Pitchfork and WIRED owner Condé Nast is experimenting with paywalls

In a new feature and interview on The Wall Street Journal, WIRED editor-in-chief Nick Thompson explains that the paywall - part of a "business and editorial reboot" - is being implemented in a bid to secure the publication's future in an uncertain time for the magazine industry.

"The simple reason that we’re going to a paywall model is that I think it’s going to make money, and I’d like us to make more money," Thompson tells the WSJ. "The deeper reason we’re going to a paywall model is because you need to hedge against the future."

Further to WIRED's incoming paywall, Condé Nast executives are apparently willing to toy with the system on other titles. Condé Nast owns Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ, and more; some publications have already started using paywalls, with The New Yorker's model seemingly the most successful.

In the feature Anna Wintour, Condé Nast's companywide artistic director, says the media giant is looking at paid content "across all the titles". Bob Sauerberg, chief executive of Condé Nast, says that the company is looking at digital paywalls "for other publications" in 2018; unnamed exceutives reportedly say that "online subscription models at The New Yorker and WIRED may be followed by paywalls at its other properties."

This may not apply to Pitchfork, which is primarily an online entity (although the short-running The Pitchfork Review was a physical magazine), but if it does that's a big voice in the music industry that'll get disrupted. We've reached out to both Condé Nast and Pitchfork for comment.