The Rhythm Section: Amy Phillips and Life Post-Pitchfork
I spoke with Amy Phillips, former executive editor of Pitchfork, about her career in music journalism, the significance of music criticism and life after the Pitchfork layoffs.
Amy Phillips was at the happiest place in the world when she received the worst news of her life.
It was a Wednesday afternoon in January, and Phillips, the executive editor at Pitchfork, the online music criticism publication, was strolling through Disney World. She had just recovered from a bad bout of Covid and the flu and was relieved to be finally savoring the sunshine on a long-planned family getaway with her husband and six-year-old daughter.
Phillips was walking to the Hollywood Studios region of the park to meet up with them when an urgent Slack message from Pitchfork’s human resources department popped into her phone, informing her of an all-hands mandatory meeting at 1:30 p.m. She responded, “I’m at Disney World, do I have to be there?” They said yes.
Phillips took a seat on a bench in front of the Chinese Theater at Hollywood Studios and joined the Zoom meeting. Anna Wintour, the global content advisor of Condé Nast, Pitchfork’s parent company, appeared on screen — sunglasses shrouding her eyes — and informed everyone that Pitchfork was being folded into GQ, and that some of their jobs would be affected. Those whose jobs were affected would be contacted by HR shortly after the meeting.
Oh my god, what does this mean? thought Phillips, as she frantically texted her husband, who was in the Toy Story Land section of the park. Do I have a job? What is happening?
A meeting appeared in her calendar. Fifteen minutes later, Phillips was on Zoom again.
This time, the human resources representatives made it official: Her position as executive editor of Pitchfork had been terminated. Phillips listened, staggered. She had spent 18 years — nearly her entire career — at Pitchfork. It was her first full-time job out of college, her home away from home, the place she had helped to build from the ground up. When the call was over, she turned to her husband, who had joined her, and burst into tears. “That’s how it ends,” she sobbed.
Hundreds of journalists are reeling in the wake of a massive wave of layoffs, dissolutions and restructurings early into 2024. In January alone, over 500 journalists were laid off, according to a report from the career coaching organization Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Media outlets including Pitchfork, the LA Times, Vice Media, Business Insider and TechCrunch among others have been gutted — seeing significant portions of their employee base seeking new opportunities following the loss of their jobs.
Clare Malone in the New Yorker decried this as a potential “extinction-level event” in journalism, pointing to a report that recorded 2,681 layoffs in broadcast, print and digital news media last year. With more unemployed writers now scrambling for scraps in the already competitive freelance market, and less jobs being available with the increasing loss of major publications, the economic security of the journalism industry has become more volatile than ever.
“It is quite literally a game of musical chairs in which they are not adding more chairs. They’re running out of chairs,” said Kelsey Weekman, an internet culture writer who was laid off from both Buzzfeed News and Yahoo News’ In the Know vertical in the aftermath of their dissolutions.
Phillips was in a daze — she didn’t know what to do. She and her husband returned to Toy Story Land to find their daughter Conwy, who was getting off a roller coaster. Her daughter asked her why she was crying, and Phillips said that it was because she lost her job. “She was super excited about that,” Phillips said. “She was like, ‘Yay! You can hang out with me all the time now.’”
Phillips decided to return to the hotel and spend the rest of the day on her phone trying to figure out who else had been laid off. She learned that upwards of half the Pitchfork staff were laid off, including her close friend and editor-in-chief Puja Patel. The next day, their daily morning staff meeting was flooded with farewells. “It was just a goodbye — lots of tears,” she said.
For their final day in Orlando on Thursday, the family was supposed to go to Epcot, but Phillips was too emotionally drained. She spent another night in the hotel texting and calling, trying to figure out what to do next. She reached out to her publicist contacts in the music industry, sharing her personal email with them so that they could still keep in touch, while in the back of her mind she wondered How do I file for unemployment? How do I make a resume?
Phillips flew back to New York on Friday, briefly dropping her stuff off at her apartment before meeting a large group of her Pitchfork colleagues at a bar. “It was just everybody throwing a wake for the Pitchfork that we knew and loved,” she said.
The following Tuesday, Phillips arrived at the Pitchfork office to pack up her things. Her husband and daughter helped her load boxes filled with almost two decades-worth of memories from the only place she had ever worked — including a shoebox of David Bowie Vans she got for a promotional collaboration, a Ken doll promoting Charli XCX’s 2017 song “Boys” and artwork made by her daughter in school — as she said goodbye to a place she had hoped she would never have to say goodbye to.
***
It was the first of August in 2005 when Phillips entered the Pitchfork office in Chicago for the first time. She was 23, one year post-grad from Columbia University, and had been making a name for herself in music journalism with some bylines in high-profile publications like The Village Voice (including a review of Sonic Youth’s 2002 record “Murray St.” which spurred some controversy among its readers).
Her passion for music journalism sparked during middle school, when for her eighth grade observation project — a “Career Day” of sorts — she was paired with Philadelphia Inquirer music critic Dan DeLuca. “It was one of the most amazing days of my life,” she said. After touring his office and taking home some promotional CDs, DeLuca took her to a Foo Fighters concert at the Trocadero Theater in Philadelphia. “After that, I was like, I want this to be my life. So I have been extremely lucky in that I knew what I wanted to do since I was 13, and then I just got to do it.”
The Philadelphia native had been asked a few months prior to spearhead the news team as its director at the behest of Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber. Two weeks after a “magical” experience at the Pitchfork-curated Intonation Music Festival, she joined four other staffers and a handful of interns inside a dingy room reminiscent of an old noir film detective agency.
It was here in this office — filled with CDs and plastered with music posters, sandwiched between the Logan Square Auditorium and a diner called Johnny’s Grill, which left a lingering stench of kitchen grease to saturate one of their supply closets they dubbed “Burger Town,” — where Phillips would find her home.
“The vibe was very much like, we’re in this gang. We’re just buds hanging out, talking about music and having fun,” she said. “That vibe, in some form, never went away. Obviously it changed a lot, but just this feeling of like, Oh my god, it’s my job to just sit around and listen to and talk about music, was the best. And it just felt so cool to feel like we were building this cool thing that people cared about.”
For 14 years, Phillips helmed Pitchfork’s news department, where she transformed the section into the ultimate outlet for information about new music. In the early days, the news team pushed three stories a day, hand-coding their writing in HTML before content management systems became prevalent. Like her colleagues, Phillips’ headphones rarely strayed from atop her head because there was too much music to be listening to — typically about five to six hours worth every day.
The job was demanding, but she always maintained the rhythm of the newsroom. “She’s like the bass player, but she also manages the band,” said her husband Elia Einhorn, the former frontman of Chicago-based indie rock outfit The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir. Despite throwing in the occasional inside joke over AIM Instant Messenger to her colleague Mark Richardson (“That piece just lit up the Internet like a goddamn pinball machine,”), or issuing out their jokingly-coveted “You fucking did it!” award during their daily 10:30 a.m. team meetings, Phillips was all business.
“When I first met her, she was just laser-focused on work to an unbelievable degree — in a way that was unhealthy,” Richardson, former editor-in-chief of Pitchfork and now the rock and pop music critic at the Wall Street Journal, said. “She would literally be at her desk until she fell asleep sometimes because she was so focused on doing a good job.” Einhorn said she would even check her phone during dinner or movies to monitor Pitchfork news. “I remember at our wedding, I joked on mic that instead of asking her mom if I could ask for Amy’s hand, I should have asked Mark Richardson.”
After being one of the last three Pitchfork employees still living in Chicago following the editorial team’s transition to New York in 2007, Phillips moved to Brooklyn in 2012, where she continued her quest of pushing Pitchfork news to break stories first and get them right. “Her version of Pitchfork news was the tightest ship that has ever run,” said Patel, who joined Pitchfork as its editor-in-chief in 2018.
She would write from time to time, occasionally authoring album reviews in addition to music news — like her enthusiastic preview of Radiohead’s 2007 record “In Rainbows” titled “NEW RADIOHEAD ALBUM AAAAAAAHHH!!!” “She’s a great writer — sharp and funny, easygoing. I always feel like she kind of hated having to write, but she’s great,” said Matthew Schnipper, former managing editor of Pitchfork. But primarily, Phillips duties’ encompassed persistent management of music news coverage and supervising their fellowship program, where she would mentor college-aged music journalists interested in working for Pitchfork.
In 2019, after a maternity leave following the birth of her daughter, Patel promoted Phillips to managing editor, allowing her a bit more distance from the daily grind of the news section and giving her a more behind-the-scenes role in the publication. “She was my sidekick. We were very much a partnership in how we ran Pitchfork,” Patel said. “I couldn’t have done it without her.” From that role, she eventually moved on to be the executive editor of the publication, and with Patel, oversaw the inner workings of the publication as a whole.
Phillips was happy. She could show up to work in a Mitski T-shirt — one of many in her wardrobe of concert and artist merch. During the pandemic, she would enjoy morning walks with Patel in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park to discuss topics on the morning meeting agenda. She would enjoy the company of her friends and coworkers while they enjoyed new music together in one of the Pitchfork office’s “listening rooms.” But in the blink of an eye, this dream job she had lived and loved for almost 20 years was gone.
***
In the weeks after she was laid off, Phillips couldn’t help but check her email and Slack religiously. It was ingrained in her, a habit she couldn’t shake. Though there were no new messages to read, no work to be done, she kept feeling the urge to look — hoping it was all just a bad dream.
She was anxious, tired and had trouble sleeping. While figuring out how to transition to life outside of her job, she went to yoga classes and spent more time with her friends — anything to take her mind away from the Pitchfork-shaped hole in her heart.
Phillips says she would love to return to music journalism someday, but she is worried there might not be a place for her anymore in the industry.
After this recent batch of layoffs, she feels like the tide has shifted in a way it hasn’t before. “It definitely felt like this year, everything was collapsing because there were so many all at once,” she said. “This industry is not what it was even a couple of years ago — just the sheer scale of it feels different to the past. And I don’t think it’s temporary.”
“The decision with Pitchfork, which is just this lodestar of music criticism, is really symbolic in how media executives don’t value the written word and don’t value arts reporting,” freelance music writer Grant Sharples said. The digital age of music streaming has complicated the relationship between critics and listeners — as the score a critic gives a piece of music doesn’t hold as much weight as it did when people had to purchase records individually, choosing which projects were worth their time and money.
“People can certainly turn to algorithms for music discovery, but personally, I find that bleak,” said Zach Schonfeld, a freelance music writer. “Spotify can serve you up a playlist of songs that you are algorithmically inclined to enjoy, but Spotify is not going to provide any cultural context for the music that is serving you.”
Music criticism acts a conduit between a listener and an artist — pulling away the layers of what goes into the music, what the contextualization behind its creation is, and explains it in a way that allows listeners to examine the art on a deeper level. It offers perspective about how a piece of music fits into history, how it furthers or hinders a genre or subculture and how it ties into the cultural zeitgeist. Without critical thought and context surrounding music, and without critics there to point out art that is worth listening to, not only do music fans miss out, but the music industry suffers, too.
“I think anybody who loves listening to music and also has some sort of appreciation or even disdain for music criticism understands the weight that a Pitchfork score can have on a record,” said Matt Mitchell, the head music editor at Paste Magazine. “They were so crucial to not only being tastemakers in music, but they could make or break a career if they wanted to. That’s how essential it was.”
Music critics and journalists break up-and-coming unknown acts into the greater social context, like how Pitchfork’s 9.7 review of Arcade Fire’s 2004 album “Funeral” made the band a household name and a radio mainstay. It allows fans of more niche areas of music to develop their personal tastes by finding new artists to listen to without relying on an algorithm. “Culture isn’t going away. People who make things are going to continue to make things, but they are going to have less viable paths to get to their audience, to make a living out of their work,” Schnipper said. “It’s just going to be harder, as a fan, to find places that will cover the entirety of the world you are interested in.”
“First and foremost, I’m a music nerd. There always will be people like me who just love thinking about and learning about artists and music and making critical connections,” Phillips said. “What value does art have? It's an escape from the drudgery of life, making beauty. I find a lot of beauty and pleasure in a well-written piece, and I think there will always be an audience for that.”
At home in Brooklyn, Phillips has a lot more time on her hands nowadays. She spends her time updating her LinkedIn profile and her resume, perplexed by the way AI has integrated into job recruitment — a far cry from her more personalized approach to onboarding new staff at Pitchfork. She still goes on walks with Patel at Fort Greene Park, though they are much less frequent, and are more personal check-ins between friends rather than coworkers preparing for the workday.
In the aftermath, she has also been able to hang out more with her daughter Conwy. She started volunteering at her daughter’s school, assisting in updating its inventory of library books, and has begun reading “Harry Potter” books to her before bedtime. “I don’t think she’s emotionally ready to read past the first three right now, so it might be another year before we really do it,” she said. “One of the delights of having a child is showing them things you love and having them be excited about it — which happens very infrequently.”
But recently, Phillips’ luck has finally turned around. In April, she secured a position as a freelance contractor for HeadCount, a non profit organization that uses music to promote voter registration. Using her industry experience, Phillips is helping the organization expand their connections in the music business, creating opportunities for contests that award registered voters with the opportunity to see the biggest names in music for free. It might not be music journalism, but it is still music-related — and Phillips is glad she has something to focus on again.
This summer she hopes to travel with her family, planning on attending the Primavera Sound music festival in Barcelona. Once her daughter finishes the “Harry Potter” series (she is reading “The Chamber of Secrets” currently) and watches all the movies, a trip to Universal Studios will also be in order — returning to where she and her husband shared their honeymoon. But it might take some time before the family returns to Disney World.
“I don’t think I would want to go back to the specific area of the park I was in,” Phillips said, laughing. “But thankfully, Disney World is vast.”
This is amazing Vic! So happy that you finally were able to put out this piece.