I no longer have access to my college email account — $180,000 in tuition doesn’t buy ten bucks of server space — but I think I first tried to write for Pitchfork in 2010, when I was nineteen. I’d been reviewing albums for an HTML blog, and emailed one of the Marks or Ryans to see if he’d be interested in some teenager’s opinions on like, Kurupt. (He wasn’t.) I didn’t really read the site, I just knew it as a place for serious thoughts about unserious music. By any metric this was Pitchfork’s golden age, but my esteem for the site grew in the ensuing decade. As the internet consolidated it was, for better or worse, the paper of record; blogging anywhere else was an audition.
It was another ten years before they gave me a shot. I spent the intervening years cycling between jobs I found on LinkedIn: medium-stage startups who’d suckered venture funds into bankrolling their social widgets or video pre-roll or those creepy chumbox ads at the bottom of Vox articles. None of these concerns were profitable — they nibbled at tiny margins, whatever bones Zuckerberg tossed their way — but by hiring fast and burning capital, they simulated demand in hopes that someone else might acquire them. It was even dumber than it sounds. Advertisers would make giant digital marketing buys, sight unseen, and the vendors would hope the buyers didn’t notice the inventory was served by porn bots (if at all).
The work was grueling: horrific hours, shit pay, snacks in the converted cloakroom-slash-kitchen. It was also incredibly boring. You’d spend hours plowing through spreadsheets of made-up data, and then as a little treat you’d scroll Twitter to see what, like, Royce da 5’9 was crowing about. I knew something was off — a job might be unpleasant, or leave you short on rent, but both? This was the crucible in which my writing life, as it were, was forged. The market turned me into a startup drone, which turned me into a Twitter lurker, which turned me into a person with takes and grievances, which turned me into a Freelance Writer In New York.
Freelancing in my off-hours, I discovered writing and labor were yin-and-yang forces. Writing could not be work, because it was a reprieve from work. Anyway, I couldn’t treat it like a job because it didn’t pay like one: at The Village Voice’s rate, I would’ve had to file forty articles a month to cover my windowless bedroom in Kips Bay. This meant, at least, I could pursue it on my own terms, writing about my interests without groveling before editors and monoculture. I think this is a healthy relationship to have with one’s hobbies — the stakes were low, the rewards intrinsic — which has further confounded my relationship with actual work.
When I received my first Pitchfork assignment in 2019, I was working for a fifty-person software company from a month-to-month WeWork on Irving Place. The following week we were acquired by a Silicon Valley behemoth, and I got laid off. I’m not the main character here: Pitchfork was never my job, just an occasional $200 check while I did other jobs. Condé Nast would never employ the likes of me, and given the chance I’d decline. (Having lived on $50,000 in New York under threat of layoff, I’m not interested in living on $50,000 in New York under threat of layoff.) Still, Pitchfork was my steadiest writing gig and, strange to say, my longest professional affiliation.
I was grateful for the arrangement, because it’s not like Condé Nast made any money off my byline. My reviews were hardly traffic drivers; you can’t pitch advertisers on Boldy James write-ups. Regardless of sales, regardless of brand synergy, Pitchfork maintained that mid-catalog Meyhem Lauren records and Naughty By Nature reissues were worthy of consideration, and the editing conferred authority. The same things that made Pitchfork a great website also made it an unprofitable one.
Condé never launched a subscription program; the spon-con and affiliate marketing were half-assed. There’s a D-list festival associated with the Pitchfork brand, otherwise all they did was sell display ads for $0.00001 apiece. When people bemoan Pitchfork’s poptimist turn, they’re really complaining about an outmoded revenue strategy. I don’t imagine Jeremy Larson ever stood up and said “OK we like Taylor Swift now,” but the ads-only model meant they had to feed off cheap search traffic. If Pitchfork looks like the rest of the internet, it’s no longer Pitchfork.
There are two types of media bosses. There are tycoons like Bezos and Laurene Powell Jobs, who own press outlets for influence or something to do. Then there are people like Bryan Goldberg and Anna Wintour: small-fry capitalists who suck at making money, and are willing to sacrifice workers in their fruitless pursuits. Imagine commanding a pool of world-class editorial professionals who effectively work for free, and still not being able to milk any profits from your publishing ventures.
Unionization is imperative, but it’s not a solution. In 2021, when Pitchfork’s bargaining committee authorized a strike, one of the Marks or Ryans emailed asking me to picket Wintour’s house with them. It was righteous, it was inspiring, I’d do it again. The upshot was Condé recognized the union (whatever that means, more in a minute), ensuring a salary floor for staffers and fewer assignments for freelancers. Again, I can’t complain. The staffers need jobs more than I need a place to write about Third Eye Blind; companies get away with labor violations by pitting the workforce against itself. Of course, solidarity is one-directional. I can’t very well ask Amanda Petrusich to refuse work because her employer owes me $75.
The problem is private-sector unions hinge on consumer demand, and Condé wasn’t selling anything. The market didn’t reject Pitchfork: Condé had a captive audience, and never bothered to make a pitch. Labor can’t negotiate if the shop’s bleeding money, and in Pitchfork’s case, management didn’t care. With layoffs imminent, the Condé union bargained for severance — the union did its job. But with all respect to Hamilton Nolan, what good is a union if Anna Wintour can nuke it with a luxurious penstroke?
A year ago Pitchfork published four reviews a day, now it’s two. The usual freelancers are still contributing, and nobody’s calling them scabs (publicly, anyway). There’s a sense — among those who encounter it as a magazine rather than a union-busting workplace — that Pitchfork, in any form, is worth saving. The remaining staffers, meanwhile, have targets on their backs. They’ll leave or else be driven out, until Pitchfork is another parking space like SPIN and The Fader, belching out SEO bait or Bob Guccione’s thoughts on wokeness. I hope I’m wrong.
So here we are, corralled into our respective Substacks, posting on a platform with no community features. Through malice or incompetence, they’ve realized a post-critical internet. If a legacy act releases a crappy album, who will say so? If a rock star is a sex pest, who will report it? If nothing else, Pitchfork — and criticism more broadly — existed to correct the record, to challenge the crap forced down our throats.
So much of the Condé disaster was founded on outright fraud: fake data, fake forecasts, fake valuation. The mountains were a mirage, but they were something to chase, you know? We wrote for pennies and were grateful for the opportunity. We kept our heads down during a pandemic, our taxes going to genocides and proxy wars. Now we can’t write about the music we listen to at our day jobs? Even that was too much dissent?