Goodbye from Salon

kikokikokiko

Good ridance.

vr46

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.

cocacola1

Unfortunate. Read them occasionally and enjoyed it.

baggachipz

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?

chmorgan_

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

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

macintux

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...

LogicFailsMe

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

mushufasa

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?

lastdong

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

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

legitster

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.

gausswho

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

>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

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

allenu

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.

mrcwinn

Totally forgot Salon existed. I guess that’s part of the problem. For anyone interested in independent journalism, I strongly recommend Breaking Points. https://youtube.com/@breakingpoints

talloaktrees

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

whalesalad

I don't think I have ever read anything from salon

jgon

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....