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.

> The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020. [0]

That was a scary number so I Googled it. You should always check scary numbers. It's misleading.

It's true that newspaper newsroom jobs fell 57% (from roughly 71,000 to 31,000 jobs) over that period. However, newsroom employment across all mediums fell by only 26% (from 114,000 to 85,000).

A lot of hose jobs went digital, they didn't just disappear.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroom-employment-has-fallen-26-since-2008/

It's down 81% since 2002:

https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/new-local-journalist-index-reveals-2026-data-on-local-news-crisis/

(Measured as local journalist equivalent per 100,000 people.)

Your page has:

> Newspaper newsroom employment fell 57% between 2008 and 2020, from roughly 71,000 jobs to about 31,000. At the same time, the number of digital-native newsroom employees rose 144%, from 7,400 workers in 2008 to about 18,000 in 2020.

So, if we group digital publications with newspapers we are going from 78k to about 49k jobs, a drop of almost 40%. It would be interesting to see a finer grained breakdown by type of jobs. I would speculate that there was probably an even bigger decline in the number of journalists per se.

The rest of the numbers you are quoting are mostly broadcast TV, with some radio and cable TV folks thrown in. My impression is that quite few of those jobs / stories are serious journalism.

> 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.

1. By "decline of the open internet and AI" do you mean "decline from the open internet and AI" or "decline of the open internet from AI"?

2. That may be so, but I feel like statements like this, about trends that started before the current thing, have the effect of distracting people from the contemporary causes that are active now.

For instance: a lot of negative social trends currently blamed on modern "screens" and social media had their start long ago, but that doesn't mean smartphones and social media haven't had an extremely negative effect. "Screens" as a problem probably started long ago, with television, but each iteration has become more invasive and more difficult to control, eventually overwhelming many people's ability to choose healthier activities (e.g. there wasn't always something "on" TV that you wanted to watch, which gave you more space to choose to do something else, but that never happens with a smartphone).

I posit things would have likely stabilized at a healthier level without the current technologies, so it's quite right right to blame those technologies for their effects.

Let me rephrase it: "long before the decline of the open internet, and the rise of AI".

I know we point a lot of fingers at social media and/or the dead internet theory - but exactly to your point the process was started simultaneously or a little bit ahead of things like the smartphone, and long before Facebook was a news source.

I think the open Internet is often said to have begun declining with the rise of walled gardens, notably Facebook, 2010 or so. A further factor was Google's degeneration from relatively fair broker to (biased) "question answerer", with a notable step 2019-2020 but with earlier steps also.

Google was using it's version of AI to push "answers to questions" a while before ChatGPT, these just weren't very good so they weren't sorted first.

But it's hard to really say - as long as the Internet has existed, people have been crafting schemes to control/manipulate it and by now those schemes have tremendous weight.

The main thing is the early Internet was a unique because it's success was an accident. Corporations and bureaucrats imagined the "Information Superhighway" as an enriched cable TV and this made it such a failure that amateur use of the Internet wound accidentally "going viral" and only over time did all the crap but it's been a while and the Internet is close to a "super-duper-information superhighway" today.

> This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI.

I was reading The Victorian Internet [0] in the late 2000s and the author mentioned how the telegraph killed off a lot of small local newspapers. The reasoning was that who cares about local news when you can instantly get international news from around the world.

This was so topical for that time period that I assumed it had been written a few years earlier e.g. 2006. Turns out it was written in 1998!

0 - https://link.amazon/B0bh3AKaw

>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).

People doing actual useful news work, in other terms.

I wish would stop using "journalist" and "reporter" interchangeably.

Reporters are people who actually get out into the world, collect facts, collect opinions from real people (some of them experts at something, some of them not), try to actually see "newsworthy events" in person.

Journalists write essays based on the work reporters do.

I'm not saying I want less journalists, but I do want more reporters.

Disagree, it’d be more accurate to say reporters are a subset of journalists. Reporters are journalists, journalists is just more general.

You might be thinking of ‘columnists’?

"The vast majority of what was lost were journalists." Fixed it for both of you!

(I'm joking, but then again, if demagogues can remove specifics to make statements punchier, why can't I?)

This matters. Our systems of democracy were formed when journalism could be counted on to hold politicians to account. This is no longer true.

We have to change the system somehow so that independent investigative journalism is either funded without compromising its independence (this is difficult, as the recent bullshit coming out of the BBC is proving), or we replace this method of holding politicians to account with something that works just as well (I have no idea what).

Or we have to change our systems of democracy so that politicians cannot abuse them. Something like "no politician, or any members of their family, or their close friends, can ever be employed by any organisation that contracts with the government, or receives government funds, or benefits from government legislation". This is obviously going to be tricky.

If anything newspapers over much of the past were even more partisan than today.

> We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage.

You don't have to rely on your domestic media for international coverage. Especially with machine translation being so good these days, you can get your international coverage directly from the outlets abroad.

Salon has always been pure opinion/analysis pieces though, they never had a newsroom. They never had much of a moat beyond getting talented people to write thinkpieces for them, and the internet has just inflated the supply of thinkpieces to the point of 0 cost.

There’s still a supply of opinion & analysis writing that people will pay for, but Salon and similar online publications got disintermediated for it by Substack.

And not just Substack.

Most people can get their celebrity news straight from that celebrity’s insta feed. Unless you’re TMZ breaking the juiciest news about celebrities, you can’t compete with that.

Big newspapers early in the internet age tried explain why journalism was needed - to explain the story behind the story - and that was the correct move, imho.

Yeah my thoughts went to Matt Levine, who is so popular you can subscribe directly to his posts for free without paying for a Bloomberg subscription.

Cost-of-living crisis. People used to gladly pay for high-quality journalism, because they could. They paid for CDs and VHS/DVDs and cable and movie tickets and cars and houses and long distance phone calls and cigarettes and book-of-the-month clubs, because they could. Not just high-earning professionals. Cashiers. Gas station attendants. Department store employees. Waiters. We had an economy where most people could afford to participate in the consumerist and cultural milieu.

The dotcom bubble burst and the GFC were a tiny fraction of the country misbehaving and causing a crisis that they used as an excuse to rob the lowest earners - the ones who hadn't already been abandoned, anyway. More work, lower pay, have an inferior version of the old product or service for more money (or just go without, you're too poor for our target demo anyhow). Of course you're going to hollow out your consumer base eventually; you can't profit off volume if you kill the volume. The people who can still pay don't care because they can still pay, but any given manager or exec only needs one newspaper, and you're not going to be able to charge $50 for it, even if they can afford it.

When people talk about a wealth tax, or an unrealized capital gains tax, or a 90% top marginal income tax rate, it's not about jealousy or entitlement. It's because those vehicles are where the money to support our institutions gets stashed once it's skimmed off the top of the wages of workers who are too desperate to demand their real worth (and risk losing their jobs in the process). If you want these things to continue existing, you can't rely on a captured market to cap wealth and ensure a floor. Sorry.

I hate that CEOs make 325x more than an average worker whereas is 1965 they made 21x. But whenever I see something about taxing unrealized capital gains, it makes me wonder: are we also going to give tax credits for unrealized capital losses?

The federal gov is essentially just entitlement programs for the elderly and the military, and all the wealth of the billionaires wouldn’t pay for it for even a year.

Completely wrong because Salon wasn’t “high-quality journalism”. It was opinion pieces. There’s a zillion free substacks where you can get that today. Salon’s business was commoditized and is now grossly oversupplied.

Trying to make Salon’s failure about tax policy is bizarre.

I was a daily newspaper reader in a midsized market for many years. The paper shrank in late 90s, early 2000s and stabilized around 2014. COVID killed the paper paper, I don't even know where you get it now.

Deregulation and consolidation started hurting the business in the 90s, the pure margin classified business started taking body blows ~2002 here (Craigslist wasn't everywhere) and salaries started tanking. Then the smart reporters flipped to PR.

The smartphone was the death blow as the sweet business of being an ad-delivery courier started to erode. Many people subscribed to the Thursday/Sunday paper to get the supermarket flyer and retail ads/coupons.

But there is tons of newspapers still? And online publications? It's not like there is a shortage of news sites

How many of those newspapers are "skins", hollow shells that layer a newspaper shape (printed or virtual) over generic content with minimal human curation or editing?

I don't know the answer, but I'm confident it's non-zero, and probably higher that whatever my initial guess might be.

The largest city in the state I used to live in had two daily newspapers. Then it went to one, and some short years later went to none. It was resurrected a few years later, and now runs out of a strip mall. About 10 years ago, I managed to get a copy (I'd moved states), and it was two pages of state/local news, and the rest was filler.

They recently cut production down to 3 days a week and laid off half their already tiny staff.

There is but it’s a brutal dying business. Our little paper had like 20 reporters in the mid 90s.

Now like 5, who also do editorial, and make peanuts.

the internet made it ~free for anyone to publish to the whole world, which eviscerated the premium of space in the newspaper. it'd have been hard for newspapers to not get destroyed no matter what they did, but losing classifieds to fuckin' craigslist wasn't their finest moment, either.

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

They were always just opinion and commentary, but did have staff writers.

Right. But The Atlantic, for instance, is mostly opinion and commentary --- in fact, on any given day, that's all you'll see them running on the front page --- but they've funded some pretty intense investigative reporting (Caitlin Dickerson's pieces, in particular the most recent Darien Gap thing, great illustrations of that). Salon never did, so far as I know.

Yeah, I agree. I don't think they've ever had any actual "news" staff.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/newspapers-must-charge-for-web-content-says-writer-of-the-wire-1766421.html

Edit wonder what the verdict will eventually be, he certainly saw the turbulence back then.

A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc. If you already have a big brand, the economics of writing for a publication are worse than starting your own blog or channel. You have unlimited income potential and have total creative freedom.

The major publications, e.g. AP, NYTs, WaPo, Economist, FT, Bloomberg all have reporting and seem to be doing well. It's not like beat reporting is going to die. The death of journalism is way premature.

> A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc.

A lot of punditry has moved to those platforms, but roughly nobody on those platforms is actually doing investigative journalism.

"The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020" - those jobs were the pipeline for the jobs at the publications you mention. Journalist is hardly the same career path it was prior to the Internet, which pretty much destroyed the business model of newspapers. Lets concede for discussion that it's going awesome for the New York Times of the world - they don't cover local stories, which, will not being relevant to the whole world, are quite relevant to people living where they are occurring. We have also lost a professional class of people who's job it was to find out what's going on. It's definitely a huge loss in my book.

> A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc

And the world suffers as a result, IMO. It’s all very thinly veiled opinion rather than original reporting. How many YouTubers are reporting out in the field rather than just reacting to stories other people reported?

More than anything else Substack shows to me how valuable editors are in the journalistic world. So, so many people are in desperate need of an editor to challenge them before they hit publish.

>> A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc.

You forgot podcasts which are available on numerous platforms. One of which is YT for video podcasts.

Most of the sports news now are breaking on podcasts. Same with pop culture. News sites now mostly refer to some podcast and the person on the podcast whatever bit of news they have come from there.

As of September: Roughly 478,000 podcasts have released at least one new episode in the last 90 days

Podcasts have become the way a majority of people I know are now getting their news, which is pretty crazy.

podcasts and web venues has allowed reputation to get all loosey-goosey compared to traditional journalism, there is less at stake, less likelihood of an actual blacklisting, and every derisive opinion has a cheerleading squad online to amplify the (usually terrible) opinions.

podcasts and web stuff is where the majority of people go to seek journalism, but I hesitate to say that's what replaced it. I see a void where it once was, and the product offered largely different than what I came to expect from journalism wholly.

It's a bloodbath for local journalism, and by extension democracy. No viable business model for local independent journalism is known to exist.

In roughly the same stretch global mobility exploded; from numbers like 2-3 billion flying around to travel, to 6+ billion...almost the entire population

And each of them can journal on their phones

Long before humans had languages and sense of preservation of culture humanoids were nomadic hunter gatherers

And since language and nation state/religious holy war appeared exponential growth in violence appeared

All the sedentary clinging to old allegory, political tropes, arbitrary academic semantics... oooh this little cabal signed off that I am a journalist! ...ground truth is its all conservatism

We don't need Flock if we are all experience hunter gatherers mobile and able to record shit.

Though 84% of Americans do live within 100 miles of where they grew up. Would be baller if the country just adopted a high speed train system and nomadic cultural practices, less sedentary and car focused practices.

  This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI.

Not sure thats true.

I suspect it is. I think the real problem was sites like craigslist (and online advertising in general) removing much of the (classified, job listing, etc) advertising that made publishing a newspaper profitable.

I remember in a very early 1990s (maybe '91 or '90) the Utne Reader had an article talking about how journalism outlets were merging at a rapid rate, resulting in layoffs and consolidation. The author feared that by 2000 there would only be 4-5 news conglomerates left. The internet was pretty much for engineering Universities and Tech companies (and all command line at that) so certainly before the 'open internet' as most people think of it.

It was discussed extensively at the time and in the years since

Many people in the news industry were complaining about this situation. It's very well known.

I am so confused by the implied timeline of the top comment here. And if the open internet happened after 2008 it’s … news to me.

It is very true. Back in early 2000s , I was in a startup that built publication management tools for newspapers. I recall making about 700 phone calls and speaking to the editorial staff to get them to sign up. And this is where I learnt that only a handful of obscure companies owned nearly all of local newspapers.

Cost effective but soulless. Local news was killed by private equity and consolidation.

For context, I have worked in news/media since 2003.

Yes, newspaper circulation had been declining since the late 1980s/early 1990s. The real economic damage came as classifieds, recruitment, real estate and advertising moved online. Craigslist and other online marketplaces ate the business model long before social media and AI entered the picture.

So "open internet" doesn't refer to a specific historical moment, but in this context I'd place its emergence in the early to mid-1990s.

My shallow, poorly worded, comment was aimed at time of the "open internet".

Newspapers took large revenue from advertising that had little to do with journalism. That subsidized foreign bureaus, statehouse reporters, investigative work and specialized beats. When those dollars moved elsewhere, the economics of reporting collapsed. The 2008 recession accelerated that.

That 60% figure is specifically newspaper newsroom employment, not journalism employment.

"News" is just entertainment and fear mongering for money. Always has been. There is no other point to reading the news. Or as someone else put it: "Newspapers are the original doom scrolling".

It would be nice to have a populus informed about what's going on in local government and actually understand the issues. But nobody really wants to be informed. They want biased ragebait.

Journalism pretends like it's fair and balanced while simultaneously only reporting part of a story that's much longer than presented, in order to provide the reader a specific perception. In other words: manipulation. Ignorance is a better outcome, because then at least people aren't overconfident in their wrongness.

Are you saying that journalism, though inherently biased, serves no useful function in our society and only ever serves to mislead people?

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.politico.com/media/story/2016/05/the-fall-of-saloncom-004551/

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.

Even now it has a rogue "VPN Providers" link in the footer stuck there to redirect 31 years of link juice to a single affiliate-spam page.

RIP Salon. When it launched in 1995 it was a total breath of fresh air and it launched at a time when the optimism for the future was through the roof.

Salon would be a good name to repurpose.

I’d like to see a better way to shutter journalism. Some kind of entity, possibly distributed, similar to archives that: holds domain names, fixes link rot, removes all formatting caused by dead ads, and hosts the actual content that had been abandoned or donated;, while also offering new navigation and discoverability through the collections. Ideally a single CMS replacing for all the articles.

It could be partially funded through libraries similar to perma.cc and look a bit like Wikipedia/longform/longreads.

Every brand falls to the worst example of what they can be to stand between their own goal posts before they die. Salon was great back in the day. So was Time, Newsweek, etc....

Well, Newsweek is dead dead. Has been for a very long time. The brand was literally purchased by an SEO firm (that is run by a cult).

It is a good read. When I was living in Europe in the early 2000s, Salon was something I would read regularly. It had some good reporting and articles. Glen Greenwald even wasn't off his rocker back then.

Thanks, I was surprised by OP because I thought Salon was already gone. Glad to know it actually was gone before. It was one of my go-tos circa 2000-2002, before really good blogging took over. Everything on it used to be quite well written. Looking back at it, it was the era where well-written trumped actual knowledge, insight or research.

Thanks for sharing this. I recall Salon being a competitor of Slate, and one thrived, and the other completely floundered. I'd wondered why.

yes, I remember reading both Salon and Slate back in the 90s. it was a big deal when Michael Kinsley, the founding editor Slate, moved from the east coast to what was then considered the hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest (compared to NY / DC / LA for media). He had had fancy jobs at The New Republic, etc.

it was also the era when Microsoft was trying to expand it's dominance in software into new realms as well as into media such as Slate and MSNBC.

See this 1996 cover of Wired Magazine: https://www.originalmagazines.com/products/wired-magazine-june-1996-mr-bill-gates-goes-hollywood-newsstand

> Microsoft was trying to expand it's dominance in software into new realms

I think it was more of a defensive play. Keep in mind that Microsoft saw the web as a threat. Gates was worried that the browser will undermine their OS monopoly (which it eventually did). Gates launched a bunch of web sites including Slate, HomeAdvisor, CarPoint, Sidewalk, Expedia, MSNBC and so on, and told the world that he didn't expect any of these sites to be profitable any time soon, which in my opinion, was intended to dissuade others from investing in the web.

The far superior 'S' from that era was Suck.com, but sadly it failed much earlier.

I remember the suck.com freebies they sent out at one point.

A sticker, a suck-branded Gold Circle Coin condom, and something else that I can't recall right now. (I still have the sticker on an old ammo can.)

Slate has been on the same slippery slope Salon was on; so far as I know it never actually died and got reanimated like Salon, but it suffered a talent exodus and s sharp tilt towards optimization and fan service. Salon was literally a chum-box version of itself, and Slate isn't that yet, but it's still not good.

The big difference though is that Slate has always had corporate ownership, first by Microsoft and then by Graham Holdings. It's never really had to stand on its own feet.

A good reminder that if you live in a city that still has an independent news source, throw them a lifeline by subscribing digitally! It's easy and usually doesn't cost more than a couple bucks a week.

I'm in the Seattle area now and the Seattle Times has been a great source of independent local and national news. Most local city news orgs have gone under at this point but I'm glad we still have one here.

I did that until our local Hearst paper started getting gross with weird subscription terms (13 weeks), random price changes and delivery issues.

I subscribe to Apple News and get most of the stories from them now. They basically push 2-3 stories a day.

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.

Ads don't have to be inherently unethical, but the current industry is. "Pay me to put your .png file here, if you're not a scam" is fine. The problem is, nobody will pay for that (but you can still try).

Presuming your username is indicative of the publication, an anecdote for you: I had assumed the brand had been SEO clickbait acquired years and years ago, perhaps circa 2014 to 16. Maybe it was the unavoidable politicism seeping into everything or perhaps it just got caught up in the miasma. I later learned that DI was still putting out real human being shit, but for too long during a certain period I could not tell true from targeted and at least from my perspective DI got sent to the same bin as Lifehacker and other Gawker acquisitions.

I am sorry. I hope things work out.

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.

Upvoted for suck.com. I was quite sad when it closed down.

Justified cynicism, I would argue...

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 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.

People are not even sharing the article link anymore. they just take a screenshot and share that

We have to. The articles aren't even readable behind all the ads, nags, and paywalls.

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.

I read Paul Krugman's 1990s columns in Slate (which I always associated with Salon as 2 similar competitors with S-names) before he became a lot better known for writing similar columns in The NY Times!

Came here to say this. The main reason I cared about Salon at all was they basically had peak Greenwald.

and just to be clear in case people missed it, here's an apt story

https://www.salon.com/2022/10/07/glenn-greenwalds-bromance-with-alex-jones-new-low-for-a-onetime-pulitzer-winner/

It’s a long article that complains he wasn’t mean enough to Jones in person and has been on the old Carlson show? Anything better?

Yeah sure, there's a knowledge fight episode on it.

Greenwald did promotional appearances with Jones

https://knowledgefight.libsyn.com/709-2-dans-2-war

He's also done collaborations with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and broadcasts on Rumble, the far right version of YouTube where scammers, bigots and hatemongers banned from YouTube go

Even if you agree with those people's politics they aren't investigative journalists. They are sensationalist provocateurs and merchants of spectacle - The internet's equivalent of the tabloid broadsheet

There was this phenomena during covid if you recall where people become radicalized to extremism, conspiracies and delusion, isolating themselves from their loved ones. There's a subreddit for it, qanon casualties.

Seems to have happened to Glenn. It's like the Pulitzer version of the Nobel disease.

https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/glenn-greenwald-offers-bizarre-defense-of-anti-vaxx-conspiracy-theorist-rfk-jr-he-knows-what-hes-talking-about/

I see nothing with any of these pieces linked above, to make me think they are 1) definitely wrong or 2) the author has gone "crazy."

We may quibble over quality, or standards, laziness, but you seem to be rather invested. No one is right all the time, and there is opinion in his piece. Take with a grain of salt.

Not to mention in a country as big as Brazil, anything could and probably did happen, at least at a small scale. GG is living there, I've been there, and the articles did not seem obviously wrong.

I'll keep my eyes peeled however.

He also dabbled in vaccine skepticism and apologetics for Jan 6th. It was good while it lasted.

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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20261106005638/https://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/

If you love it, download it now, and upload it somewhere.

Your choice to do the whole page or just copypaste the story.

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.

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?"

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!

This is exactly how my wife and I met! Same sentiment. We still read The Onion, at least

Oh yeah, I remember that. It was the same backend company running the dating for many sites.

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.

yes, it exists to collect ad revenue by leveraging its considerable domain authority and good google rankings

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.

The amount of early 2000's forums I can tell a similar story about is incredible ... companies willingly just jettisoning their audience.

It's either killing off forums completely, or "upgrading" to the point of being unrecognisable, or requiring everyone to make a new account and ... I can't even be bothered to write it.

Old-school corporation-run internet forums being killed off in the 2010s was usually due to costs of moderation (IMDB, Amazon) or brand-protection reasons (Lonely Planet) or both.

At the time, I was angry at this as a user. But looking back, the forums would have declined anyway. With most people today using the internet from phones, and younger generations chiefly interested in video, there just isn't the same societal support for thoughtful long-form text typed from a computer keyboard. The surviving independent forums I'm on are greying out at best, or have shrunk to a few cantankerous or dotty people at worse.

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

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.

This is Maureen Dowd erasure. Please respect one of the GOATs of vapid, internally-inconsistent nonsense. She's an absolute legend.

Nor can we forget David Brooks, the moralizing conservative who left his wife for his research assistant 24 years his junior.

David French accusing Mayor Pete of fixing bread prices, Lulu Garcia-Navarro with more glasses than good faith questions, etc.

Say what you will, but the NYT has a deep bench of shenanigans. They truly love the game.

Genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about. David French joined NYT in 2023 and was already an independent. He is not at all a foil and is basically in lockstep with his more left of center cohosts like Jamelle Bouie (who is apparently a fascist, according to the median Bluesky poster). This idea that he’s a right of center contributor to NYT is based entirely on work from before he was there. The only person who was right of center in NYT opinion was Ross Douthat and he’s already gone.

David brooks was never that heavy on moralizing, imho. He was more of an idealist who saw a vision for society that he conceded could never be realized , but was content with people otherwise acting in accordance with their incentives and preferences.

Substack is booming.

it's amazing how much long form content there is over the past 5 years, especially the past 2. my reading list is so flooded I have given up

I agree. In the last 10 years, a huge number of popular independent journalists and pundits (opinion writers) have moved to Substack. For me, in 2026, it is the OnlyFans of blogging.

Booming is a relative term. I would have to see how many writers are making a "living wage," a favored term of people in tech circles which generally means a fraction of what they make.

it's just a blogging platform + newsletter service. There was never an expectation ppl would make a living income from it, except for only the top. But it's like this with almost everything in life.

Yes there was. The monetization was why it wasn't medium.com. Friend of a friend is a substack writer. 50k subscribers that pay $10/month for her insights.

Sadly, it ceased to be that way for a long time.

independent journalism is on substack, twitter , tiktok or other social media

If it sells, you sell it and make money.

In fact, you sell it in all colors and make more money:

https://www.google.com/search?q=black+people+site%3Asalon.com

It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to sell.

But then someone democratizes the publishing (Substack).

Someone else then mechanizes the producing (LLMs).

And you no longer sell.

Bummer.

the tone is very different, don't you think?

https://www.salon.com/2015/12/22/white_men_must_be_stopped_the_very_future_of_the_planet_depends_on_it_partner/

hotwired, suck, boing boing, CNET, digg, slashdot, segfault, geocities, flickr...

I still subscribe to flickr but it basically exists on the back of Smugmug and I'm not sure how long that can keep going.

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

Written by the author of speed tribes, who had tremendous influence on william gibson!

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.com/2000/09/01/rich_stevens

still alive from the same era: slashdot.org

I hope they keep the archived site open for read-only.

Likely they will. they make tons of ad revenue this way. the domain has considerable domain authority and its articles rank well. unless they sell the actual domain

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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).

privacy.com lets you generate credit cards for every vendor so they don't get to take money from you unless you actually allow them to.

The New York Times was most notorious for this.

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.

Never used Salon myself, but I've also seen this a lot. I assume a lot of these organisations pull in some third-party credit card processing, then when asked "do you want high security and low fraud?" they answer "Yeah of course"

Then the credit card processor asks for card details, full address, phone number, captcha, browser fingerprinting, IP address reputation, validate the payment in your bank's app, reject foreign cards, reject prepaid cards, and so on.

Then a customer like me who is literally at the checkout trying to give them money isn't allowed to.

And they're selling digital goods - pixels are free, a non-paying customer doesn't cost them anything!

Yeah, I used to work on credit card processing so I'm very familiar with this. I don't remember the details, but my vague recollection is that Salon's process was much worse than just normal card processing set to high security. I remember seeing layers on layers of third-party Javascript with questionable provenance, lots of personal questions. I tried to work around it all for a bit because I really wanted to support them (I've been reading Salon since they launched) but eventually just threw up my hands in despair and figured they were probably doomed anyway because surely I was not the only one having the same experience. :-(

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.

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.

Your taste is clearly not the driving force behind media consumption in the 21st century, for better or worse. In fact it hasn't been for quite some time. You kind of hit the nail on the head at the end though... media used to be something that was primarily consumed by relatively educated people with enough leisure time to sit around and read. Then the radio and TV democratized that to an extent, but nothing has remade the marketplace for information like the internet and smartphones.

So yes, people lack media literacy. Billions of people currently online are experiencing their first generation of exposure to the what the world of news and other media has to offer in any real sense. Instead of wagging a finger at them and calling them ignorant lets accept all of what's changed and adapt accordingly.

Also the person who

   I follow specific writers for their voice, not in spite of it

and the kind of author who attracts that kind of reader are going to Substack.

> You kind of hit the nail on the head at the end though... media used to be something that was primarily consumed by relatively educated people with enough leisure time to sit around and read.

I mean, I think there are numerous things to point to explain such things, but I think the two big ones would be:

* The ongoing deadening of our attention spans and the normalization of products that foster addiction in their users often to the detriment of those users to drive profits

* The ongoing attacks on education fostered by the right wing here and elsewhere creating a more ignorant, and less literate electorate. Media literacy itself requiring literacy to be taught, and as is touted frequently, most people can't read above 6th grade.

> Then the radio and TV democratized that to an extent, but nothing has remade the marketplace for information like the internet and smartphones.

I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "TV democratized media"? TV (and radio really) is still incredibly centralized, now more than ever. As to a marketplace of information, I don't think information is the issue at hand, we have more information now than at any time in human history. Almost all of us carry a device in our pockets that would give us the answer to any question we had, were we so inclined to ask, yet misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda are perhaps more prolific than ever before.

What is lacking now, IMO, is the ability for the reader, again, to think critically and sort the wheat from the chaff of that massive wellspring of information. Which follows neatly into...

> Instead of wagging a finger at them and calling them ignorant lets accept all of what's changed and adapt accordingly.

I'm not calling them ignorant, I am stating the fact that they are ignorant. Ignorance is not a criticism, it's the natural state one finds themself in when they are uninformed on a topic. It's also pretty easily fixed unless one is unduly attached to their ignorance in some way that benefits them.

I also don't believe it's strictly their fault that they are ignorant, because our country has spent decades defunding and attacking it's own education system, and other countries similarly, ultimately I believe because a less educated, less thinking electorate is easier to manipulate.

>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?

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?

it will exist to collect ad revenue on its huge library or articles

OK so they're not shutting down shutting down.... they're just not penning articles any longer?

ask.com closing was more along the lines of what I was talking about then. that bugs me that they don't still have any form of simple search or a news portal or anything.... just, "bye!".

Seems like a waste.

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)?

Aren't they pronounced the same?

Semi-apropros, early '90s SNL used this as a premise to satirize over-the-top haircare commercials. Of all things!

https://www.tiktok.com/@darntootin85/video/7168584345140137258

I tried to find a source other than TikTok, c'est la vie.

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.

"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?"

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

Breaking Points is also just punditry; if you're interested in independent journalism, try to find an outlet to support that has newsgathering jobs!

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