There's a rather long, but quite interesting, article over at N+1 regarding The History of Pitchfork. However, it's not just a historical retelling of the founding and rise-to-success of the site. The article goes into a great bit of detail to describe the musical landscape in general that helped create the atmosphere for Pitchfork to thrive. There's a portion of the piece that gets into the "commercialization" of the site; the slow evolution format change from passionate, sometimes amateurish, writing explorations to more formulaic non-offensive straightforward style.

There's a long discourse that can occur between anyone that's followed Pitchfork from its no-budget beginning to its enormous Music Empire status that it has now and this article touches on all the worthwhile points... though I think it's probably best if you get together with your music nerd friends and discuss them in greater depth.

via Paige.