Taylor Swift’s rise, Pitchfork’s fall—grumps blame one thing for it all.

Last week, Rolling Stone TV writer Alan Sepinwall became the latest prominent arts critic this year to get some form of pink slip . He was preceded by film critics at the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and Vanity Fair, as well as four senior arts critics at the New York Times who were “ reassigned ,” including its chief popular-music critic Jon Pareles. New York magazine recently summed up these developments in a piece titled “ Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism? ” After examining media economics and web-traffic trends, the essay reached a gloomy diagnosis: “The vast majority of reviews go virtually unread.”

Meanwhile, New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh published a piece in late August called “ How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge ,” asking why critics ar