The smell of fear

Anybody else catching a whiff of desperation from over Pitchfork way?

First there's the information on the Intonation Festival site, where if you read between the lines you can tell the Pitchfork page-view numbers are both fishy (they say "Recent articles have cited the online magazine to have 115,000 daily visitors and over 2 million views per month" - in other words, THEY'RE not claiming those figs or vouching for them) and declining (elsewhere: "In 2004, Pitchfork reached its watershed of 1,000,000 unique visitors per month, and currently attracts more than 115,000 visitors per day").

Then there's the re-design, surely engineered to generate hype.

And there's the press offensive that drowned us all in Ryan Schreiber for two months.

And now the switch to a real-time news format, a transparent effort to get the indee kidz clickety-clacking through on the five minutes for breaking Weezer nooze.

Add it all up and it looks like they're dancing as fast as they can.