alt Hacker NewsGoodbye from Salon
Comments
This article didn't generate any comments when it made the rounds 10 years ago. An obituary for what salon.com used to be.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210219012551/https://www.polit...
I operate an online publication that has been online for an amount of time that can be accurately described as "decades," though not quite as long as Salon.
My project had a brief window of modest profitability from about 2012 to 2020. Before and after that time, I've mostly operated at a break-even or a loss because I love doing it, and it gives me a sense of purpose, and the thought of packing it up is deeply depressing. But the past few years have been an extreme drought of donations, which leads to extreme drought in ambition and energy. I sometimes wonder if my mental health would improve if I turned out the lights and moved on to something else. I don't want to, but sometimes we humans fail to want what's good for us.
I'm sure it doesn't help that I reject advertising and rely solely on donations. But perhaps the only thing more depressing than shutting down is slapping ads on everything. Blah.
I haven't visited salon.com in quite a while. I remember way back in the day I'd hop on there to read an article or two and maybe go read suck.com as well. Such a different internet back then, pre-BuzzFeed and YouTube. Less clickbait, more Gen X cynicism.
I loved the first version of Salon. So many excellent writers appeared in their pages; I grew to love Anne Lamott.
It changes at some point, no doubt triggered by the crash of journalism, but it didn't try to be interesting and I gave up on it so far back I don't remember when.
So long and thanks for open sourcing Bricolage ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage_(software) )
It was ahead of it's time in terms of it's model for publishing large sites with staging, editorial desks, etc.
I've only seen salon links on astroturfed subreddits and it makes sense they'd become irrelevant the moment Reddit traffic dropped after Google's AI Overview took over.
The one thing burned in my brain is that when Clinton was president he was interviewed about this "new internet thing" and asked what websites he and Hilary like to read, and his answer was salon.com
Went to some of my favorite bookmarked Salon.com articles and:
"410 Gone
This page was part of the old salon.com site and has been removed."
Pretty sure that's the first time I've ever seen 410 in the wild.
Wow, blast from the past! I think the last time I read a Salon article was 20 years ago. They used to be staple of the old internet. I miss those days…
Very sad. Loved the articles from Stephanie Zacharek, Camille Paglia, and Cary Tennis.
On my internship the local newspaper wanted a revamped UI and I was asked to present some ideas. After searching around for references found Salon had a really clean UI and added some of its pages to the presentation spec. This was in early 2000s. Their UI today is still very clean and readable. I don’t think it has changed that much :) https://web.archive.org/web/20021130080643/http://salon.com/ Sad to see them go.
What happens to the articles?
Salon hosts one of my favourite short stories that still holds up 24 years later: https://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/
Read it while it's still there.
Oh thank God.
It's kind of weird, if you just go to Salon's home page, there's no inkling of this announcement. They still want you to "Go Premium", there's a heap of midterms post-mortem material etc. Does one hand not know what the other is doing?"
Salon used to have a terrific forum, with some of the most brilliant contributors I've seen on the web in their "International Issues" section.
One day without warning, they deleted it.
Complete contempt for writers who were frankly far superior to any on staff. I was just a lurker, I've no personal investment beyond that.
I can't remember the last time since that that I visited the site with intent; the arrogant, contemptuous destruction of brilliant writing - that's Salon's legacy for me.
Wow! I met my future wife on the salon personals back in 2006. Her profile was on theonion and I guess they used to merge the profiles. I think there were like 30 profiles for my entire city back then! Went on a date and the rest is history.
Goodbye Salon! Thanks for the dating help!
I think it’s been something of a zombie publication for a while which always was sad to me as I was a big fan in the early days. They used to have interesting thoughtful takes.
Independent journalism shutting down is really tragic. One of the OG internet publications.
We need as many news organizations as we can get imo. I used to read them in the 2000s. The tone kept shifting towards negativity and vitriol and reporting perception of intentions rather than facts. Not surprised they are winding down.
I used to read Salon every single day, it was great. I'm reminded of this story about living in Japan from 1998 (that now seems pretty politically incorrect):
https://www.salon.com/1998/10/30/feature1_6/
Very, very different from what you'd expect from Salon in the later years.
I archived it, because the OP didn't really make it clear if salon.com is going offline or not: https://archive.is/PesDo
It's been probably 15+ years since I visited this site, but waaaaay back in the day they had a pretty compelling lineup of politics, culture, and because they were trying to jump on the web explosion in the 2000s, tech. So I'll post this article, a tribute to one of the great tech writers of all time, W. Richard Stevens. Who would have thought that you would get choked up reading about a person who wrote guides for programming Unix (among other things) but I did when I read this. The early web was a fun time.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120217111837/http://www.salon....
still alive from the same era: slashdot.org
I hope they keep the archived site open for read-only.
Unfortunate. Read them occasionally and enjoyed it.
That is a massive shame, although I stopped reading it a very long time ago, but I have fabulous memories of the place, when Patrick Smith's Ask The Pilot and Cary Tennis' Since You Asked were wonderful staples of my week.
I am increasingly convinced that this "golden age of journalism" is an imagined time shortly after Deep Throat and the Nixon scandal, that never really materialized and then was longed for nostalgically as if it existed.
Wow. I'm honestly shocked by this. It's been a mainstay for so long. It's as ad-riddled as other news sites, is it that ad blockers finally did them in?
The most racist man alive's wife will be very sad.
>NOV 8 2023 * FIND.CO ACQUIRES ICONIC DIGITAL MEDIA LEADER, SALON.COM; ESTABLISHES U.S. PRESENCE AND SIGNIFICANTLY EXPANDS MEDIA PORTFOLIO
Guess that didn't work out. I enjoyed reading their creative journalism before they went all the way in on dogmatic politics.
Pretty plain farewell letter, empty of any details and signed by nobody. I'm guessing everyone was fired before this was written and posted?
I'm not sure they were really doing much other than writing "give me reasons to feel smug about my political opinions" slop.
I assume there's good money in that, whether you're peddling your slop to leftoids or to rightoids. But maybe they weren't writing quite the right kind of slop? Or there was too much competition from other slop writers?
Shame if anyone loses a livelihood as a result, however. I may not agree with their politics, but I think that everyone should have a good livelihood.
Oh no! Anyway. I see they closed comments on their X post announcement
Ah, this is the utopia we were promised. What's next?
In early 2000s I always enjoyed Salon’s political articles by this young journalist named Jake Tapper.
At some point, we will have to think about our religion of progress.
I'll never understand this.
31 years in operation and you just ... close completely?
The long tail of 31 years of goodwill is worthless?
Why not turn it into a news aggregator site like yahoo news or something, at least?
Really sad loss. Salon's ex-comments section, The WELL, actually predates the magazine part and lives on as an independent community again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL
Now that it's gone, I realize that after all these 31 years, I never did conclusively know if the website is pronounced suh-LON (like where hair goes to fall) or SAL-on (like the artsy fartsy gathering)?
Is it just me or do others feel like this is a "buy me" ad and inevitably someone will purchase the brand at firesale and do something else with it? Didn't that already happen in the past with Salon?
Alas.
Craigslist was the first nail in the newspaper coffin. Classifieds and adverts ate a LOT of local money. And all of that went poof. CL cost $0 to post. Why would I pay $10 for a week advert?
All the aggregators grabbed news from everywhere, and paid 0 for it. It cost to make. And made nothing. Encouraged the closed/paywall web.
Ganett etm bought a LOT of local papers, and lowered quality as low as they could go. Inertia kept many older subscribers. I know 0 millrnial and younger subscribers.
NYT and other major papers are easy to sign up, and you basically have to die to get rid of. I would never recommend.
There's a lot of factors. Basically most journalists are going to the glue factory, like horses did with motor vehicles.
Totally forgot Salon existed. I guess that’s part of the problem. For anyone interested in independent journalism, I strongly recommend Breaking Points.
"This is what happens to a publication when it does not have a unique voice. All of these former outlets focused on the same news stories, spewed the same opinions, spread the same talking points, pushed the same narratives, and ignored anything that colored outside the lines. The audience for that is only so large, and if that audience can get the exact same product you’re manufacturing elsewhere, why click on you?"
Another shitrag flushed, long overdue. Once lauded for their Abu Ghraib coverage, they became indistinguishable (to me, anyway) from their peers, in terms of being a place where one can go to read opinion pieces written from the same point of view one could find anywhere else. And now you can find those same opinions everywhere else on the Internet, so, who cares?
Broadly paywalled, stopped reading afterwards. But yes, once they were great. I blame society(tm).
[dead]
The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020. The vast majority of what was lost were "beat" reporters - foreign bureaus, Washington bureaus from regional publications, statehouse reporters, or regional specialty beats (science, law, etc).
This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves.
For the most part, your choice of news platform is just a layer of coverage choices and political spin on top of a very thin market of original coverage.