Is the GQ merger the end of Pitchfork as we know it?

A week ago, on Jan. 17, media conglomerate Condé Nast — owner of Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Wired, among other publications — announced it would merge the music publication Pitchfork with the men's magazine GQ. This merger also resulted in a good chunk of Pitchfork's staff being laid off, including former editor-in-chief Puja Patel. 

"Today, we are evolving our Pitchfork team structure by bringing the team into the GQ organization," wrote Anna Wintour, chief content officer at Condé Nast and editor-in-chief at Vogue. According to former Pitchfork staff, including former editor Jillian Mapes, Wintour kept her sunglasses on during the entirety of her meeting while informing them of their layoffs.

This news shocked the music community, as Pitchfork has always been the publication fans trust when looking up reviews of their favourite albums. Founded 28 years ago by Ryan Schreiber, the publication's signature 0.0 to 10.0 scale has cemented a reputation in music criticism. Its 10.0 review of Radiohead's KID A is still talked about today.

Mapes, music critic Niko Stratis, and musician and former Pitchfork writer Cadence Weapon join Elamin to discuss what the recent layoffs and merger with GQ means for Pitchfork.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: Jill, I'm going to start with you. I know this is a tough moment for you and your colleagues. I want to spend some time here and get an idea of what it's like. Can you tell us what this last week has been like for you? 

Jill: For sure. So a week ago, everyone at Pitchfork thought everything was fine. Everyone had their jobs. About 15 minutes before an all-hands meeting with Anna Wintour where she did not take off her sunglasses, they sent this invite. Our boss didn't know anything about it. They get on the call. The call lasts, like, four minutes and it's very vague about being incorporated into GQ. Doesn't explicitly say people are going to be laid off. But then immediately sends a note to the company. If people got an HR email, they were out, and if they got a GQ email, they were in.

Elamin: I want to read a bit of a tweet that you posted after the news of Pitchfork broke. You said, "After nearly eight years, mass layoffs got me. Glad we could spend the time trying to make [Pitchfork], a less dude-ish place, just for GQ to end up at the helm." Can you just elaborate on what you're getting at there?

Jill: Sure. So I think that for a lot of the women and folks of colour and queer people at the publication, it's a personal project to want to help the thing change and grow. And obviously, public perception of Pitchfork hasn't been good since this era. No one can seem to agree when we were good or bad. And I know that, but we've just been trying to make it less of a white indie rock dude space. 

Elamin: Rollie, you just did a piece about this for Hazlitt, but also one of your earliest breaks as a music critic was for Pitchfork. What was your reaction when you saw the news last week? 

Cadence Weapon: My first thought was, "What is the crossover between the audience for GQ and Pitchfork? For me, GQ, the magazine that tells you that you need to buy a $75,000 watch? I don't really feel like there's much crossover with Pitchfork's audience for that. 

But generally I was just totally shocked. I felt like Pitchfork was too big to fail. From my understanding, it's the definitive source of music news and reviews out there.

Elamin: Niko, I think it's fair to say, Jill's talking about this era of Pitchfork that you don't link to, that's got a lot of these criticisms, but the mid-2000s Pitchfork was also seen as this publication that could make or break your band. Bon Iver, certainly that review was a transformative moment for Bon Iver's career, Broken Social Scene, all bands that would say they owed a lot of their initial success to Pitchfork. But also with that growing reputation and power came a lot of criticisms. What were some of the criticisms that people had of Pitchfork, would you say? 

Niko: I mean, the predominant criticism was the weird elitism, there are things that people ascribe to music people and even me as a music person, I've put it on other people, and I know I'm this person too. It was like cis, het, white dudes that are fresh out of high school, that don't have a lot of lived experience in the world that are all coming from this very cynical place because it's easier to be cynical in the world if you're coming from that place too. 

Elamin: Jill, maybe get a little bit romantic in this moment, if you will. At its best, what made Pitchfork? What made a Pitchfork review special to so many music fans?

Jill: I think that some of the changing approaches and attitudes of the site that we are kind of hinting at, you can see in different areas of what people liked about it. Like there's the very famous Jet review, that's just a GIF of a monkey pissing into its own mouth. People love that. But then also people love things like the KID A review in the year 2000 that's a perfect 10. And it starts with "I had never seen a shooting star before…" and it's deeply romantic. 

I think even when people thought these [writers] were jackasses or snobs or whatever, the passion that you get from this writing, it's not like what was in glossy music magazines. And it's not like a lot of the other parts of the internet. There were blogs, but I think that having a communal passion of so many different people that went through there, made [audiences] recognise that [Pitchfork writers] are music people.These aren't like people writing for a general audience. They're writing for us. 

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender