Online music publication Pitchfork will launch its first mobile app in November, the company revealed exclusively to Mashable. Dubbed Pitchfork Weekly, the magazine-style app will be available on iOS at launch before coming to Android in the future.
The move into the mobile space is not surprising, given Pitchfork's recent attempts to create a more "immersive" experience for readers with their ongoing "Cover Story" series and their "Advance" album streaming platform.
Pitchfork Weekly will emulate the magazine experience. It's designed for the reader who can't keep up with the torrent of music content produced by the site. It will also incorporate Pitchfork's videos, with an eye on surfacing content from the archives as well as a new podcast feature.
The magazine-as-app idea is nothing new, of course. From The Atlantic Weekly to Huffington, publishers have long looked to bring the "lean back" approach to their digital offerings. Even The New York Times appears to be working on a digital magazine.
"We've gone through different iterations of building an app before," Pitchfork Media President Chris Kaskie told Mashable. "We never did anything with them because they never felt inspiring enough and an accurate enough representation of what we were doing online."
Pitchfork will launch the app with Lexus as its corporate sponsor. Though the advance images of the app obtained by Mashable don't show the Lexus advertising in action, Kaskie promised Pitchfork would "innovate" beyond splash and banner ads.
The app was built in collaboration with Stinkdigital, an agency that recently worked on the launch of Google's Project Loon, among other projects.
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