And just like that two giants have fallen. Last week saw the demise of both Pitchfork and Sports Illustrated. It was announced on Thursday that Pitchfork is being folded into GQ, ending a 25-year run as music’s haven for thought-provoking (and sometimes confounding) criticism. The next day, staffers at Sports Illustrated received layoff notices, gutting the stalwart sports publication’s staff and leaving its future uncertain.
Sadly, this is just another in a series of terrible, horrible, no-good bad days for media lately. Last year saw layoffs at almost every major media outlet, from Buzzfeed to NPR, Vice to Vox. According to a study by employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, media shed over 20,000 jobs in 2023, though that’s still 10,000 jobs short of the 30,000 lost in 2020. More worrying, though, is that nearly 2,700 of those job cuts came from newsrooms, meaning that important coverage could be missed.
The Pitchfork and SI news hits a little differently, though. Both represent the peak in their respective fields. Sports Illustrated was widely known for its insightful coverage and incredible writing. It turned the athlete profile into an art form. It made folks like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Venus Williams into immortals. It provided the kind of context current sports coverage from even the best outlets can’t touch, and even if they could it would be sullied by some betting line for the weekend’s fantasy sports league.
And Pitchfork: Well, I’ll admit I had a complicated relationship with the site. I was a music critic for roughly 20 years. I never wrote for Pitchfork, nor did I want to or ever try. I just wasn’t a match for them, mainly because I wasn’t a fan of the site’s approach to music reviews—one part college thesis to two parts esoteric nerd. That was not my approach.
But I understood Pitchfork’s importance and its place in the pantheon. It provided a bright light for what it loved, elevating bands that others overlooked, finding the drop of genius in the firehose of music releases. They even gave one of my favorite bands, Minneapolis trio Walt Mink, a perfect 10—a rarity in the history of the site.
And as Pitchfork grew from its humble blog beginnings, it expanded its gaze beyond dude-centric indie rock to cover hip-hop, pop, and world music with incredible authority. It promoted the writing of women and people of color—both rarities when I started in the music industry. It became essential reading for millennials looking to stay up to date on the best new releases—and maybe be able to lord that knowledge over their friends.
Since the announcement of GQ’s swallowing of Pitchfork, there has been a lot of debate about whether its demise is also the death knell for traditional music criticism and curation. The argument always circles around the idea that people don’t need gatekeepers anymore, that platforms like Spotify have democratized music, making it so anyone can find anything they want without some self-appointed critic giving folks the OK.
But I’ve never seen music critics that way. If anything, we’re wayfinders. We help people navigate the endless streams of average to find that next perfect song. We provide connections the algorithms miss. We remember the lost. We assess and reassess value. We provide context. Sure, you can let Spotify or Apple or TikTok do all the work for you, and you’ll always have a new bit of music that sounds roughly like what you love. But for me, that’s so limiting and passive. Music is a treasure hunt. You need to work to find artists like Walt Mink or Young Fathers or Bob Lefevre & The Already Gone. And the discovery makes the music itself that much better, a secret so juicy you just have to share. If Pitchfork’s exit means we lose that service then we’ve given up something precious at a time when we need it more than ever.
Obviously, Conde Nast, Pitchfork’s parent company, doesn’t see it that way. And not just because they made this move. Reportedly, when Anna Wintour, Vogue’s iconic editor-in-chief and Conde Nast’s chief content officer, was laying off Pitchfork’s staff last week she never bothered to take off her sunglasses. She couldn’t look those people in the eye as she gutted them. To me, that’s someone who just doesn’t see the value in those people or what they did. Ironic, since she has long done the same thing for fashion, though the algorithms are coming for that too.