A Substack Exclusive: My Interview with Tech Journalist Taylor Lorenz on Pitchfork and the Fate of Digital Media
Taylor Lorenz is a technology columnist at the Washington Post. Before this, she worked as a technology reporter for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and Business Insider. She primarily covers Internet culture and the content creator industry. She recently published a book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, which chronicles a social history of the Web and how it’s reshaped the world.
Throughout this interview, Lorenz and I spoke about the recent Pitchfork layoffs that happened in January following its folding as a publication into GQ, the men’s fashion magazine owned by Condé Nast. We discuss what this means in the grander scheme of the media ecosystem and the fate of similar publications, especially concerning how social media has played a transformative role in the delivery of news.
J: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, your background and how you came about to be a tech reporter?
T: I started off as a blogger in 2009. I built an audience through blogging and then got into media through social media. I started running social media accounts for media brands and I was always blogging and writing on the side. In 2017, I switched to full-time writing and not doing any more social media work on the side, but I still do my own personal social media—branded work.
J: Was it Tumblr, the blogging site you were on?
T: Yes, Tumblr. I had blogger websites but they never got any traction. It wasn’t until I was on Tumblr that I started to get a following.
J: I feel like my age group was right after Tumblr died down basically.
T: I feel like from 2008 to 2012 — this was pre-Instagram—Instagram launched in 2010, but it was still really nascent. Twitter, you couldn’t even share photos to Twitter. YouTube was tiny, everything was really small. Blogging was the dominant— it’s like what TikTok is today.
J: I cannot imagine that world right now. Like you said, given that blogging was what TikTok is today, I can imagine that Pitchfork, at its prime, was definitely the site to be on at the time, especially if you were looking for new music. How have you seen the ways in which we receive information and consume media change from when you started out as a blogger, and when Pitchfork started out as a publication, pre-being owned by Condé Nast— how have you seen that changed?
T: Yes, you have to remember the Web at that point was very fractured and people would visit websites. Facebook and other platforms weren’t acting as aggregators yet, so people would visit blogs, and Pitchfork was one of the most culturally relevant blogs of the time. It was this huge phenomenon, and it was everything, and their reviews were everything, and they had just enormous cultural capital and power within the [music] industry. It really meant something when you were written about on there [Pitchfork]. Then, as we progressed further into the 2010s, media just totally changed. People stopped getting their information from these websites and blogs and individual places, and they started getting all their information and discovering culture basically through social media.
Also, fans started to have a much bigger voice. When Pitchfork was founded, there were these fan websites and fan clubs; you could sign up for a member of a fan club. For example, I was a member of the NSYNC fan club in 2000. But it wasn’t a public-facing thing. Pitchfork really had to grapple with the fact that the Internet had become this two-way street. By the mid-2010s, you had a lot of fandoms exerting their influence on the site. In the sense that, for example, somebody would get a bad review [from Pitchfork], and then you would see this sort of backlash, and fandoms would want justice. I think that led to eventually Pitchfork, a couple years ago, going back and re-ranking certain artists. I think it shows the power of—art now, people understand that other people have different tastes, and there are so many new niches now. Pitchfork just struggled to retain its relevance for so many different factors. Fandoms, and being in touch with different fandoms, was one big part of it. It came off as sort of elitist and people stopped visiting websites. People started to get music recommendations from streaming. Something that came up in the 2010s. And then with apps like TikTok. So, there just wasn’t as much of a desire for music criticism.
J: Right, and I feel like something I talk about a lot with my friends and peers is that our attention span has become so short, and our capacity to actually seek out and read music criticism is— we just don’t have time for that.
T: Also the format is not, it’s not exactly— if you are going to hear the criticism, you want to hear it in an easily digestible way. Writing, especially, and Pitchfork was not a site with many pictures— it’s clunky. I get why people don’t want to sit down and read a long piece of criticism.
J: I guess we’ll go a little bit more into the day that PItchfork was folded into GQ. When that news broke, people were a little bit confused as to what that meant. Would the publication still exist, or how would Pitchfork still exist as its own publication, if at all? What exactly does this mean for the publication?
T: It basically means that it’s under the GQ umbrella. I think they might retain some of the branding potentially as a vertical within GQ, but it’s under GQ. The editorial publications are all under GQ. And they laid off a bunch of people as a bunch of redundancies. Essentially, it’s just part of GQ now. It’s not really its own thing anymore. Which obviously people are like, what the hell? But it didn’t make sense for it to be its own brand.
J: I know that these layoffs and what happened to Pitchfork isn’t just happening in isolation, and that there have been a bunch of layoffs recently, not just this year, but within the past couple years, with Buzzfeed as well. This year, with the Los Angeles Times and Sports Illustrated. What are these trends you’re observing that’s happening in the media industry, and maybe with respect to how social media platforms have a role in these trends?
T: Social media has just disrupted the media industry a lot but also the mechanics of the business models of the media, and then the business models of the media have really floundered, because media is a business generally built on advertising, which has been gutted by these platforms. Also, there’s just a huge anti-journalism sentiment that there never used to be. People didn’t feel this way about journalists, at all, seven or eight years ago. There was not hostility. People really liked journalists and they liked reading people’s work. Really I think you start to see this anti-journalist sentiment—it was really a decade ago, after GamerGate—but basically, along with the rise of the far-right, you started to see this enormously anti-journalist sentiment. People are less likely to subscribe to media organizations, they’re more likely to subscribe to opinion outlets, they don’t understand the difference between opinion and news, they don’t value reporting, for all those reasons and more, the news industry is dying.
J: For sure, and at least from what I can remember, growing up, I used to see all this anti-journalist rhetoric happening in authoritarian countries where those freedoms aren’t necessarily protected. But to see it here is really astonishing. In addition to that, I don’t know people my age who are still subscribing to newspapers because I feel like the Internet has presented itself as a place where you can get any sort of information for free, which wasn’t always the case. I think that has completely warped my perception of it too. I remember when the New York Times started going behind paywall a couple years ago for certain articles, and my peers and I were so confused as to why this was happening, but now I understand. You’ve touched on this a little bit, but what do you think is mostly behind these trends we’re seeing in the media, why do you think this is happening now?
T: I think that the economics of the news industry are broken. It’s to basically every single person in power’s benefit not to have a strong news media, and so people, without public support, the media just crumbles. And without institutional backers, the media crumbles. And also the technological shifts and the way we consume information and want information delivered to us— the newspapers have not kept up. And a lot of newspapers are outdated, and biased, and bad, and honestly, out of step with the world, so I’m not totally sympathetic to them. But I do think it’s a loss. We need to preserve journalism. We just need more responsible journalism.
J: Do you think these trends are something that are new, or have we seen something similar happen in the past?
T: I haven’t seen anything similar happen in the sense that— I guess radio, the radio industry was decimated by Television. And so you do see these new formats emerge and change media. But I think the Internet is far more transformative than Television.
J: I think that the rate at which things are transforming are so unprecedented, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Going back to what you said about media companies, and some of their business models being out-dated— I follow your Instagram account where you post videos about social media phenomena and the state of the media industry, including the most recent one which went viral. Do you think now, journalists will have to essentially do something similar, where they have to represent themselves and their work in order to make news more digestible, or do you think it’s up to media companies to update their business models and how they reach readers?
T: I don’t think media companies are going to do that, really. I’ve always said that journalists should build their own relationship with the audience because you can’t trust any company. First of all, there are companies you can work for that will lay you off tomorrow. And you want to own a relationship with the audience and make it as direct as possible because you can’t trust any of these companies to give you distribution. It’s not the 1990s, where they have millions of readers, and what you write in there matters. People get their news and information from so many different places. It’s also really good for trust— people want to know who they’re getting their news from, who you are, and who’s writing the articles. Is it a bunch of rich, old, white men or is it other types of people? Who are the journalists we’re getting our news from? What are their ideologies? People want that kind of information in a way now, when they used to not ask those questions.
J: Going back to Pitchfork and other independent or formerly independent publications, I think a lot of the writers did have these relationships with the readers, or at the very least, parasocial relationships with the readers, and they felt more personable. Having said that, what do you think is the future for publications like Pitchfork? Can independent journalism really survive in this media ecosystem?
T: It depends. I don’t think brands like Pitchfork will survive, because I think Pitchfork was part of that first wave of digital media that did not survive. Look at Gawker; Mic.com, the website I used to write for; Buzzfeed. If they’re not gone, they’re a shell of their former selves. I think that there is a model for media that’s subscription-driven. Either you see that with websites like Defector, or 404Media, or Substacks— a lot of journalists have newsletters— so that can be an option. It’s just hard, because those companies are inherently niche, and they’ll never be able to offer the same resources that a traditional media organization could’ve offered.
J: I wasn’t even the biggest reader of Pitchfork myself, I definitely had my fair share of criticism of the website, but I think it was especially disheartening, especially as an aspiring journalist, to see these writers, who had nothing to do with the layoffs happening.
T: Of course.
T: Thank you so much again for taking the time to talk to me.
This is a transcript of a conversation between the author and Taylor Lorenz, which happened at the beginning of February this year. The original transcription has been edited for clarity. Quotes from this conversation have been used in an article for the Columbia Political Review, to be published shortly.