Just over six months after Condé Nast announced that Pitchfork would be absorbed by GQ, the publication has announced the appointment of its new heads and that it will continue to stand alone.
Mano Sundaresan, formerly of NPR and founder of No Bells, was announced as Pitchfork's new Head of Editorial Content. Former GQ Editor-in-Chief Will Welch is now the global editorial director of both Pitchfork and GQ, and said the two publications will be separate, as he told Billboard:
Pitchfork is still continuing as Pitchfork and GQ is continuing as GQ. I'm now leading both, and very excited to have Mano working on the Pitchfork project with me. And there are ways that we are sharing efforts on the back end — operational stuff, logistical stuff. We just had a really cool meeting last week, where it was GQ editors sharing what they're excited about in music looking ahead at the rest of the year, and then the Pitchfork editors doing the same. There are conversations like that happening, but the Pitchfork brand is continuing standalone, and GQ is continuing standalone as well.
In the same interview, Sundaresan claimed he wants to "honour the traditions of Pitchfork as-is": "They've done so much over the past few years, especially with broadening the accessibility, making it more conversational. I want to continue those efforts," he said.
Following Pitchfork's restructuring, former Editor-in-Chief Puja Patel was laid off alongside 20 percent of Condé Nast's union, and 400 employees of the media giant staged a historic walkout to protest the job losses. When the layoffs initially happened in January, the future of Pitchfork remained unclear.
