Welcome to the New York Times

Pop Gas, your culmination and instant greatest hits.

Of music news and criticism, I'm your host, John Caramonica.

No music this week, because we're going to talk about something serious and a little bit emotional and I think tough especially for those of us who pay close attention to what's happening in the music press.

A few days ago, by the time you're hearing this maybe about a week ago,

Conde Nass announced a bunch of layoffs at Pitch Fork.

Pitch Fork still exists. It's being brought under the GQ editorial umbrella.

It's a little unclear what that might look like moving forward. There are still people who were

staffers who remained on staff. I don't want to lose sight of that, but a lot of people were laid off and the

news obviously was received with a tremendous amount of sadness and confusion and uncertainty prognostications about the fate of

independent criticism the fate of music journalism all of those things will be

made clear over time, I think.

It's maybe a tiny bit too soon to totally understand

how this is going to reorient music journalism

as it's currently practiced, but it is undeniable the power and

authority that Pitch Fork has had for two-plus decades at this point. It's been

through a lot of phases, a lot of staffers and editors and writers

who have helped to shape the areas of coverage that they were the most passionate about.

On this week's episode, what we're going to do is actually go back to

the beginning of Pitch Fork we are going to talk to Ryan Schreiber who if you follow

site lore you know Ryan founded the site back in the mid 90s as an indie rock obsessive blogging on the

internet a time-honor task that that I hope everybody tries out at least once

...