Forked Up Big Time

A rant about GQ's acquisition of Pitchfork, the sorry state of music media, and the devaluation of women's writing.

I wish I could give you something more uplifting, more hopeful. Talk about how blogs and worker-owned publications are the future of music journalism (which I still want to believe they are). But this is all I have in me right now.

It’s been about 24 hours since Condé Nast announced that Pitchfork would be merging with GQ, though “merging” might not be the most accurate term to use, as a merger implies the joining of two equal parties. A memo shared by Semafor staffer Max Tani revealed that going forward, all Pitchfork Media operations would be subsumed into GQ. With this came a slew of layoffs across departments at Pitchfork, including Puja Patel, who took over as the site’s editor-in-chief after founder Ryan Schrieber stepped down in 2019. As the memo circulated, Pitchfork staff writers, editors, publicists, and designers announced en masse that they’d been let go.

This round of layoffs is horrible on an individual level for all of the incredibly talented, clever, and hardworking people whose livelihoods are now gone and whose skill sets are becoming increasingly less marketable, as we’ve seen with each culling of music media jobs with the shutdown of publication after publication after publication. The talent pool is brimming, but with fewer and fewer outlets willing to invest in it, music journalism has all but ceased to be a viable career. There was a time when staff writer positions were more plentiful and even freelancers could make a livable wage doing just that, but today that model just isn’t realistic. The vast majority of music writers that I know have day jobs and side hustles that allow them to do the thing they actually care about for far less compensation than they deserve. Yeah, we all do this for the quote-unquote love of the game, but it sure would be nice if we didn’t have to.

More than just the obvious tragedy of the abyssmal music media job market, with the folding of yet another music media outlet and subsequent wave of layoffs comes the umpteenth reminder that our culture largely does not value criticism, does not respect the written word, does not view the work of creative people as real work, and sees engagement with art as a frivolous pastime for those with cash to blow rather than a longstanding tradition and practice rooted in a desire for deeper connection and understanding. Writing is work. Editing is work. Designing a website is work. When corporations treat art (and discussions of it) as luxuries– and make it nearly impossible for anyone in the industry to be adequately compensated for the time and energy they put into it –it sends the message that our work does not matter. 

In recent years, one of Pitchfork’s greatest triumphs was the diversification of both its staff and the music that they covered. The economic consequences of publication shutdowns and mass layoffs cannot be disentangled from other interlocking axes of inequality. 

It’s telling that Pitchfork’s takeover is by a men’s magazine. Yes, GQ’s readership and contributor pool is not just men, but it’s still primarily geared towards a male audience. It’s in the name– Gentlemen’s Quarterly. This is no coincidence, it’s years in the making, considering the fact that Condé Nast’s initial purchase of Pitchfork was made with the explicit goal of zeroing in on the publication’s “millennial male” audience. It’s also no coincidence that the men’s magazine-ification of one of the most prominent and respected music publications is happening while women’s media outlets are constantly getting shut down. Beyond just sending the message that music writing can and should bend to corporate whims and be whittled down to nothing more than an endless stream of clickbait, it also sends the message that readers and writers who aren’t men don’t matter. Or at least, that they matter less than their male counterparts. That we can have our niche girly little passion projects, but at the end of the day, real, respected criticism is the domain of men. It’s yet another reminder that despite the strides we’ve made, music journalism will remain the boys’ club that it always has been. 

When I think back to my teen years when I started reading music criticism and realized that this was what I wanted to do– that this was something I could do –the writing that sticks out most in my mind is that of women who wrote about what music meant to them. It was the scans of old 90s riot grrrl zines I found through Tumblr. It was reading Sarah “"Ultragrrrl" Lewitinn and falling deeper in love with music that sounded like home to me and gaining new respect for the archival and historical capacities of blogs. It was poring over the work of Jenn Pelly and Stephanie Kuehnert and Suzy Exposito and Julianne Escobedo-Shepherd. It was Jessica Hopper blowing my entire mind open and making me realize that you can be a feminist and a smart, serious critic in a way that’s emotional and analytical and fucking cool. It was and still is the international network of brilliant female music writer friends I’ve made over the years who will never stop doing the thing they love regardless of whether or not the media landscape is hospitable to them and their work, which makes me swell with pride and fury at how much they have to offer and how little this parasitic, capitalistic, male-dominated industry gives them in return.

Don’t get me wrong, Pitchfork is not perfect and never has been, but this still feels like massive loss because it is. If Pitchfork’s acquisition by Condé Nast back in 2015 marked the beginning of a downward descent, its absorption into GQ feels like a final nail in the coffin. I know that sounds dramatic. I don’t want to join the chorus of fatalistic, un-nuanced sludge declaring this the death of music journalism (let’s be real, people have been crying “death of music journalism” since the 80s, if not earlier). Music journalism did not begin with Pitchfork and will not end with it. For as long as music and the written word have both existed, people have been writing about music. That will not change, because music writers will never learn to shut up, and thank God for that. Pitchfork itself isn’t even necessarily ending, it’s just changing for the much, much worse.