In the first week of August, Veeps, which is owned by Live Nation, laid off nearly the entire editorial staff of BrooklynVegan, Alternative Press, Revolver and Goldmine. BrooklynVegan is reported to be shutting down. It was founded in 2004 by Dave Levine as a blog about the New York independent music scene and, improbably, vegan food, and it spent two decades doing the specific unglamorous work of telling a few hundred thousand people that a band they had not heard of was playing on Tuesday.
I started doing this professionally in 2005. BrooklynVegan is roughly my age in internet years. I have no personal stake in it, I am not a music writer, and I am not going to perform a grief I do not have. But I want to be accurate about what happened to it, because the internet spent the following two days being inaccurate about it in a way that happens to flatter people like me.
It Was Not the Algorithm
Within about a day of the news, I watched the story get absorbed into the AI-is-eating-media narrative. Headlines framed it as another publication killed by chatbots and zero-click search. It is a tidy story. It is the story I would be tempted to write, because I write about search for a living and every event in the world looks like it is about search when that is your job.
It is also not what the reporting says. This was a parent company decision. These titles were bought up in a consolidation wave, passed from one owner to another in 2024 and 2025, ended up inside a live-events conglomerate, and then the conglomerate did what conglomerates do to editorial cost centres. Nobody needed an algorithm update to make that happen. Private equity and strategic acquirers have been quietly euthanising music and culture publications for fifteen years, and they were extremely good at it before any of us had heard of a large language model.
I am being pedantic about this on purpose. Our industry has a bad habit of claiming causal credit for every trend in publishing, sometimes as a boast and sometimes as a lament, and both versions are a kind of vanity. Not everything is about us.
The Consequence Does Not Care About the Cause
Here is the part that is about us.
The entire link building industry, every agency doing digital PR, every outreach specialist, every tool that scores a domain and tells you what a link from it is worth, rests on an assumption: that there exists a large, renewing population of independent publications with real audiences and real editorial judgment, whose attention can be earned but not simply bought.
That population is shrinking. It shrinks from consolidation, as it did this week. It shrinks from the collapse of display advertising. It shrinks from zero-click search, which is our doing. It shrinks from AI summarisation, which is partly our doing since we spent two decades teaching the web to produce summarisable content at industrial volume. The causes are different, they arrive on different schedules, and they all point the same direction.
What grows instead is the substitute goods. Sponsored posts on sites that still carry the authority scores of a publication that no longer employs anyone. Digital PR that is press-release spam with a survey attached, where the survey exists solely to generate a statistic that journalists can cite. Link networks wearing the skins of dead regional newspapers. An entire secondary market trading on the residual authority of institutions that stopped doing the thing that earned the authority.
We are logging an old-growth forest, we have never once funded a replanting, and each year we report the declining yield as a market condition rather than a consequence.
I Am Not Innocent Here
I have written before about the part I played in what SEO did to journalism, and I do not want to relitigate it, but I will say the uncomfortable adjacent thing. Every time I have helped a client earn coverage, I have been extracting value from an editorial institution that someone else paid to build and maintain. That is not a crime. It is the deal journalism has always made with the people who want to be written about. But it only works if somebody, somewhere, is still paying to maintain the institution, and increasingly nobody is, and my industry has never treated that as its problem.
It is going to become our problem, in the boring mechanical sense that our tactics stop working. When the only places that will link to you are places that will link to anyone, a link stops carrying information, and when a link stops carrying information the search engines stop weighting it, and then the tactic that funded a thousand agencies quietly stops being a tactic.
What To Actually Do
I do not have a clever answer, and I distrust anyone who offers one, but I know the shape of the correct response and it is unfashionable.
Stop buying authority. The market for residual authority is a market for something that is being actively consumed, and you are late.
Accept fewer and better. Three links from places that still employ someone who reads before publishing are worth more than three hundred placements, and they always were, and the reason people did not believe that is that three hundred is easier to put in a monthly report.
Build the thing that gets cited without being asked. Original data nobody else has. A tool that solves a real problem for free. A position stated clearly enough to be argued with. These are slow, they do not fit a quarterly retainer, and they are the only things that have ever produced a link that still exists five years later. It is the same argument I keep making about not needing Google in the first place, and it is the same answer, because it is always the same answer.
And if you have a budget line for link building, consider that some fraction of it could go to the publications you actually want to be covered by, as an advertiser, with no expectation of editorial. That is not link building. That is paying rent on an ecosystem you have been living in for free.
We are very good at harvesting. We have never once planted anything.