Paste (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Paste magazine began not with a glossy cover shoot or a record label partnership, but with a CD tucked inside a print issue. Founded in Atlanta, Georgia in July 2002, it arrived as a quarterly built for listeners who cared about adult album alternative, Americana, and indie rock. At a time when the music press was dominated by larger outlets, Paste staked out quieter ground. Its tagline said it plainly: "Signs of Life in Music, Film and Culture."

  The magazine's founders were Josh Jackson, Nick Purdy, and Tim Regan-Porter. They were not chasing the mainstream. Each early issue came bundled with a CD music sampler, a physical artifact the editors eventually retired in favor of digital downloads as a Going-Green initiative. The artists Paste championed in those early years read like a who's who of the indie underground: Paul McCartney, Regina Spektor, the Decemberists, Fiona Apple, Ryan Adams, and Thom Yorke among them.

  But sustaining a print magazine built on that kind of taste proved harder than building the taste itself. By 2009, the magazine was in financial crisis. By 2010, the print edition was gone entirely. And yet the story did not end there. Two decades later, the company behind Paste was acquiring shuttered media brands and spinning off new publications. How a scrappy Atlanta quarterly survived collapse, went fully digital, and eventually became a small media group is a story worth hearing.

• 2. The Radiohead Gamble

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  In October 2007, Paste attempted something unusual. The magazine offered new and current subscribers the ability to pay whatever they wanted for a one-year subscription. The move was inspired by the approach Radiohead had taken with a major album release that year, and Paste president Tim Regan-Porter gave it a name to match: "the Radiohead experiment."

  The response was immediate. The subscriber base grew by 28,000. For a small quarterly based in Atlanta, that was a substantial number. But Regan-Porter was candid about the limits of the model. He acknowledged it was not sustainable on its own. His hope was that the influx of readers would renew at regular rates the following year and that the spike in web traffic would pull in new advertisers.

  Those hopes did not fully materialize. Paste launched a website as early as 1998, giving it an online presence years before the print magazine existed. But neither the web traffic surge from the experiment nor the print readership it generated could shield the publication from what came next. A broader economic downturn was already beginning to pull advertising budgets across the industry.

• 3. The Near-Collapse

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  On the 14th of May 2009, Paste editors made an unusual public plea. They asked readers, musicians, and celebrities directly for contributions to keep the magazine alive. Lagging ad revenue had pushed the publication to a breaking point. Other magazine publishers were suffering through the same downturn in 2008 and 2009, but for a smaller title without the backing of a large media company, the margin for error was thin.

  The editors identified the root cause plainly: advertiser spending had dried up. Cost-cutting measures did not stop the losses. Fiona Apple, the Decemberists, and other artists who had appeared in Paste's pages were among those associated with what became known as the Campaign to Save Paste. The magazine had built genuine goodwill with the musicians it covered, and those relationships became part of its survival strategy.

  Also in 2009, Paste launched an hour-long television pilot for Halogen TV called Pop Goes the Culture. It was a sign the brand was trying to extend itself beyond the page even as the page itself was under threat. On the 31st of August 2010, the print edition was suspended. PasteMagazine.com continued, and the publication that had started online in 1998 returned fully to its digital roots.

• 4. Building a Media Group

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  Paste Media Group moved aggressively in late 2023. In November of that year, it acquired two sites that had been shut down by G/O Media: Jezebel, a women's news and culture site, and Splinter, a left-leaning news and opinion outlet. Jezebel relaunched in December 2023; Splinter followed in March 2024. That same month, Paste Media also purchased The A.V. Club, another former G/O Media property.

  The expansion did not go without friction. In October 2024, G/O Media filed a lawsuit against Paste Media alleging a breach of contract from the sale of Jezebel and Splinter. The legal dispute signaled that the acquisitions had come with complicated terms.

  July 2025 brought another move: Paste spun off its games section into a standalone fifth publication, extending its editorial footprint into anime, tabletop, pinball, and theme parks. Garrett Martin, who had been Paste's games editor since 2011, became the new publication's Editor-in-Chief.

• 5. Restructuring and Contraction

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  November 2025 brought a significant reversal. Paste Media Group announced that Paste itself would refocus exclusively on music coverage, the subject that had defined the magazine since its Atlanta founding in 2002. The movie and television divisions were closed. Future film and TV reporting would be handled by The A.V. Club. The restructuring resulted in layoffs.

  At the same time, the games spin-off was merged into The A.V. Club as a section called The A.V. Club Games. No layoffs accompanied that particular merger. But the consolidation of editorial operations was unmistakable.

  Later that same month, Paste Media president Josh Jackson announced that Splinter would be folded into Jezebel. Jackson explained that while Paste Media had successfully revived two inactive outlets, Splinter had, in his words, "lain dormant far longer" than Jezebel. Combined with ongoing industry pressures, that history led the company to fold the two brands into one under the Jezebel name. By May 2026, reports surfaced that The A.V. Club Games had also effectively shut down after Paste Media laid off its staff, including Garrett Martin.

• 6. The Album of the Year List

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  Every year since at least 2006, Paste has named an Album of the Year. The list functions as a kind of running record of the magazine's taste across two decades. In 2006, the honor went to the Decemberists for The Crane Wife. The National's Boxer won in 2007. She and Him took the prize in 2008 with Volume One.

  The selections tracked the magazine's original commitments to indie and Americana while occasionally reaching toward more widely recognized names. David Bowie's Blackstar claimed the title in 2016, the year of his death. Frank Ocean's Channel Orange won in 2012. Fiona Apple, who had been among the artists tied to the Campaign to Save Paste years earlier, won in 2020 for Fetch the Bolt Cutters.

  The 2021 winner was a collaboration between Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra, an album called Promises. Big Thief took 2022 with Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. In 2025, Nourished by Time won for The Passionate Ones. The list, running unbroken even through the magazine's financial crises and structural overhauls, remains one of the more consistent editorial records in American music journalism.