I’m gutted to see Condé Nast folding the online music magazine Pitchfork into GQ. I won’t try to improve on the eulogies written for the site already (Casey Newton and Eric Harvey have good ones). But even today, if you look at the first screen of my iPhone, below The New York Times app and to the left of the Notes app, I keep a tile that’s just a direct link to Pitchfork’s page of music reviews. It’s one of the few corners of the internet I still love, no matter how often I find myself in disagreement. Disagreeing is part of the delight! The writing is beautiful, the reviewers encyclopedic, the point of view bracing.
I’ve seen some thoughtful writing already on why Pitchfork couldn’t make it. But too many post-mortems when a beloved (or not-that-beloved) site collapses are too specific. In this case, they’re specific to Pitchfork’s editorial choices and market position. That would be fine if Pitchfork’s fall was isolated. But we’re seeing a huge swath of that class of publication close or cut staff and ambitions.
Sports Illustrated just laid off most of its staff. BuzzFeed News is gone. HuffPost has shrunk. Jezebel was shut down (then partly resurrected). Vice is on life support. Popular Science is done. U.S. News & World Report shuttered its magazine and is basically a college ranking service now. Old Gawker is gone and so too is New Gawker. FiveThirtyEight sold to ABC News and then had its staff and ambitions slashed. Grid News was bought out by The Messenger, which is now reportedly “out of money.” Fusion failed. Vox Media — my former home, where I co-founded Vox.com, and a place I love — is doing much better than most, but has seen huge layoffs over the past few years.
Nor is it just digital journalism suffering. More than 350 newspapers failed in the first few years of the pandemic. That was the same pace at which newspapers were failing before the pandemic: a rate of two closures or so per week. Alabama’s three largest newspapers have ceased printing. Southern California’s oldest paper went out of business. The McClatchy chain filed for bankruptcy. Storied newspapers like The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun and The Dallas Morning News have been racked by layoffs, forced to become shadows of what they once were. What’s failing here isn’t a particular editorial strategy. It’s that the middle is collapsing in journalism.
There is still opportunity at the top. Take The New York Times. It faces real headwinds — print subscription revenues are dropping here, just like many places — but access to a global audience has opened new vistas of growth. The Times can be as competitive in California as it is in New York, and it can make a real run internationally, too. But a global market creates a Winner-Takes-More dynamic. Most people will subscribe to only one news outlet, if that. And they will pick the subscription that delivers the most value. The more subscribers that market leader gets, the more money and reach it has to attract the best staff and expand its offerings. The more talent it then hires and products it offers (Cooking! Games! Product reviews! Local sports!) the better of a deal it is, which makes it that much more compelling a bundle, and the flywheel keeps going.
At the other end, it’s easier than ever to support yourself as an independent author. I got into journalism as a blogger back when there was no way to make that pay. What you did, then, was move your blog to an established media outlet with some kind of business model and get paid for it. I went to The American Prospect, and then The Washington Post, and that was the start of my career.
But now those blogs are newsletters, and those newsletters have subscribers. Substack’s chief innovation, in my view, was realizing that you could charge much more for a newsletter subscription to a single author than most of us imagined. It would never have occurred to me to sell subscriptions to my blog for $80 a year. But if you do sell them for $80 a year, you can make a great living on the back of 5,000 subscribers. A small audience, well monetized, is a perfectly good revenue stream.
But that revenue stream doesn’t scale up to fund a publication where you need to support multiple reporters, editors, copy editors, photo editors and so on. There’s a reason opinions thrive on Substack and investigative journalism doesn’t. A few publications, like Politico and Axios, have built real newsrooms atop newsletters, but you need a very moneyed audience to make that work.
That’s where media is right now: You can thrive being very small or very big but it’s extremely hard to even survive between those poles. That’s a disaster for journalism — and for readers. The middle can be more specific and strange and experimental than mass publications and it can be more ambitious and reported and considered than the smaller players. The middle is where a lot of great journalists are found and trained. The middle is where local reporting happens and where culture is made rather than discovered.
A few weeks back, I had Kyle Chayka, the author of the new book “Filterworld,” on my podcast. A big part of that conversation was what’s been lost as we’ve moved from an internet built around curation to an internet built around algorithmic recommendation.
The value of curation, Chayka said, is “not just telling you what to consume. It’s giving you this holistic education and insight into how things work, into the context of objects or ideas. It involves vast amounts of labor and time and work to present objects or ideas or songs or whatever in the context that they deserve. And I feel like that’s been lost on the contemporary internet.” That’s what Pitchfork did, and now it, too, is lost. It will be missed. And I fear it will not be replaced.