Zach Seward of the NYT has published as an article his 2024 SXSW talk on AI and journalism. It's very good! I'm in full agreement with his conclusions. Approved usage for AI: providing assistance with search, data organization, and other creative research methods. What it should not do: write content while pretending to be something it is not. There are legitimate ways to incorporate AI into newsrooms, and Seward has outlined great boundaries around how one might.
The End of Pitchfork?
Pitchfork magazine is being folded into GQ. I've been a reader for over twenty years now, and so this is a bummer. I read maybe one out of every 300 reviews, but it was still a good place to catch wind of new artists, or which older artists are putting out new material.
Kornhaber does a pretty good job of capturing my attitude towards it:
The irony of Pitchfork is that although it has long been thought of as a keeper of cool, the site itself has never been particularly cool; one admits sheepishly to reading it. This is not just because of its reputation for snobbery and its sometimes exasperating prose. It's also because to absorb the logic of Pitchfork is to believe in the authority of each individual's ears and brain. Saying you're a Pitchfork person can be mistaken for saying you take its opinions as your own, when ideally it just means that you want a discerning companion for making your own discoveries and judgments.
I never really cared what Pitchfork said about anyone. I'm able to have my own studied opinions. But if they cared to write about someone, I figured they were worth the attention, for good or bad.
This is probably the end of the site, but the real Pitchfork killer would be the sunsetting of its RSS feed. If I can't follow the music news without also getting posts about what watches movie stars wore on red carpets, then I'm out out.
Time to start looking for more places for independent music news.
