139 points mkeeter 53 minutes ago 33 comments

vr46 42 minutes ago | parent

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.

Animats 26 minutes ago | parent

> That is a massive shame, although I stopped reading it a very long time ago...

That why Salon is disappearing. I used to read it, and I thought it disappeared around the time Brill's Content and The Standard went under.

I haven't seen Salon in a Google search result in years.

cocacola1 42 minutes ago | parent

Unfortunate. Read them occasionally and enjoyed it.

baggachipz 40 minutes ago | parent

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?

EA-3167 34 minutes ago | parent

I expect a lot more of this, partly for the monetization issue, but also because these sites went all-in on SEO and then Google AI ate their lunch. Who wants to pore over a 3 page rambling “article” that contains one or two sentences of useful info when an LLM can read and summarize it?

A whole class of site is on the chopping block as ad revenue and clicks dry up. For actual journalism worth paying for increasingly paywalls are popping up to compensate for these factors.

baggachipz 28 minutes ago | parent

Oh I for sure see this in my day job.

Us: "Here Google, I've done your bidding to earn higher placement in your search engine"

Google: "Thanks for all the data, idiot. Now we'll show it on our site and claim it as ours"

Our organic traffic is WAY down despite nonstop kowtowing to their demands.

ToucanLoucan 21 minutes ago | parent

> I expect a lot more of this, partly for the monetization issue, but also because these sites went all-in on SEO and then Google AI ate their lunch. Who wants to pore over a 3 page rambling “article” that contains one or two sentences of useful info when an LLM can read and summarize it?

I don't understand this viewpoint at all. I follow specific writers for their voice, not in spite of it. A whole lot of people seem to be hallucinating this past moment in history when news was strictly factual information, delivered with no editorializing, from people who had no opinions or ideas, and I genuinely have no idea what they're talking about. Walter Cronkite would frequently editorialize about events he was reporting. All the major historical men and women of news would, that's... the point, you're not just tuning in to know what happened today, you're tuning in to experience those events through the eyes of someone you've at least got some vague trust relationship with.

And I categorically reject any notion that it's better to get a summary via AI. I can clock articles written with heavy AI use and I dislike their monotone and... well, inhuman writing style. Frequently, especially as of late, current events need the touch of an empathetic human with their own ideas.

If you require your news filtered through a bias-remover, IMO you just lack media literacy. I can read something from someone I disagree with on basically everything and still get the facts out of it. Frankly: skill issue.

lisper 29 minutes ago | parent

I think what did them in is that they would not allow you to subscribe without handing over a ton of personal info. I don't remember the details, but I wanted to subscribe in order to support them, but when I tried the process had so much friction that I just gave up. And this is not unique to Salon. I am continually astounded at how many organizations put up intentional obstacles to giving them money.

lenerdenator 26 minutes ago | parent

They've gotten hooked on the data sales revenue. It's now expected that you'll both give them the money and the information.

It's pretty much everywhere. I just assume it of apps on my phone.

cogman10 8 minutes ago | parent

IDK if this is a salon issue, but another major issue is so many subscription businesses have made it damn near impossible to end your subscription without sitting in a queue for an hour and having their retention specialist give you 900 offers to stay.

That alone has made me much MUCH more leery to subscribe to anything if it's not something that can easily be canceled (For example, using Google play to subscribe to things since they make it easy to unsubscribe).

chmorgan_ 37 minutes ago | parent

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.

benbayard 35 minutes ago | parent

Independent journalism shutting down is really tragic. One of the OG internet publications.

tptacek 30 minutes ago | parent

Punditry is a kind of journalism, but far from the most important kind; what people get from Salon today they can get better from a hundred different newsletters.

DonHopkins 5 minutes ago | parent

I miss suck.com.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suck.com

Suck.com Net.Moguls Internet Mogul Trading Cards:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181211075708/http://www.suck.c...

Rick Adams, Front:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180802115113im_/http://www.suc...

Rick Adams, Back:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180802143444im_/http://www.suc...

And the hard hitting parody of fuckedcompany.com.

Fucked Company published an excellent documentary on the Digital Entertainment Network.

(It's from "Fucked Company", so obviously it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but who's at work any more these days?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W41Ttr73TqU

>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network

>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network

>I rescued this from Web Archive, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.

Yes, THAT guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s

>Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

Oh no :(, the Internet Archive fucked them:

https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/

>Sorry.

>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

Alternative alternative archive of the front page, only existing in the web.archive.org snapshot of wayback.archive-it.org:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240326164342/https://wayback.a...

Then they went from sorta fucked:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20091016001955/http://www...

To fucked:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20130104195206/http://www...

macintux 29 minutes ago | parent

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...

tptacek 24 minutes ago | parent

This is really good and worth reading. Important thing to understand: like Newsweek, Salon is (was) a zombie brand, as much an SEO play as anything else.

LogicFailsMe 25 minutes ago | parent

Broadly paywalled, stopped reading afterwards. But yes, once they were great. I blame society(tm).

mushufasa 21 minutes ago | parent

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?

nonethewiser 21 minutes ago | parent

meh

lastdong 18 minutes ago | parent

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.

slowin 16 minutes ago | parent

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

bashhq_r 16 minutes ago | parent

did they ever actually turn a profit or was it vc runway the whole time

legitster 13 minutes ago | parent

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.

tptacek 7 minutes ago | parent

I don't think there were any newsroom jobs at Salon?

gausswho 10 minutes ago | parent

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)?

adamiscool8 7 minutes ago | parent

>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.

mscarpino 7 minutes ago | parent

Very sad. Loved the articles from Stephanie Zacharek, Camille Paglia, and Cary Tennis.