SALON.COM. Encyclopedia of American Journalism

One of the first and best-known Internet-only publications,
Salon launched its Web-based magazine in 1995 under the
leadership of David Talbot of the San Francisco Examiner
and a handful of his friends from the newspaper, including publisher David Zwieg, writers Gary Kamiya, Laura
Miller, Joyce Millman, Scott Rosenberg, and Andrew Ross,
and art-director Mignon Khargie. Based in San Francisco,
Salon.com’s full and part-time staff as well as a cadre of
freelancers produced original content. At first a bi-weekly,
Salon became a daily in February 1997. The original URLs
for Salon were www.salon1999.com; www.salonmag.com,
so the magazine did not become Salon.com until 1999 when
it purchased the domain name, www.salon.com.
As an icon of the late 1990s and early millennium digiterati, Salon.com is known for its insightful articles and essays
that often center on the American political system. It is also
perceived to skew toward a more liberal viewpoint. One of
its best known former bureau chiefs was Sidney Blumenthal, who was a high-ranking aide in the Bill Clinton White
House. Formerly conservative columnist and talk show host
Arianna Huffington was a regularly contributing columnist.
The content sites, updated daily or more frequently, include
News and Politics, Opinion, Technology & Business, Arts
& Entertainment, Books, Life, and Comics.
In descriptions and reviews, Salon was called “intriguing and intelligent” (by the Washington Post), “truly compelling” (Time) and “smart and provocative” (Forbes). Its
readers in the early twenty-first century were primarily
older (97 percent were above twenty-one years old) with an
average household income of $78,342, and 74 percent had
earned a college or graduate level degree.
Salon.com also was known for its online community,
and in particular, purchasing The Well, a well-known virtual community made up of intellectuals and early Internet
users chronicled by Howard Rheingold in his best-selling
non-fiction book, Virtual Community: Homesteading on
the Electronic Frontier (1993). Salon.com used the software that powered The Well to run its own online forums
(called “Table Talk”) but housed the original online community as well.
Salon.com used advertising on its site to keep the publication free for readers, but in 2003 it moved to a model of charging subscribers $35 a year to read stories without
also having to view advertising. In 2005, Salon.com had
80,000 subscribers, but another 730,000 per month choose
to view the stories for free in exchange for first viewing
full-page advertisements that lead into them. Before this
time, the magazine was known in the dot com community
for its financial troubles. In the summer of 1999, Salon.com
offered an Initial Public Offering on the NASDAQ stock
exchange and its offering was mediocre. In the several
years following the IPO, Salon.com’s stock has been delisted from the NASDAQ exchange and currently trades as
an over-the-counter penny stock at less than 50 cents per
share, and it announced ever-mounting losses and debt. The
magazine’s subscribers essentially saved it after a financial
crisis in 2000 when founding editor Talbot appealed to them
for donations. Salon.com had sixty full-time employees
during the dot com boom of the middle to late 1990s, and
that number was down to twenty-three full-time employees
ten years after its founding.
In October of 2003, Chief Executive and President of
Salon Media Group, Michael O’Donnel, announced he was
leaving the company. Talbot, still the company chairman
and editor-and-chief of the magazine took his place, and
Betsy Hambrecht, Salon’s CFO, became the new president.
Joan Walsh took over as editor in February 2005. As of
early spring 2005, Salon.com had made a quarterly profit
for the first time in its existence, benefiting from a resurgent
online ad market and an established subscription business.
Although Salon Media Group was still headquartered
in San Francisco in 2006, most of its editorial operation
was based in New York and it also had a smaller bureau in
Washington, D.C.

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