David Carr of the NY Times' profiled Pitchfork yesterday in "Garage Rock Meets Garage Critics." He pinpointed a few of the reasons the site is so successful. "Pitchfork is home to the kind of full-on rant-think piece-takedown that was once the specialty of long-and-strong journalism legends like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs," he wrote, later adding that it has a style of writing much like that of alternative weeklies "but it is ambitious and passionately prosecuted."

Xeni Jardin, co-editor of Boing Boing, points to a "new credibility" on the Internet. "At this moment in our cultural history, a lot of the better content on the Web is seen as unmediated and more honest," she said. Pitchfork has oodles of credibility, that's for sure. One gets the feeling it can't be sold. (In indie rock language that means it can be snooty.) How coincidental that on the same page in the Times's business section was an article about Liz Hurley on the cover of Shape magazine that carried the sentence, "Magazines, of course, often blur the line between advertising and editorial content." And therein lies the cred problem.