Insert Foot on the demise of Pitchfork and music criticism.

I thought I had it bad getting death threats from 14-year-old girls when I’d write that the Backstreet Boys were on their last legs.

I was right, but the death threats and insults were kind of fun. It beats having no one pay attention.

But being a fulltime music writer in 2024 can’t be that much fun. If there are even such people anymore.

The recent news that music site Pitchfork is being gutted and folded into GQ – ewwww – makes me feel glad I’m a 56-year-old journalist. And a fulltime music writer at the beginning of the century. Because the days of working in a newsroom with a bunch of energized, creative, smart and funny people, putting your opinion out there and having readers care (hate you) are gone. So I’m sooooo glad I got to be part of it.

Coupled with the announcement that Sports Illustrated is basically nuking its entire staff, is terribly sad for those of us growing up with SI as the pinnacle/last word on all things sports, but not surprising. In fact, once it came to light that SI was using AI for content, blowing up the whole thing sounded like a pretty solid idea.

Pitchfork was reliable. Not as fun as Creem or as high and mighty as Rolling Stone, but the writing was good, thoughtful and done by real music lovers who knew what they were doing.

And knew how to write, which is the bigger tragedy here.

Technically, Pitchfork isn’t dead yet. On Jan. 17, media giant Conde Nast announced it would lay off Pitchfork staff and merge the site with gross men’s magazine GQ. which is kind of like telling a bunch of music nerds they have to go join a frat or get kicked out of college.

GQ is gross, and it was gross when I was still young enough to pretend I cared about fashion and cologne and stuff. Don’t argue with me.

Anna Wintour (Meryl Streep), who’s also the boss at Conde Nast (which publishes high falootin’ magazines like The New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair) issued the typical bleh bleh bleh any journalist who has been through this crap is sick of hearing.

“Today we are evolving our Pitchfork team structure by bringing the team into the GQ organization,” Wintour wrote, bleh bleh bleh … bullshit bleh bleh more bullshit bleh bleh … The people who run RIFF all worked journalism jobs and heard these restructuring (layoff) speeches before.

I understand journalism still hasn’t properly figured out how to save itself. People much smarter than me have been trying since they saw it coming 25 years ago. Ironically, journalists are supposed to love democracy, and the Internet allows anyone to jump on and be read or seen.

So I suppose it’s democratic that way. Everyone gets to jump in the pool. But have you ever thought about what that does to the water?

Case in point, and this is no joke: My daughter just told me that one of her friends has many followers on InstaTikTwitter and 800 people allegedly watched her and some friends hit each other with tortillas in my living room. That is either the most brilliant or stupidest thing I’ve heard.

Agan, I’m SO glad I’m ancient and there was almost no way to document the things my friends and I did.

The point is that another blow has been delivered to the art of human thought being transferred through flesh-and-blood fingers to a pen or keyboard in an organized, thoughtful, funny, inspiring, or awful way. It was then absorbed through human eyes into another human brain, digested and either discarded or used to form another opinion.

It was a beautiful thing. Not because journalists are so much smarter than you (they are), but because they respected the process of discourse. They actually trained us to do this stuff. I have like $8 million in college loans in default because I had to go learn how to do it in college, which despite Uncle Joe Biden’s best efforts, they still make you repay.

Then someone paid us barely anything to go write stuff. And it felt wonderful, like we had a cause or something.

Now there’s no difference between a studied, knowledgeable arts critic with life experience and context and anyone who wants to jump on TikTok or YouTube and blurt out a bunch of mouth-garbage about whatever artist they happen to love or hate for whatever reason that pops into their attention-starved brain that day.

And it’s quite likely that that silly person is forming that opinion because they’re getting money or free stuff to do so. It’s true! One of the reasons 17-year-old influencers drive cars nicer than your house is because they get thousands of other people who weren’t alive to understand the phrase “Must-See TV” to follow them. It’s all in the numbers.

And now, even worse, they’re allowing artificial intelligence to provide content for them. I saw “Terminator.” I know where this is going.

Do the world a favor and pay for journalism made by humans. Or at least know the difference between good human journalism and the stuff written by Skynet (there’s way more of it than most of us recognize). In this age of everyone supposedly doing their “research,” do some research on the sources you use for your news and opinions. Understand the lines get more blurry everyday between real news content and advertisements spun out by some stupid corporate algorithm. And support the good human journalism. It matters.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.