Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | September 16, 2025
Yesterday, Oliver Darcy’s Status reported that Rolling Stone had abruptly fired Alan Sepinwall, along with several other staffers (Sepinwall later confirmed the news on social media). He’s the latest high-profile casualty in the ongoing gutting of cultural criticism, joining Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson, the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips, a slate of long-time critics at The New York Times (including a personal favorite, Margaret Lyons), and far too many others to name without it feeling like salt in the wound.
Why does this keep happening? It’s a perfect storm of collapsing forces: the rise of TikTok “criticism” (often little more than studio-sponsored content), the Rotten Tomatoes effect, dwindling trust in media, and most of all, A.I.
It’s likely no coincidence Sepinwall was let go the day after Rolling Stone’s parent company, Penske Media, sued Google. When A.I. took off a few years ago, the obvious fear was that machines would replace writers outright. That’s still a threat, but the knockout punch came sideways: Google’s A.I. snippets. These “helpful summaries” are decimating the open web. Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others are hoovering up critics’ work and spitting it back in bullet-point form.
The numbers are brutal. After Google rolled out snippets, zero-click searches — where users never click through to a site — jumped from 56% to 69% in just a few months. That’s a 13-point swing in audience vaporized overnight. No clicks mean no revenue.
And revenue was already dire. Even with Google funneling readers our way, it’s hard as hell to monetize reviews. For transparency: last week, thanks to the Toronto Film Festival, we published about 20 reviews. The top-earning film review of the week made $65. Most earned between $10 and $25. That’s it. You can do the math on how “profitable” movie criticism is.
Now scale that up. If you’re Richard Lawson or Alan Sepinwall pulling 10 times our traffic and earning three figure salaries, you still need to pump out 10-15 massively popular reviews every single month just to break even. That’s impossible — there aren’t 10-15 movies per month with that kind of traffic pull. And “breaking even” doesn’t cut it at corporate-owned sites. They want profit margins, so they pivot to content that sells ads.
What sells? I honestly couldn’t tell you. I’ve been at this 21 years and still don’t know. Some posts perform, some tank. Pajiba survives not by chasing profit but by avoiding losses. Our writers — most of whom have been here for years — don’t rely on this for a living. For them, it’s a side hustle or a complement to their other writing gigs. For me, it’s a livelihood (sort of!), but one that exists because we can operate outside of corporate profit expectations.
That’s not the case at Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, or even The New York Times. When traffic nosedives 30-40% overnight, the “necessary” cuts are the expensive veterans — the critics who’ve built careers and reputations. I will say this much, though: Paste Magazine deserves credit for keeping The A.V. Club, Jezebel, and Splinter alive because I think they operate with a mindset similar to ours (make enough to stay out of the red), but most outlets can’t absorb the hit.
As for Penske’s lawsuit, my guess is they’ll eventually settle, pocket a payday, and quietly shutter a few underperforming sites. That’s the way these things go. The New York Times is suing OpenAI while cashing checks from Amazon. Reddit blocks OpenAI while taking Google money. The corporations will work it out among themselves. The writers — the individuals who make the culture worth reading — are the ones who get left behind.
