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.
donohoe 7 minutes ago [-]
This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI.
Not sure thats true.
Analemma_ 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
tptacek 32 minutes ago [-]
I don't think there were any newsroom jobs at Salon?
macintux 54 minutes ago [-]
This article didn't generate any comments when it made the rounds 10 years ago. An obituary for what salon.com used to be.
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.
allenu 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
schiffern 19 minutes ago [-]
Justified cynicism, I would argue...
lastdong 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
jgon 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
mscarpino 32 minutes ago [-]
Very sad. Loved the articles from Stephanie Zacharek, Camille Paglia, and Cary Tennis.
whalesalad 20 minutes ago [-]
I don't think I have ever read anything from salon
benbayard 59 minutes ago [-]
Independent journalism shutting down is really tragic. One of the OG internet publications.
tptacek 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
okeuro49 6 minutes ago [-]
Substack is booming.
DonHopkins 30 minutes ago [-]
All the good news web sites got fucked, and their best stories and documenteries have been taken down, even from the archives, by thin skinned people who don't want them told.
>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."
I rescued this from the Internet Archive before it got taken down, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.
Yes, THAT creepy MAGA Bannon Epstein good buddy pedo crypto shill guy, Brock Pierce, who turns into a banana at 20:30 in this video:
Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):
>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 snapshot of fuckedcompany.com:
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?
lisper 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
cogman10 32 minutes ago [-]
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).
lenerdenator 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
michaelt 28 minutes ago [-]
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!
lisper 17 minutes ago [-]
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. :-(
EA-3167 59 minutes ago [-]
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 53 minutes ago [-]
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 46 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
EA-3167 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
slowin 41 minutes ago [-]
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):
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
cocacola1 1 hours ago [-]
Unfortunate. Read them occasionally and enjoyed it.
adamiscool8 32 minutes ago [-]
>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.
talloaktrees 22 minutes ago [-]
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
mrcwinn 25 minutes ago [-]
Totally forgot Salon existed. I guess that’s part of the problem. For anyone interested in independent journalism, I strongly recommend Breaking Points.
Breaking Points is also just punditry; if you're interested in independent journalism, try to find an outlet to support that has newsgathering jobs!
vr46 1 hours ago [-]
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 51 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
gausswho 35 minutes ago [-]
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)?
13 minutes ago [-]
bashhq_r 41 minutes ago [-]
did they ever actually turn a profit or was it vc runway the whole time
mushufasa 46 minutes ago [-]
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 45 minutes ago [-]
meh
aaron695 56 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
kikokikokiko 1 hours ago [-]
Good ridance.
sublinear 59 minutes ago [-]
No kidding! The whole front page is a wall of Trump.
kurisufag 50 minutes ago [-]
as a young'un, i've only ever known salon as calorie-free partisan nonsense. i have at least vague memory of when VICE was good, and would be sad if they dissolved, but the same does not apply here.
LogicFailsMe 50 minutes ago [-]
Broadly paywalled, stopped reading afterwards. But yes, once they were great. I blame society(tm).
Rendered at 21:20:52 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210219012551/https://www.polit...
https://web.archive.org/web/20120217111837/http://www.salon....
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 funny-because-its-true parody from 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?)
Classic Dot-Com Era Fucked Company Brock Pierce DEN (Digital Entertainment Network) Documentary:
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 the Internet Archive before it got taken down, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.
Yes, THAT creepy MAGA Bannon Epstein good buddy pedo crypto shill guy, Brock Pierce, who turns into a banana at 20:30 in this video:
Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s
Brock Pierce's Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein Went Deeper Than Anyone Knew:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/brock-pierces-relationsh...
Fucked Company:
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 snapshot of fuckedcompany.com:
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...
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).
It's pretty much everywhere. I just assume it of apps on my phone.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Guess that didn't work out. I enjoyed reading their creative journalism before they went all the way in on dogmatic politics.
https://youtube.com/@breakingpoints
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.