Media matters

📰 Making sense of this week's Pitchfork and Sports Illustrated news -- and why credibility, trust and sustainable business models are essential

Today’s issue is longer than usual. If you don’t have time to read it right now, save it for when you do. I think it’s an important topic.

Grab your favorite beverage and find a comfortable seat. And then let me know what you thought.

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I read a lot and, every so often, a story really hits. This week it was the twin stories of Pitchfork and Sports Illustrated. In the first case, Condé Nast announced it was folding music-focused Pitchfork into men’s magazine GQ. In the second, the publisher of Sports Illustrated announced it was laying off most, and potentially all, of its staff. I usually publish this on Saturday but it’s now Sunday and I’m still trying to synthesize it all.

You see, while the details of each story are interesting and specific, they are part of a much larger storyline that is affecting us all. Communication, journalism, media — call it what you want — needs two essential ingredients to exist effectively:

1. Credibility and trust

2. Sustainable business model

When either or both of these erode, we find ourselves in a bad place. This is why these stories matter.

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1. Pitchfork

As The Hollywood Reporter reported, “It’s the end of an era for Pitchfork. The music publication is being folded into GQ as part of the ongoing restructuring at Condé Nast, which has owned Pitchfork since 2015.”

Many have written about this over the past few days. I want to highlight two:

• Casey Newton has an excellent article on Platformer this week explaining why Pitchfork died.

• Marc Hogan, a senior staff writer who has written for Pitchfork since 2004, looks back in an article published in Rolling Stone.

Both articles are worth reading in full. Because many readers do not typically read linked articles, however, I am including some excerpts below.

Screenshot of Rolling Stones article by Marc Hogan. Source

The ascent

First, for those unfamiliar, what is Pitchfork? Marc Hogan shares its history:

Founded by a teenage Ryan Schreiber in the mid-1990s out of his parents’ Minneapolis basement, Pitchfork originally gained notoriety mostly for its indie-rock coverage, with reviews that could make or break bands and a breathless, over-the-top prose style that distinguished it — for better or worse, and in hindsight often worse — from established print magazines like Rolling Stone. The site’s name was a reference to Tony Montana’s tattoo in the film Scarface. Schreiber moved Pitchfork to Chicago in 1999, and the publication became comparatively professionalized with the hiring in 2004 of Chris Kaskie, formerly of satirical publication The Onion, to run business operations and seasoned editor Scott Plagenhoef, now global head of editorial at Apple Music, around the same time.

Its origin story mirrors many: Someone starts something, often to scratch their own itch. It gets traction. As it grows, the team expands and professional managers are hired. So far, so good.

Marc Hogan continues:

Since then, while there have always been those who complain that Pitchfork’s older stuff was better, the site’s upward trajectory has seemed unassailable: The sale to Condé Nast, in 2015, matched the upstart online publication’s lean editorial operations with the wider resources of a prestigious legacy-media giant; Pitchfork, which had years earlier decamped to its spiritual home of Brooklyn, weirdly relocated to 1 World Trade Center. The transition at the top in 2018 from Mark Richardson, who’d replaced Plagenhoef as editor-in-chief, to Puja Patel (now laid off from Condé) handed the reins from one of Pitchfork’s first freelance reviewers to a veteran of Spin and Gawker Media who recognized that it was historically important — “a fucking miracle,” she once called it — for a woman of color to preside over one of the ludicrously white- and male-dominated bastions of music journalism. Pitchfork’s world got a little bigger, the genres it covered continued to expand, and hard-news scoops kept piling up through last year, when the site received its first National Magazine Award nomination for general excellence. Now, it has been cut down to size. [emphasis added]

Pitchfork earned a reputation as “the most trusted voice in music.” As Casey Newton notes:

In a world where every Uber trip and DoorDash delivery gets five stars, it’s a sign of real editorial integrity that in 28 years Pitchfork only handed out a 10.0 to a new album 11 times.

The decline

So what happened?

Economic

In the second part of his article, Casey Newton explains:

Pitchfork’s power declined for many reasons. One of them is a story we have heard many times before. 

While I haven’t reviewed the site’s financials, Wintour’s note suggests that it may have been losing money. Lots of free, ad-supported publications like Pitchfork are. In a world where the vast majority of digital advertising profits go to three companies — Google, Meta, and Amazon — smaller publications are struggling to survive. Publishers have been slow to diversify their revenue streams and have all but abandoned efforts to compete against the tech giants to build better ad products.    

As a result, the past few years have seen us lose countless mid-size publications that once made the web vital. Last year we lost BuzzFeed News, Protocol, the new Gawker, and the old Jezebel. Pitchfork is the first site to fall in 2024, but it will not be the last. 

As difficult as the ad puzzle has been for publishers so far, it’s only getting more difficult — particularly for those that rely on Google to drive traffic and therefore ad impressions. Which is most of them. 

The first problem is that pablum created with generative AI is now rising up through Google News results, depriving websites written by actual people of revenue. The second is that Google is answering more queries over time through its search generative experience product, which gives users fewer reasons to click and in particular seems likely to decrease publishers’ affiliate-link revenue. (Why would Google send you to 10 websites when you search for “best laptop 2024” when it can just recommend the consensus pick at the top of search results and keep the commission for itself?)

The web is all but certain to get less vibrant as a result. I find Ben Thompson’s theory about the closing of AI news aggregator Artifact depressingly plausible: now matter how good Artifact’s predictive algorithms got, in the end there just wasn’t that much good content to surface. [emphasis added]

As he notes, Pitchfork isn’t the first and won’t be the last time we hear this. Having a sustainable revenue model is essential to survive. But there’s more to the story.

Editorial

As Casey Newton notes:

The economic explanation for Pitchfork’s decline is well understood. But the publication also had an editorial problem, brought about by other technological shifts that are just as important.

Casey Newton details this in the third section of his article, which is worth a read. There he explains:

Like most great publications, Pitchfork became popular by doing a job for its readers: in this case, scouring the vast landscape of recording music to identify what was worth listening to. When it was founded in 1996, there were two primary ways of listening to new music: one was listening to the radio. The other was driving to a store and paying $18 for a compact disc. 

For the most part, and particularly in the early days, Pitchfork focused on music that you would almost never hear on the radio. And to the young people it served, for whom $18 was a lot of money, the publication provided a valuable service. By highlighting music that was actually worth spending money on — and calling out music that was not — it helped its audience expand its musical horizons and save money at the same time. It was the Wirecutter for music, long before the Wirecutter was even born. [emphasis added]

Over time, there began to be other ways to discover music. Napster arrived in 1999; Spotify in 2006. He suggests that the question shifted from “why?” one should listen to this music to “why not?”

Curation became important. Casey Newton explains:

At first, Spotify leaned on human beings to curate playlists. Because the music could all be consumed at the point of curation — something Pitchfork could never compete with — Spotify’s playlists became huge tastemakers in their own right. In 2017 Vulture called Spotify’s RapCaviar playlist “the most influential playlist in music.” Among other things, it’s credited for launching the career of Cardi B.

But as Ashley Carman reported at Bloomberg this month, even RapCaviar’s influence is now on the wane. The reason, of course, is artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is a theme we will return to shortly.

Putting the Pitchfork story in context, Marc Hogan writes that:

Perhaps Pitchfork matters today because its arc parallels that of the internet itself, from nerdy and amateurish to grown-up, worldly, and inclusive, to now gated off in a Babel of AI-age confusion. But it also matters because music matters, because writing about music matters, because holding powerful figures to account in any industry matters. 

Indeed. I remember the internet of the early 1990s and I definitely remember the web of 1996 when Pitchfork was founded (that was the same year I launched our student newspaper online). It has changed a lot in the ensuing years — some for the better, some not so much.

Marc Hogan muses:

As with the internet’s recent descent into junk and AI gibberish, Pitchfork’s current predicament might have been foretold in its Nineties origins. Anyone willing to write for free what other people have made lifelong careers doing can’t whine too much when we lose our jobs.

It may be a fair point. It also has me thinking about enabling paid subscriptions to

Bryce's Blog

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But back to the technology first. Casey Newton writes about the power of the algorithm — and what people provide:

On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never expected I would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with. 

For that you needed someone who could go beyond the data to tell you the story: of the artist, of the genre, of the music they made. For that you needed criticism. 

For that, in other words, you needed Pitchfork. And while it may have dimmed in its power over the years, it will always loom large in my mind — as a publication that met its moment with actual, discernible taste, and shared its tastes with the world, right up until the moment that the algorithms flattening our culture washed Pitchfork away, too. [emphasis added]

What’s next?

What’s next for Pitchfork? Marc Hogan shares:

I’ve seen reports suggesting that Pitchfork may now become a “brand” for festivals and events, with less of an editorial presence. I hope that isn’t true. I didn’t have the budget to fly back to the first Pitchfork-curated fest, called Intonation, in Chicago in 2005. But I have been almost every year since, with exceptions for my wedding and the births of my two children. Especially in those early years, with local kids swimming in the pool adjacent to the festival spaces in the city’s Union Park, looking out at the audiences for beyond-the-mainstream acts like, say, Ponytail or the Cool Kids, it felt like the digital realm was becoming real. I’m not sure the physical presence of people at a live music event matters in the same way without the fuller cultural context that brings them together. [emphasis added]

Brands get extended, repurposed and refreshed all the time. For some reason, I’ve paid attention to brands as long as I can remember. Just as a biologist studies living organisms and their environments, I enjoy watching brands. Maybe I’m a brand biologist? Anyway, Marc Hogan raises an important point.

Some years ago, I heard Gary Vaynerchuk say digital is now the gateway to the physical world. It may be. But with a diminished editorial presence, how much brand equity will remain? How much community? Relevance? We shall see.

What not to do

Oh, and then there’s this:

Screenshot of Variety article by Todd Spangler. Source.

“One absolutely bizarro detail from this week is that Anna Wintour — seated indoors at a conference table — did not remove her sunglasses while she was telling us that we were about to get canned,” Allison Hussey, a former Pitchfork staff writer, wrote on X. “The indecency we’ve seen from upper management this week is appalling.” (source)

2. Sports Illustrated

Background

When I was growing up, my brother subscribed to Sports Illustrated. Millions did. Circulation topped out at nearly 3.5 million in the late 1980s. For those less familiar, here is a brief history of Sports Illustrated from CBS News:

Sports Illustrated was launched by Time Inc. owner and publisher Henry Luce in 1954. For decades the weekly print publication was considered a benchmark for sports journalism, scooping up national magazine awards and influencing several generations of sportswriters.

Long a weekly magazine, Sports Illustrated shifted to a biweekly schedule in 2018 and became a monthly in 2020. The publication was sold by Meredith Corp. to ABG in 2019 for $110 million. Within weeks, ABG licensed SI's publishing rights to Maven, a digital company that later changed its name to The Arena Group. 

Recent developments

Artificial intelligence (AI) scandal

In November 2023, Maggie Harrison at Futurism broke the story that Sports Illustrated published articles by fake, AI-generated writers, noting “the AI content marks a staggering fall from grace for Sports Illustrated, which in past decades won numerous National Magazine Awards for its sports journalism and published work by literary giants ranging from William Faulkner to John Updike.” NPR and others covered the story.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised. The WSJ published an article in February 2023 which I remember reading that began, “The publisher of Sports Illustrated and other outlets is using artificial intelligence to help produce articles and pitch journalists potential topics to follow.” Here’s the press release on SI.com.

Still, it’s one thing to use AI to “pitch journalists potential topics” and quite another to fabricate fake authors (complete with pictures and bios). Maggie Harrison at Futurism again:

Needless to say, neither fake authors who are suddenly replaced with different names nor deplorable-quality AI-generated content with no disclosure amount to anything resembling good journalism, and to see it published by a once-iconic magazine like Sports Illustrated is disheartening. Bylines exist for a reason: they give credit where it's due, and just as importantly, they let readers hold writers accountable.

The undisclosed AI content is a direct affront to the fabric of media ethics, in other words, not to mention a perfect recipe for eroding reader trust. And at the end of the day, it's just remarkably irresponsible behavior that we shouldn't see anywhere — let alone normalized by a high-visibility publisher. [emphasis added]

So how did The Arena Group, which publishes SI, respond? It blamed it on a vendor. Then it deleted the content. Then in December 2023 it fired the CEO, Ross Levinsohn. This week, we learned it didn’t pay its licensing fee.

Screenshot of BBC article. Source.

Licensing fee not paid

Here are the details as originally reported by Front Office Sports:

Authentic, the licensing group that purchased Sports Illustrated for $110 million from Meredith five years ago, has terminated the agreement it holds with The Arena Group to publish SI in print and digital, according to an email obtained by Front Office Sports. That move comes three weeks after Arena missed a $3.75 million payment that breached the company’s SI licensing deal, which began in 2019. (Authentic’s notice of termination, meanwhile, triggered a $45 million fee due immediately to Authentic, according to an SEC filing on Friday.)

Layoffs

The WSJ reported that “the union said it was notified by the magazine’s publisher, the Arena Group, that it intended to “lay off a significant number, possibly all” of Sports Illustrated’s unionized staffers because Arena had lost its license to publish the magazine.” And here we are.

“After almost 70 years,” as Kevin Dugan writes at Intelligencer, “Sports Illustrated — the storied magazine that has published some of the best sports journalism of the past two centuries — appears to be over, at least as anyone knew it.”

Context and perspective

How did we get here? As Ben Strauss and Will Sommer write in The Washington Post:

The root cause of the despair is a business model that staffers fear is irretrievably broken. The Arena Group pays $15 million per year for the rights to publish SI, in print and online, to a licensing company called Authentic Brands Group, which bought SI from its previous owner, magazine publisher Meredith. (More than 30 percent of the staff was laid off as part of that deal.)

Authentic Brands Group retained the commercial licensing rights to SI, which it uses for things such as the newly launched Sports Illustrated resorts. Arena Group, meanwhile, starts every year $15 million in the hole with its SI budget and must generate most of its revenue from subscriptions and advertising, according to people familiar with the deal. Even documentary, audio and scripted TV licensing rights are controlled by Authentic Brands Group.

That might explain the need for more content, however it’s generated.

Over at the Poynter Institute, Tom Jones shared a few perspectives when the AI scandal first broke in November 2023:

Awful Announcing’s Ben Axelrod wrote, “It’s hard to imagine that the use of AI-generated content will do anything but continue to damage an already diminished trust from its audience.”

In a strongly worded statement on X, former Sports Illustrated writer Jeff Pearlman wrote, “It sucks,” and mentioned some of the legends that built Sports Illustrated into an elite publication: Frank Deford, Dan Jenkins, Richard Hoffer and Steve Rushin.

“But this is what we’ve done,” Pearlman continued, “with the continued corporatization of media. These companies don’t care about content. At all. It’s entirely clicks and ads and ads and clicks. That’s it, that’s all. I’m not particularly sad, because the Sports Illustrated I loved and worked for … 52 issues a year, 5,000-word pieces, a devotion to craftsmanship, detail, heart and love … is long gone. It just is. This isn’t Sports Illustrated. It’s some bull (expletive) company picking off the last pieces of rotted fat from the carcass of something that was truly great.”

In a December 2023 column in The Los Angeles Times, Brian Merchant wrote:

The tragedy of AI is not that it stands to replace good journalists but that it takes every gross, callous move made by management to degrade the production of content — and promises to accelerate it.

If journalists are outraged at the rise of AI and its use in editorial operations and newsrooms, they should be outraged not because it’s a sign that they’re about to be replaced but because management has such little regard for the work being done by journalists that it’s willing to prioritize the automatic production of slop.

AI does not emerge from a media company’s innovation lab but from a handshake deal with a shady third-party company. It’s a hail Mary move that aspires to take the place of formulating a real plan to turn a business around — a future-shaped Get Out of Jail Free card for business leaders confronting bad times. And it’s almost certain to fail to deliver. [emphasis added]

Finally, in The Globe and Mail:

“We’re thinking about AI as omniscient, and in reality it’s like a dumb intern: Everything it does has to be checked, it’s often wrong, it’s a bad writer, it’s cliché-ridden,” said John Affleck, the Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society at the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. “But here’s the thing about dumb interns: They get smarter as time goes on. So, watch how they grow.”

He has a point. This is a storyline that is just beginning and will be with us for a good while. Whatever you may think of AI, I believe you have a right to know when content has been generated by AI. PR Daily has this suggestion:

Bentley University Professor Christie Lindor shared some language on how to easily disclose AI use in an HR Brew article, including:

• “No generative AI was used to create this product.”

• “Generative AI produced this content.”

• “This content was created with the assistance of generative AI.”

No generative AI was used to create this article. (As an aside, this makes me think I may want to draft a disclosure/ethics policy statement like Casey Newton has at Platformer.)

Staying on the theme of media…

3. Billionaires

Did you see this article in the The New York Times?

Screenshot of New York Times article by Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson. Source.

There’s an old saying about the news business: If you want to make a small fortune, start with a large one.

As you may know:

As the prospects for news publishers waned in the past decade, billionaires swooped in to buy some of the country’s most fabled brands. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post in 2013 for about $250 million. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotechnology and start-up billionaire, purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2018 for $500 million. Marc Benioff, the founder of the software giant Salesforce, purchased Time magazine with his wife, Lynne, for $190 million in 2018.

All three newsrooms greeted their new owners with cautious optimism that their business acumen and tech know-how would help figure out the perplexing question of how to make money as a digital publication.

Alas:

“Wealth doesn’t insulate an owner from the serious challenges plaguing many media companies, and it turns out being a billionaire isn’t a predictor for solving those problems,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. “We’ve seen a lot of naïve hope attached to these owners, often from employees.”

“The very rich find it very difficult to lose money year over year, even if they can afford it.”

-Ken Doctor, an analyst and media entrepreneur. (source)

The New York Times was able to point to one positive example:

Still, there are some bright spots in the firmament of traditional news organizations owned by billionaires. The Boston Globe, purchased by John W. Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, from The New York Times Company in 2013 for $70 million, has been profitable for years, according to a person familiar with the company’s finances. Those profits have been reinvested in The Globe, the person said.

So maybe it’s possible.

4. The collapse of the middle

We began this issue talking about Pitchfork. In a column worth reading in full in The New York Times today, Ezra Klein writes:

I’ve seen some thoughtful writing already on why Pitchfork couldn’t make it. But too many post-mortems when a beloved (or not-that-beloved) site collapses are too specific. In this case, they’re specific to Pitchfork’s editorial choices and market position. That would be fine if Pitchfork’s fall was isolated. But we’re seeing a huge swath of that class of publication close or cut staff and ambitions.

Sports Illustrated just laid off most of its staff. BuzzFeed News is gone. HuffPost has shrunk. Jezebel was shut down (then partly resurrected). Vice is on life support. Popular Science is done. U.S. News & World Report shuttered its magazine and is basically a college ranking service now. Old Gawker is gone and so too is New Gawker. FiveThirtyEight sold to ABC News and then had its staff and ambitions slashed. Grid News was bought out by The Messenger, which is now reportedly “out of money.” Fusion failed. Vox Media — my former home, where I co-founded Vox.com, and a place I love — is doing much better than most, but has seen huge layoffs over the past few years.

Nor is it just digital journalism suffering. More than 350 newspapers failed in the first few years of the pandemic. That was the same pace at which newspapers were failing before the pandemic: a rate of two closures or so per week. Alabama’s three largest newspapers have ceased printing. Southern California’s oldest paper went out of business. The McClatchy chain filed for bankruptcy. Storied newspapers like The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun and The Dallas Morning News have been racked by layoffs, forced to become shadows of what they once were. What’s failing here isn’t a particular editorial strategy. It’s that the middle is collapsing in journalism. [emphasis added]

He posits that there is opportunity at the very top (exhibit 1: The New York Times) and for the individual writer (exhibit 2: Substack). But the revenue model isn’t working for those in the middle. Ezra Klein continues:

That’s where media is right now: You can thrive being very small or very big but it’s extremely hard to even survive between those poles. That’s a disaster for journalism — and for readers. The middle can be more specific and strange and experimental than mass publications and it can be more ambitious and reported and considered than the smaller players. The middle is where a lot of great journalists are found and trained. The middle is where local reporting happens and where culture is made rather than discovered. [emphasis added]

This, I believe, is a critical issue for our time.

The value of curation

He concludes by sharing:

A few weeks back, I had Kyle Chayka, the author of the new book “Filterworld,” on my podcast. A big part of that conversation was what’s been lost as we’ve moved from an internet built around curation to an internet built around algorithmic recommendation.

The value of curation, Chayka said, is “not just telling you what to consume. It’s giving you this holistic education and insight into how things work, into the context of objects or ideas. It involves vast amounts of labor and time and work to present objects or ideas or songs or whatever in the context that they deserve. And I feel like that’s been lost on the contemporary internet.” That’s what Pitchfork did, and now it, too, is lost. It will be missed. And I fear it will not be replaced.

This is why I’ve written this. I continue to believe there is value in curation. And, having spent the better part of my weekend on this, I can confidently confirm curation does takes labor and time. I wish I had more time to polish this further, and to integrate other perspectives and sources. Alas, you deserve to read it, engage with it, and mull it over, too and so I am sharing it now.

5. Trust

Here is one final thought from The Economist this week in an age of AI.

Screenshot. Source.

The Economist:

Online content will no longer verify itself, so who posted something will become as important as what was posted. Assuming trustworthy sources can continue to identify themselves securely—via urls, email addresses and social-media platforms—reputation and provenance will become more important than ever. [emphasis added]

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What is the service I provide to you? I highlight and surface stories you may not have seen, ideas to consider, and universal truths, and strive to create a safe space to ponder, to learn, to wonder — and to connect with others who are similarly curious, like to learn and want to grow.

I always enjoy hearing from you and welcome any thoughts or feedback you may have.

Be well,

-Bryce

1. If you have any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at bryceayne@substack.com).