The news that the music website Pitchfork will be folded into GQ by its owners Condé Nast, with the reported loss of most of its team, is a body blow to the world of music journalism. The decision, for which the reasons remain vague (the content chief at Condé Nast Anna Wintour said it came after a “careful evaluation of Pitchfork’s performance”), has ripped out the heart of online music criticism. The music-writing section of my CV is largely a cemetery of defunct magazines, but Pitchfork’s demise as an independent entity feels especially shocking – because it was supposed to be the future.
I remember when, in 2001, Q magazine first decided to take its website seriously. Print, I was told, was doomed sooner or later, and online journalism would be superior anyway. Clips! Links! Comments! For a few months I was somehow paid to review the bonus tracks on CD singles. Like later experiments, that investment did not last long because the real money was still in the print magazine. Pitchfork, however, was a digital native – the flagship of an armada of new websites and blogs that constituted a brief golden age for online music journalism.
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