Folkster's Blog

scotttobias:

The news is up on the site now. On Tuesday, July 7th, just three days away from our two-year anniversary, The Dissolve was… well… this is a time when we regret having that for a name. It’s all too overwhelming for me to process fully, but I leave feeling enormously proud of what we accomplished and of the many staffers, freelancers, and Pitchforkers who made the site something special. To that end, I wanted to use this space to acknowledge some people:

Thank you to Chris Kaskie, Ryan Schreiber, Megan Davey, Ryan Kennedy, and the rest of the management team for taking a huge gamble on us and welcoming us into the Pitchfork family. We found the best possible home for The Dissolve, a true independent that values the integrity and aesthetic beauty of its publications, and, more than that, the dignity of the hard-working people who put them together. Our biggest regret is that we couldn’t reward the faith you placed in our abilities.

Thank you to everyone else under the Pitchfork Media banner, which is just loaded with talent from top to bottom. Thank you to the designers—Mike Renaud, Molly Butterfoss, Joy Burke, Jessica Viscius, and others—for creating hands down the most gorgeous film site on the Internet, then following up with design elements that brought our features to life. Thank you to the developers—Matt Dennewitz, Andrew Gaerig, Neil Wargo, and Mark Beasley—for making the site a pleasing, intuitive experience for readers and for adding your own grace notes, too. Thank you to the business staff—currently Matt Frampton, Molly Raskin, Rob Jensen, Dave Gallagher, and Adam Krefman—for fighting the uphill battle of making us financially viable and giving us tremendous encouragement along the way. Thank you to our office manager, Amelia Dobmeyer, who had the unenviable task of leading us through a difficult day yesterday and did it with sensitivity and patience. And while we didn’t work that often with the music and TV staffs in New York, it was always fun when we did. I never met a single person at Pitchfork who I didn’t like or who I didn’t feel was excellent at what they did. That’s unfathomable to me. 

Thank you to the three founding staffers who left before the ship went down. Thank you to Noel Murray, my oldest friend and the ultimate pro, who knows everything about everything, worked nights and weekends in plugging up holes in every section, and  turned in thoughtful, informed, witty copy that rarely had so much as a misplaced comma. Thank you to Matt Singer, who was the one original staffer we hadn’t worked with before starting the site, but who was our only choice for heading up the Newsreel section; his creativity and enthusiasm epitomized the voice and the values we wanted for The Dissolve. Thank you to Nathan Rabin, a great navigator of the wounded and the arcane, who has an unmistakably personal voice that readers adore.

Thank you to Rachel Handler, who was only with us for six months, but is just an incandescent talent. Matt left impossible shoes to fill, but Rachel was like, “I’ll bring my own shoes, thanks.” (This shoe metaphor needs work, but I’m unemployed, so I’m letting it slide.) Her passion for women’s issues and issues of representation profoundly expanded the scope of the site, and she approached the job with amazing vigor, both in her voracious appetite for movies and in executing a news section with many moving parts.

Thank you to Genevieve Koski and Tasha Robinson, our peerless standard-bearers. Their fastidiousness and editorial values kept the site operating at a very high level from the jump. In a digital publishing culture where many have a post-first/ask-questions-later attitude, they insisted on making every piece as good and as factually and grammatically accurate as they could make it. And in doing so, they saved me and others from embarrassment almost daily. Everyone knows that Tasha, my favorite sparring partner and Strong Female Character, articulates herself beautifully, but they don’t realize how much research and care she puts into every review, feature, interview, and podcast to make sure she has something original and substantive to articulate. As for Genevieve, the site would have simply collapsed on its own without her. She was Grand Central of an extremely complex operation—the point person for every single section and the keeper of a daily to-do list longer than Mr. Smithers’ on The Simpsons. And she’s a deep thinker and writer to boot, as multi-dimensional as anyone I know in this business.

Thank you to all the freelancers, past and present, who made The Dissolve what it was. There are dozens of you, too many for me to name here, but one of our missions as a site was to break new talent and give veteran writers an opportunity to do their best work. On that front, we succeeded beyond our wildest expectations, and we were proud and honored to give a platform to so many remarkable voices.

Thank you to the readers, who validated our vision for the site from Day One. We wanted to create “a playground for movie lovers,” where cinematic omnivores like ourselves could have a place to analyze and argue about movies and share our enthusiasm for the form. And readers carried that spirit into the comment boards, which were simply the best I’ve ever experienced on the Internet—thoughtful, respectful, funny, and a world unto itself.

And thank you, finally, to Keith Phipps, the founder and editorial director of The Dissolve, the Best Man at my wedding, and my partner in this venture. We discovered early on that launching a new site and gaining traction in a competitive market was much harder than we anticipated. We fought to attract readers every hour of every day, and Keith bore it all on his shoulders, sometimes making gut-wrenching decisions for the good of the site. He loved his people and stood up for them always, and he deserved such a better outcome than the one he got. None of us have any regrets about this adventure and when the uncertainty and anxiety dissipate, I for one will remember it as the best professional experience of my life. Thanks, buddy.