Behind the "scene": a full interview with Pitchfork's Chris Kaskie
By Jen Kessler, Entertainment Staff Writer
April 5, 2008 | 9 p.m.
Speakeasy had the opportunity to glimpse the inner workings of the Internet's most popular independent music publication, PitchforkMedia.com, through a conversation with Associate Publisher Chris Kaskie. For a Speakeasy profile of Pitchfork, click here.
SE: When and how did it all start?
CK: It started with Ryan Schreiber, who is the founder and editor-in-chief of Pitchfork. He started it out of his parents’ basement in '96 in Minneapolis, Minn., which is where he’s from originally. He decided he wanted to figure out a way to meet bands, interview bands and get free music and stuff, and he didn’t have any money to start a print magazine, so he decided to do something on the Internet, which is what he did. So he started up the site at first in order to get band reviews and whatnot and get on guest lists and stuff, and then it just kept growing. He’d get people to write for him for free -- whoever was kind of around. Then, in ‘01 or so, the site saw a relatively large jump in traffic due to a Radiohead review because of all the Radiohead fans that had kind of latched on. So after that, he kind of got a little more pro with his writing staff, got some more people, paid them a little bit here and there, and then late ’03, he decided to get some employees and hired some people. He hired me first, and then we hired a managing editor to kind of handle the writing staff so I could handle all the operations from the non-writing perspective of the site.
SE: Are you three the only full-time staffers?
C.K: No, actually. I was the first full-time staffer to be brought on, and then Scott was the second, and now we have 18 full-time employees.
SE: How many writers?
CK: Fifty or 60, spread across the U.S. and the world, for that matter. They’re all considered staff writers but they work as like freelance, so it’s all on a project-by-project basis.
SE: When you guys publish a review, is there any sort of consensus that goes into it or is it basically left up to the writer and his/her opinion?
CK: Well, I don’t handle the reviews and submissions, but as far as I understand everything and as far as I know about it, basically what happens is the writer will write something -- obviously it’s assigned; everything is on an assignment-based system -- but the editor will make an assignment to the writer, and then the writer will write about it and basically turn it in, and if there is anything to be talked about, it’s talked about, but for the most part, it’s the writer’s opinion, and then all the editors have to make sure is happening is that Pitchfork sort of agrees with their stance -- not necessarily if it’s good or bad, but if we can stand behind what they’re putting out.
SE: Is it difficult to manage writers that are so scattered all over the place?
CK: I think so, yeah. It’s definitely more difficult to wrangle them all together and get them to turn things in on time, especially since we’re a daily publication. You’ve got to put up five reviews a day, and that’s kind of tough. We’ve actually made steps to regulate that; we hired all of our news and all of our Forkasting, which is the audio/video blog. All of that’s done in-house, so the only thing that’s left as a freelance thing are the reviews and features. So we’re definitely taking steps to regulate it, but yeah, it definitely seems like it’s kind of a hassle.
SE: You guys are based in Chicago, correct?
CK: Right, and we also have an office in New York City now, too. We’re launching a new part of our site in April called Pitchfork TT, so we have a couple people out there. Ryan [founder of Pitchfork] actually moved out there last March, and then a couple people working with him on the initiative, which should launch in April. But yeah, everybody else is in Chicago; that’s where our headquarters are located.
SE: Where did the name “Pitchfork” come from?
CK: I believe Ryan a) liked the way it sounded, and b) it was a reference to a tattoo that Tony Montana had in “Scarface.” Ryan is very into and very much about making sure something sounds cool, or when it comes to album art, he’s a real stickler on what bands to use their album art and which not to. It kind of goes along with that; he liked something that sounds cool. It doesn’t really have a huge meaning.
SE: How have the goals of Pitchfork evolved since the beginning?
CK: Basically, when Ryan made the decision to turn it from a hobby into more of a company, the goals went from just getting by to making sure we could put out some of the best music criticism out there. Obviously, there are a lot of places that are kind of less concerned with the art of a music review and more concerned with getting someone an mp3 or just pumping out as much content as they can and not really put much time into it. Basically, we kind of wanted to make sure that we were not only the best written word when it comes to music criticism, but also, as it grew in size, we realized that we could also kind of start to chalk up to some of the larger magazines and do something better. So it’s just a matter of staying innovative and staying with or ahead of the curve and not falling behind. Some magazines have kind of suffered that fate; they’ve neglected to notice that the Internet was taking off or neglected that people like to listen to mp3s and stuff. So it’s a matter of staying not just relevant, but kind of staying conscious of who we’re talking about and what we’re doing.
SE: Do you find it difficult to be an Internet publication as opposed to a print one?
CK: Definitely. There are a couple different problems. One problem is, as I said, a lot of people don’t -- and I think this is becoming less prevalent now -- but people don’t think that the Internet is as viable a source for anything as something printed, like a newspaper. People got used to reading the New York Times in the morning, but now people are getting used to reading Pitchfork in the morning. So the print aspect is a drawback in some people’s eyes, but in others’, it’s just a much more convenient way to read the same stuff in a more immediate way. We have the capability of doing whatever we want as soon as we want it. We run into more problems in that we can do that in terms of the size of our readership; we’ll review a record that was released in Sweden that’s not out in the U.S. for two months, and the people in the U.S. kind of get bummed out because we’ll review it, and no one can get it. So those are kind of the troubles we get more for catering to an international audience; sometimes people get pissed off when they forget we’re not just in the U.S. even though we happen to be based here. I’d say another big drawback, being online versus in print, is what you can do creatively from an advertising and marketing standpoint. You get a lot more freedom to do something neat and spectacular when you’re in print and you have a page in a magazine, whereas online, anything you try to do like that becomes, naturally, more obtrusive to our readers. We’ve kind of taken a pretty conservative stance against that. So we’ll have issues with advertisers who want to do more than we can offer to kind of match what they’re doing in print.
SE: Best year at Pitchfork?
CK: I think for Ryan, he’d say '01-'02. And 2005, he had a good year. The last few years, we saw a lot of growth, and we really began to streamline our internal operations and do a better job at everything. We have a music festival we do in Chicago, so we had our first successful festival, and everything was kind of falling into place, and we were really prodding ourselves towards the future. That was a table-setting year for us. Last year was also very good, but in my opinion, '05 was really a standout year.
SE: How do you guys manage to make that Pitchfork music festival so cheap? [2008’s summer fest will cost $65 for all three days]
CK: We just managed to take a non-capitalistic stance on it. The whole goal in doing the festival, and one of the things that we’ve always noticed is that it’s hard to go see a band that you want see when you either have to see a hundred other bands that you don’t want to see or have to deal with sponsors that are in your way, and you have to deal with high ticket prices. Basically, what we did was decide to kind of cut the fat on everything that we noticed in music festivals and make a festival that would cater to ourselves and thus our readers, and we priced our tickets so that people can come and not have to worry, so ticket price becomes an afterthought. They go to see the music and see what’s going on as opposed to getting hung up on things that don’t really matter. We definitely don’t pay any less than other places do -- we just happen to make a little less than everybody else does -- but it’s all for fun and all for promoting the music that’s there, as opposed to taking all the music there and trying to make a bunch of money off of it.
SE: As somebody who deals with music on the Internet on a regular basis, how do you feel about music piracy?
CK: I think that there are ways to go about it that are good and ways to go about it that are bad. The music industry is changing, and piracy is basically forcing the industry to adapt and change, and there are some people that are having a hard time doing that, and they are the ones normally raising the biggest fuss about piracy. Obviously, I don’t think that people should be stealing music, necessarily, and if they do or are able to steal it, then it’s on their conscience. But I think it’s more on the shoulders of the labels and the distribution folks to figure out a way to a) stop it from happening and b) figure out how they can adapt to make sure that people are being able to fulfill that nature of people being able to get something but also getting it so that the artists are benefiting from it. There are a lot of things popping up, like bands releasing music on ad-supported networks so that when ads pop up the music is free, and the site ends up paying the bands money. People are figuring out ways around it; it’s just going to be a matter of time before it all kind of falls into place and people stop thinking about it as stealing music and thinking as it more of sharing music – but the most important thing is that the artist can benefit.
SE: You guys are often labeled “tastemakers” in the music industry. As a publication, do you feel responsibility over that?
CK: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, when someone calls you a tastemaker, that’s just one person’s opinion, or a bunch of people’s opinions, but as I said earlier, one of the benefits of being an online magazine is the fact that you can hear something and do something much more immediate that anywhere that’s bound to publication dates or anything, and I think that we happen to have a situation where we meld the blog world and the magazine world together. We can kind of be there and filter through everything before most other people get it. You obviously have a responsibility to make sure that you’re doing well, but the site has always just been honest with what it likes and with itself. It’s up to people to put how much weight they want to put into what we say. In some cases, some people think it’s the end-all, be-all, while other people don’t think it matters. You have to always understand that you’re talking to a large amount of people, and a lot of people might not know what your deal is or what a band’s deal is, so you have to be conscious of it, but you can’t necessarily feel responsible for what happens. It’s up to, ultimately, the artists and their publicists and everybody to do their job, and we are just sort of the words of many. It’s obviously flattering to be considered that, and I think that you want to be that -- we definitely like the idea of being a tastemaker -- but the only reason we’re considered that is because we’re directing a bunch of loyal readers who are loyal to our site.
SE: Does Pitchfork have any big future plans in particular?
CK: I think it’s just a matter of expanding the site and expanding what we do. We have a certain niche that we work with, and we want to expand that a bit more, and then kind of hone in further on our specialties. Reviews, news and, now, we can add TV to the fold. If you read about one band in a review or a news section, you can also watch something we’ve created from a visual perspective. And then it’s just a matter of the content of the site and kind of keeping with the times; allow more voices in, get more writers involved, bring in more of the music community. A lot of the places like that are kind of faltering, and we’re kind of able to take advantage of being a hybrid of things that people like. But there’s nothing major planned aside from doing a better job at our festival and online -- just expanding and making ourselves better. This is a big year for us. We have a bunch of stuff coming up; we have a festival in England, the festival in Chicago, we’ve worked with a video game company to pick out soundtracks for video games. It’s things like that we’re starting to get into to further represent and kind of get our brand out there, for lack of a better term. But yeah, I think for the most part, it’ll be business as usual.
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