Salon.com Is Dead. I Helped Launch It 31 Years Ago. It’s the End of an Era.

The Industry Working at the web magazine in the ’90s was exhilarating. Its death feels like the end of an era. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Laura Miller? Nov 06, 202612:14 PM Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Thirty-one years ago, I sat in the conference room of a San Francisco architectural firm that was so down on its luck it had to rent out part of its office space to a bunch of giddy people doing something unfathomable: publishing a magazine on the World Wide Web. Back then, in 1995, only a couple of precedents even existed (Feed and Word, you are not forgotten!), none of them a full-fledged news organization employing a staff of professional journalists. My new co-workers were newspaper veterans, led by our editor in chief, David Talbot, and until recently employed by the city’s now extinct evening newspaper. They knew what they were doing—except they knew how to do it in a very different medium. I sat there, sketching grids on a legal pad, trying to figure out how this new type of publication would work. Our “magazine,” as we then thought of it, was Salon.com, an organization that has just announced its closure after more than three decades of publishing reporting, commentary, and criticism. At the beginning, we were none of us technological visionaries, but I at least had been online for a while, since even before the web itself existed. I had email, which only about half the people I knew could claim, including the most internet-savvy among us, Scott Rosenberg. If you emailed David, however, you’d have to walk across the office to nag him into looking at it. Otherwise, it might be days before it occurred to him to check. At first, still thinking of ourselves as making a magazine, we uploaded full “issues” of a dozen or so stories over the office modem on Friday nights. This took so long we often didn’t leave until 11 p.m., making sure to check all the pages first, as if we were proofing a print publication. We were print people, gradually adjusting to a new way of publishing, and the notion of a website that would be continually updated throughout the day was unimaginable to us. An early critic compared Salon to an old-fashioned airship, richly appointed and comfortable but more slow-moving than an actual plane. As my colleague Gary Kamiya put it, this wasn’t as insulting as it was intended to be. To someone who cared most about great writing, Salon was a paradise. Laura Miller Over time, a model for publishing online journalism emerged, one very different from the version I had tried to map out on that legal pad in 1995. Salon adapted to this model, which traded page views for display-ad dollars, along with every other web publication, but for a while, during those first few years, nobody knew what worked or even how to define what it meant for a web publication to “work,” and so we could do whatever we wanted. At first, there wasn’t even a reliable way to gauge how much traffic a particular piece got. Investors—a group that included Adobe, Apple, and Borders—were footing the bills while we experimented. We published a collection of stories about death (now impossible to find in its entirety, but here is a standout piece from it, by Susie Bright), for example, just about the most advertiser-unfriendly topic imaginable. We broke some news and even had to hire security to guard our offices after publishing a story about the infidelities of the Republican congressman who was leading the moral charge against Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I moved to New York to help open the office there, and remember rushing to work on the morning of 9/11 to search for a counterterrorism expert to interview about what I had just seen from the sidewalk in front of my apartment. That was the first time I heard the name Osama bin Laden. I was a culture editor, however, so most of the news and politics coverage, with its attendant dramas and controversies (and there were a lot of those), wasn’t my immediate concern. Instead, I was thrilled to publish literary idols like Denis Johnson, Mary Gaitskill, and David Foster Wallace, to find new voices to champion like Colson Whitehead, and to scoop up pitches from my inbox from writers I’d never heard of before but who filed stories that were immensely satisfying to bring to the world. Along the way, I got to edit book reviews with Dwight Garner, and work with colleagues who included Jake Tapper, Rebecca Traister, Dave Eggers, Steve Kornacki, Michelle Goldberg, Joan Walsh, Sarah Vowell, and so many more. Although I left Salon a decade ago, I’ve never stopped rooting for it. Its fortunes have waned over the years, and in 2023 it was sold to a performance-marketing company, an all-too-common fate for many of the publications that once flourished online. I’m told that what finally finished off the site was the introduction of A.I. into web search, leading to a steep decline in traffic coming from Google; in Salon’s closing announcement, the unnamed author wrote, “Our publishing model is no longer sustainable.” There’s a bitter irony to the fact that the same technological change that once made it possible for a bunch of journalists to finally, finally publish the kind of magazine they’d always wanted has ended up cannibalizing all that creativity and industry, destroying its future, and making it much harder for younger writers to have a shot at the same experience. As one former colleague remarked to me, “The dream of the ’90s internet is well and truly kaput.” I was ridiculously lucky to get in at the beginning of all that, and to this day, the first few years of Salon remain the most fun I have ever had. We were so deep in the making of it that its cultural impact will probably never be fully visible to me. We were grateful for all our readers but unaware of what we meant to most of them. Others will have to attest to that. People sometimes tell me about reading Salon avidly in their youth, how it felt like connecting to something exhilarating and cool and a bit crazy in the strange new expanses of the internet. All I can say is: That’s exactly how it felt to work there. Internet Journalism Magazines Media