How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
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Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#2This is like blaming the stock market going up or down on the president. Conde Nast may have simply been the last one holding the "hot potato". In the face of social media platforms sucking the userbase away from blogs and traditional websites, can you really blame them? Does Chrome even have a way to follow RSS feeds, or do you need to install a shady plugin?
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#3At the time this was declared as a user base driven acquisition where Conde Nast assumed that the largely 20 to mid 30s male readership of Pitchfork would graduate to one of their traditional style publications once they came of age. Clearly it was misguided to assume that cash strapped college grads who grew up on mp3's and ramen would graduate to Eames chairs and Zegna fleeces without some VC backed lottery payout.
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#4bad leadership strategy. Plain and simple. They like many once powerhouse IP controlling firms have failed to realise the very thing that gave those IPs any value in the first place..... individual identity that was not centralized by some corporate quarterly objectives.....
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#5This is like blaming the stock market going up or down on the president. Conde Nast may have simply been the last one holding the "hot potato". In the face of social media platforms sucking the userbase away from blogs and traditional websites, can you really blame them? Does Chrome even have a way to follow RSS feeds, or do you need to install a shady plugin?
There's web-based readers that work in Chrome. After Google Reader died, I moved to Feedly which seems to still work alright.
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#6This is like blaming the stock market going up or down on the president. Conde Nast may have simply been the last one holding the "hot potato". In the face of social media platforms sucking the userbase away from blogs and traditional websites, can you really blame them? Does Chrome even have a way to follow RSS feeds, or do you need to install a shady plugin?
Partially, but can't go back in time and prove otherwise. When Conde Nast started buying up specialty like Bicycling, Outdoors, and Wired they transformed them into generic "lifestyle" magazines (10-15 years ago). I remember flipping through Bicycling and seeing 3 car advertisements before getting to the first that had anything to do with cycling and all the columns and editorials contained product pitches for personal care products("What I'm obsessed with this week!").
Would these magazines have survived without Conde Nast? I don't know. I know I stopped buying/reading/visiting websites of all of them soon after because I got bored seeing the same things regardless of the title. I guess the counterpoint would be any niche publication that is still doing well in today's publishing environment.
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#7Condé Nast is where awesome goes to die.
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#8Condé Nast is where awesome goes to die.
Even Ars Technica is getting stale.
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#9Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#10Condé Nast might have helped run it into the ground but the unrecoverable dive started a long time ago. Pitchfork's content slowly turned into something more like a parody of pretentious music criticism. Paragraph after paragraph of drivel with seemingly no relation to the music. More like someone's journal entry repurposed as an album review. Maybe because they realized how stale their content had become they seemed to shift more and more of their focus towards hip hop and other genres that their traditional indie/rock readership didn't care as much about.