WEEKLY WRAP: Pitchfork Folding into GQ

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WRITTEN BY: Caitlin McGeehan, Eva Agabegi, Erika Cutaia

It was announced earlier this month that the Pitchfork team will be brought into the GQ organization, and some Pitchfork staff would be laid off as a result. Started in 1996 by indie-music fan Ryan Schreiber, (and sold to Condé Nast in 2015), Pitchfork is a digital music publication most widely known for its ratings of albums on a scale of 1-10, down to the decimal point. 

We asked WHIP web department members what they think about this change, what it could mean for music journalism and how we interact with music, and more.

Caitlin McGeehan – Pitchfork brings the perspective of a music-lover to the forefront and I worry that this perspective will fade into the background with this restructure. While I don’t think a Pitchfork review is the be-all end-all of an artist’s work and career, it still holds weight. A review by such an influential publication, they do brand themselves as “the most trusted voice in music” after all, could inspire casual listeners of a genre to check out a rising artist. Now, with a smaller editorial staff, will Pitchfork be able to introduce readers to as many underground or rising artists? How many artists may go unknown if Pitchfork scales down its number of reviews?

Eva Agabegi– There is a lot to be said of Pitchfork’s long-running, overall mission to bring recognition to smaller voices in the world of music. Whether their reviews reflect admirably or poorly on an artist’s creative work, they still highlight the presence of independent artists in the musical space and have altered a great deal of public perception on the musical artistry of diverse groups of smaller musicians. With this newly formed change in editorial control, there is a fair chance that this emphasis on prioritizing much of Pitchfork’s musical coverage on lesser known artists may be erased. This would curate a large threat to the publicity generated in Pitchfork’s content for smaller artists and their audience’s overall image of their work. 

Erika Cutaia– My personal relationship with Pitchfork has always been surface level so I write with that warning. I think people can feel cringed out by being impacted by music writing and the weight that it holds, but in cases like Pitchfork, there is a weight there that exists no matter the “cringe” or controversy around it. Music journalism is a form of uncovering. We swim down into an album to see where or if we connect with it and we come up to write about our findings. Whether someone agrees with our interpretations or gets explosively pissed off, our words still change and expand readers’ perspectives and awareness of what we present to them. I remember growing up in a small town without a music scene. I had to look to online spaces to uncover music. All of my awareness was digital, and lead me to seek the real. In cases like Pitchfork, the site was a rare space where smaller artists were displayed online. It must be an awful feeling to spend years writing in that space just for it to start to be broken down by an unsympathetic, and quite frankly, irrelevant corporation that markets to appeal to a male audience. I will always worry when independent voices start to become commercialized or taken over, because that leads to erasure of representation from lack of power and erasure of discovery.