Behemoth magazine-publishing company Condé Nast—home to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired, GQ, and a bunch of others—has purchased Pitchfork Media, The New York Times revealed this morning. No one from the companies said how much Condé paid for the 20-year-old taste-making website (and magazine and music festival), but Fred Santarpia, who shepherded the deal for Condé, pointed out that Pitchfork brings “a very passionate audience of millennial males into our roster,” which is just the kind of buzzwordy corporate-speak the Pitchfork Media staff can look forward to hearing regularly now.
Rumors had circulated that Pitchfork was looking for a buyer, but news of the sale still took the media world by surprise today. That said, the deal makes sense: Magazine publishers like Condé Nast are desperately trying to figure out how to survive and make money in the post-print world, and Pitchfork gets the resources provided by a giant media company.
Meanwhile in midtown Manhattan, executives at Time Inc. and Hearst are googling “millennial male websites.” Sorry, guys, The A.V. Club isn’t for sa—wait, how much are we talking about here?
Also bought today: The Village Voice, purchased by something called the Reading Eagle Company, meaning the paper that was once NYC’s flagship alt-weekly is now a subsidiary of a small-town Pennsylvania newspaper. Welcome to the media world of 2015!