Farewell, Paste Magazine

​After nearly folding last summer, it looks like the Georgia-based music mag Paste is departing for good this time. Staffers got the news in an afternoon meeting yesterday, and have since taken to Twitter, looking for new jobs--pretty conclusive evidence that the pay cuts the writers took and reader-led bailout of the magazine last July were not enough to save it in the long run. And thus another magazine joins Blender, the old, fully-functioning incarnation of VIBE, and No Depression in the graveyard of music-focused print products. Social media and the dissolution of Paste's particular reader niche--as chronicled in their own cover story, "Is Indie Dead?"--surely didn't help.

Like its predecessors, Paste leaves behind a niche basically unfilled anywhere else--a perhaps overly Ryan Adams-focused, Americana-to-the-point-of-occasional-parody kind of niche, but a valuable one nonetheless. They were still in the conversation, and these days, when the pulse of the conversation feels sluggish at best and impossibly passive and diffuse at worst, that's saying something. We are sad to see them go.

Paste Magazine Is Dead [Gawker]