Vice, Lifehacker, Kotaku & Gizmodo all to shut down Australian operations… here’s where they all went wrong

It’s a sad day when you read that five very cool online zines are closing down, especially when you consider it shouldn’t take too many dollars to run an online publication.

Insiders have confirmed that lifestyle site Refinery29, gaming blog Kotaku, and tech zine Gizmodo are all shutting down their Australian operations, and that their entire staff have been made redundant as part of the restructuring of the Pedestrian Group.

Vice Australia, and Lifehacker Australia will also be closing, with local staff informed yesterday of their fate from the bigwigs at Nine – who own the Pedestrian Group.

I remember sitting at a PR dinner alongside the guy who originally started Pedestrian. He thanked Cream for being an inspiration in independent publishing that saw him go on to co-found the Pedestrian site. I took the comment as extremely complimentary, and I loved what Pedestrian were doing. It’s a site that has managed to keep up its anti-conservative ethos but which, in recent days, has become a mess of pop-up ads and noisy clips, heavily disrupting the reader experience.

That’s where I think the problem lies with all these hip online magazines: while trying to fight the traditionalist media agenda, they’re being forced by the likes of Network Nine to sell out while bellowing their anti-traditionalist cries even louder, looking hypocritical in the process.

They also expand way too quickly – some hiring too many writers fulltime, others relying on free citizen journalism that only adds to the chaos and mess. And then there’s the lull in advertising spend during the current economic crisis, for it’s natural that a traditional media company like Nine considers the ultimate ca-ching value of a magazine far more important than its raison d’etre.

There’s a certain dissonance that is inevitable when an indie magazine is bought up by a big media company. You can’t be rallying for minority rights when the old-school clingers-on of commerce are aiming for greater mass appeal. It just doesn’t work. Even The Face in the UK – that bastion of rad pop culture – sacrifices traditional advertising in favour of clever advertorial amid its reviews and interviews. And for The Face this works very well. The publication is so insistent in its minimalist approach to marketing, its entire template adopts just one colour for copy: red. And what a perfect colour for a title that has always projected a Glasnost-type mission.

This week, Pedestrian group CEO Matt Rowley announced that, “Where possible, we will look for opportunities for redeployment and will continue to work with everyone over the coming days to support this difficult transition.”

Rowley also announced that “as a result of this change, I will also be leaving Pedestrian Group and Nine following a transition period” .

I’m not sure what salary Rowley was on but just the fact he wore the label CEO with pride kind of kills the Pedestrian vibe for me.

Independent publishing in Australia has always been about defying the ways the legacy media operated and behaved. Rather than be the indie voice it started out as, Pedestrian has become a somewhat Aussie-fied version of TMZ – noisy on the aesthetic front, trashy in its celebrity news presenting, and redundant on the political side of things. Even its LGBTQIA championing comes across as patronising and twee.

What I’d like to see is perhaps the best representative from each of the aforementioned titles taking care of their respective department in one cohesive and cleaner title. Yes, there’s too much stuff online these days, but when you have the passion and the right (original) ethos that a brand like Pedestrian possessed, you ought to be able to keep on top of something as ghastly as – yuk! – financial issues. So I’m sensing that even if Pedestrian does get amputated from Nine, it should be able to be able to continue its flag-bearing brilliance.

And please, if you’re going to keep the brand alive, at least keep going against the grain of the dying legacy media. Otherwise, you really are just becoming, well, pedestrian.

Antonino Tati