I never subscribed, but throughout my junior high/high school/college years, spanning the late ’80s through the late ’90s, I loved seeing the awesome photography in SI, and the articles were usually quite good.
Unfortunately, for all the good things about the internet age, it has caused the demise of print publications, and to me that's really sad. I grew up obsessing over boxscores in my local newspaper, and have done lots of print newspaper reading in my adult years. I studied journalism in college, and my first 10 years in the full-time workforce were spent as a copy editor for daily newspaper in Maine and SoCal. I love the printed word. I do some reading of Kindle books, but for me, nothing can match the experience of holding a hard copy, an actual physical book, or an actual physical newspaper or magazine. Not all progress is progress.
100% agreed. Watching local media get gutted over the last 25 years or so has been very hard to watch, and all of that has a knock on effect on the national discourse that's been rarely remarked upon - or not remarked upon enough when it happens to appear as a footnote to, say, the old SBNation being unsustainable.
Unfortunately, most physical media outlets never really figured out how to get people to pay for things after the internet became ubiquitous - and most digital outlets have never really figured out how to get people to pay for things once it because clear that good content on the internet was something that would have to be paid for.
Now, you either have to know very smart people and make the effort to talk to them regularly about topics that interest you (like we do on CB and some people used to on Twitter et al), or you have to know where to go to pay for the good stuff; provided, of course, you can afford to pay for it. We've gone full circle, in some ways.
This couple of paragraphs from Defector - a good sports blog that I recommend subscribing to - on the news that Pitchfork is joining the 27 club kind of sums up the shell game that ownership of most modern news websites (especially the good ones, with 'brand value') wind up going through.
Beyond gutting Pitchfork's staff, it's not clear what exactly being brought under the auspices of GQ will mean for the publication. But it feels safe to assume that it will become a smaller, dimmer version of what it was before it became the latest victim of the ongoing implosion of music journalism. This is a corner of the media industry that has been hit particularly hard by consolidation and downsizing. When I was laid off from Spin in 2018, I was part of a downsizing of a collection of music brands including Vibe and Billboard.
The idea was that the brands these publications represented still had value, but that the journalism they produced didn't, and therefore the sites would be better off as little more than engines for listicles and veiled ad copy. Stereogum ended up having to go the indie route, and now more or less runs off reader support.
Meanwhile, throughout the industry, features and reporting and music reviews have taken a backseat as companies push for more social media and video content. What has filled the vacuum left behind by actual music criticism is a loose collection of YouTubers and influencers who feed slop to their younger audiences, and fan communities that engage with music solely through their obsession with a particular pop act. This has all helped produce a mass of music fans who don't understand the value of criticism and outright detest being told the things they like might suck.
https://defector.com/music-journalism-cant-afford-a-hollowed-out-pitchforkI don't particularly mourn Pitchfork (or the modern-day SI, to be honest) - but I do find it very frustrating that, because it's very difficult to make money from writing, editing and publishing, those of us with culture-shaping amounts of money have evidently decided that nearly no one should make any money from writing, editing, and publishing.
