Business News Media

Pitchfork previews new print Review

By | Published on Friday 22 November 2013

The Pitchfork Review

Having recently launched its iOS app Pitchfork Weekly, music website Pitchfork has revealed it will, on 4 Dec, swim against the media tide and go into print, via a ‘serious’ and ‘substantial’ new quarterly magazine titled The Pitchfork Review. Hmm.

Due to launch on 14 Dec, it’s described in this introductory piece on Fast Company as a “journal … focused on longform music writing and design-focused content”. Pitchfork will partner exclusively with Converse for the mag’s first four issues, the first of which will include articles on Glenn Danzig, Van Morrison, Otis Redding and Savages, plus a history of the jukebox, and a nostalgic appraisal on the “glory days” (ha) of the UK weekly music press by critic Simon Reynolds.

Talking it up, Pitchfork founder and CEO Ryan Schreiber intones: “Magazines have lost their foothold on breaking news, so the original content in the Review is new but less time sensitive. It looks at current music but also catalogue artists”.

Relating the Review to the print edition of US music mag Spin, which ceased to be last December (and thereby slightly twisting the knife… or the fork), Schreiber adds: “They kind of had the right idea, but it was still about everything being new and first. You were seeing a lot of the same things that had already been out there, the same artists that you’re seeing every day”.

By contrast, he says: “We’re not trying to be what music publications have traditionally been. We’re trying to break free from this constant racing to be first, which we do online”.

Issue one of The Pitchfork Review, which will be printed on high-quality paper and be quite book-esque, will be in stock online on 14 Dec. Issues are priced individually at $19.96, in a nod to Pitchfork’s birth year. Nice.



READ MORE ABOUT: