram.com/pitchforkfest
I actually had a totally different newsletter planned for this week (I just think we maybe shouldn’t turn a complex and vulnerable person into an internet celebrity as a little jokey joke, you know?) but then, on Wednesday, American media company Condé Nast announced it would be folding influential music publication Pitchfork into GQ and every music writer I know—not to mention basically everyone who works in cultural criticism, entertainment journalism or media in general—had a totally justified collective meltdown. So… I’m writing about that instead.
In case you were not on X/Twitter as it was all going down, on Wednesday afternoon, Semafor’s media reporter, Max Tani, posted a screenshot of a memo from Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue and chief content officer at Condé Nast, informing staff that the company would be “evolving [the] Pitchfork team structure by bringing the team into the GQ organization. This decision was made after a careful evaluation of Pitchfork’s performance and what we believe is the best path forward for the brand so that our coverage of music can continue to thrive within the company. Both Pitchfork and GQ have unique and valuable ways that they approach music journalism, and we are excited for the new possibilities together.”
The (clunkily worded) memo went on the confirm that layoffs were part of this ‘restructuring,’ and that Pitchfork’s editor-in-chief, Puja Patel, who had helmed the publication for five years and was instrumental in widening the scope of its coverage, was among the employees who had been let go. Tani said he’d been told it was a business decision, and that advertising was stronger at other publications.
There’s a lot to be upset about here: The decimation of yet another media outlet, and the way so many talented and hardworking journalists saw their loyalty rewarded with an unceremonious layoff. The continued disrespect of, and disinvestment in, culture writing. The suspicion that this was a “glass cliff” situation for Patel. The very fair worry that there’s now going to be one less place for music journalists to place freelance pitches, land a staff writing job and/or build a career as an editor. The collision of capitalist priorities (Pitchfork’s “performance,” sigh) and editorial/cultural value, and the fact that CFOs are always going to prioritize the former over the latter. It’s no wonder Pitchfork’s demise, as a standalone outlet at least, has already prompted elegies in Defector, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post and the Guardian.
But the thing that makes me most furious is that none of this even makes business sense! In fact, that’s what I want to delve into this week, because when huge companies make decisions like this, it implies that culture writing, and championing diversity in our editorial decisions, are business liabilities, and if anyone’s going to actually make good on those rumblings about the need for a worker-owned music publication, I think it’s important to highlight just how wrong that perception is.
It makes a terrible sort of sense for Pitchfork to end up as part of Condé Nast’s men’s flagship
I don’t think I really need to make the argument that cultural critique is important. (That is definitely my whole thing.) So I’m going to skip that part, and instead talk about what Condé Nast wanted when it acquired Pitchfork in 2015: men. As then-chief digital officer Fred Santarpia told the New York Times, buying Pitchfork was really about bringing “a very passionate audience of Millennial males into [its] roster.” (At the time, the outlet’s readership seemed to be 82% male and mostly between the ages of 18 and 34.)
That demo is catnip to marketers—which is kind of surprising, because it’s also quite well known that women actually wield more economic power, both because of their own growing disposable income and because they make most of the purchasing decisions for their families. But, as a 2014 Marketplace article explained, the 18-to-34-year-old male is consistently a key demographic for marketers because “his wallet’s full [and] unlike the typical female consumer, he’s more likely to spend what he wants, without thinking too much about what he needs. So if you’re Bud, or Jeep, or Nike, you want to get him hooked on your brand, before someone with more grown-up spending habits—likely a woman—starts putting him right.” Sexist and heteronormative framing aside, the article did cite consumer spending data to back this assertion up: “young men (up to age 34) spend more than young women overall, and also in key categories for marketers—new cars and trucks, alcohol, entertainment. For booze and eating out, they even spend more than older men, who have significantly more disposable income.”
The problem—for advertisers, anyway—was that this demo can be difficult to target. According to a 2014 Nielsen study, millennial men at the time were “elusive creatures… commonly thought of as cord cutters who can’t be—and don’t want to be—reached.” At the time of its purchase, Pitchfork was profitable and ran a “thriving live events business, with events in Chicago and Paris, and robust video offerings—both vital and growing parts of the publishing business,” per the Times. So, if that could continue, and if it could deliver its mostly young, male readership to Condé Nast, it would be more than worth the purchase price, which was estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
But people of all genders like music—and that’s a business opportunity
At the time of the sale, Santarpia’s comments, which implied Pitchfork’s female audiences weren’t valuable, or maybe just didn’t exist, stoked outrage. It’s true that when teenaged founder Ryan Schreiber started the outlet in his parents’ Minneapolis basement in 1995, he was probably more interested in trying to distinguish it from legacy music publications like Rolling Stone than he was invested in dismantling the (white) boy’s club of music criticism. But, by the 2010s, the site had diversified its coverage beyond indie rock, thanks in large part to the work of talented and passionate female editors and contributors. And, despite their initial focus on millennial men, that does seem to be something Condé Nast bought into, at least for a while. In 2018, three years after the sale, the company hired Patel to replace Schreiber as editor-in-chief, and as Tani noted, she “attempted to make Pitchfork more relevant to a larger audience in recent years. More diversity of voices, broader coverage beyond what used to be indie/indie rock, and new festivals in London, Berlin, and Mexico City.”
Importantly, she was successful, not just editorially but also from a business perspective. When Patel was hired, Observer Media cited Comscore data showing traffic to the website was already up 65% year-over-year, which I think can be at least partially explained by access to audience development resources that exist at larger companies in ways they don’t at smaller ones, including subscription SEO tools, experts on different social media platforms (who’ve also developed relationships with those platforms) and bigger budgets for social media promo. Now, according to Condé Nast data scientist Claire Willett, who was responding to Tani’s tweet about advertising being a motivating factor for this move, “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.”
So… what’s the deal?
I think two things. First, as we see over and over again, when given the chance to champion, support and invest in media created by and for marginalized groups, big companies just… don’t, even when it would make financial sense to do so. I don’t know for sure why that is—maybe they’re not seeing the results that they want quickly enough (though in my experience, it’s also likely they’re not properly investing in these outlets, or giving revenue-generating strategies enough time to come to fruition, but whatever). Or, maybe it’s just the whims and fancies of older white men. However, I do know that I’ve worked at magazines that met every metric corporate asked us to, including hitting a million unique page views a month, which was astronomical considering the size of our staff and budget, and it meant nothing the next time layoffs rolled around.
Second, this seems to be a response to employee organizing, at least in part. Management and owners don’t tend to like it when their workers form unions, and Condé Nast is no exception. There are five unions at the company; Pitchfork employees have their own, as do workers at the New Yorker, Ars Technica and Wired. The company also voluntarily recognized a wider group of employees’ efforts to unionize in September 2022, after 2.5 years of negotiations. The Washington Post described that process as “easily received” compared to how it went down at other media companies, but when Condé announced plans to lay off 5% of its workforce in November and the unions fought to advocate for their members, things seemed to devolve.
In December, Pitchfork Union secured assurances from the company that none of its members would be impacted, but since the company was still planning to lay off Pitchfork employees that didn’t belong to that union, as well as workers at other magazines, it said it would continue to advocate for worker rights. Around the same time, NewsGuild of New York took legal action against the company “for surveillance and attempting to intimidate union members engaged in protected collective activity” on behalf of Condé Nast Union members. Then, last week, NewsGuild filed a second charge against the company, this one around unfair labour practices. Keeping this in mind, maybe it’s not surprising that some people—including United Musicians and Allied Workers, an advocacy group for music workers that formed during COVID-19—have characterized this reorganization, and its attendant mass layoffs, as union busting.
I still think the future of media is independent
All of which is to say, I don’t think this is about business sustainability at all. There’s this sense of hopelessness that permeates many of the conversations I see—and sometimes have—about the state of media right now. We have this idea that, because these corporations can’t successfully run the outlets that we love, no one can… not even us. But I think there’s a strong argument to be made that this isn’t the case.
It’s true that indie publishers will still be operating within a capitalist system, and will still have to navigate the same challenges corporations are navigating, only with substantially less funding, infrastructure and opportunities for collaboration. And yes, we have the rethink revenue models and our own ideas of what it means to run a successful publication (i.e., probably modest levels of revenue and slow, but hopefully sustainable, growth). But it’s also clear that these corporations don’t actually care about sustainability. In fact, when they talk about ‘business success,’ they really just mean maximizing profit in the short term, even though they know they’re jeopardizing these publications’ long-term survival. Oh, and they’re also super invested in upholding existing power structures, obviously.
And maybe that’s good news, in a way? Because the outpouring of support and mourning for Pitchfork—not to mention the data that shows it was well-read—is a clear indicator that audiences want smart, thoughtful cultural critique. Put another way, there is an audience for the work we do, which means there’s a business case based on real demand. It just can’t be one that replicates the same politics of exploitation that big media corporations depend on.
And Did You Hear About…
@DraculaActual, a novelty X/Twitter account that has been making me laugh for days now.
This nuanced Teen Vogue article on the young people who are disillusioned with the Democrats, and especially Joe Biden, and are considering abstaining from voting in the 2024 election.
Pacinthe Mattar’s beautifully written The New Quarterly piece on the language we’re using to talk about Palestine.
The spiritual appeal of Spotify’s newish Daylist feature, which has recently been going viral. (And that fact that, because we live in a capitalist dystopia, it was curated by a staffer who the company laid off in December.)
Tayo Bero’s spot-on Guardian column about why Hollywood is still making Black women fight for respect.
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