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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...

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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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Now poorly-written trumps actual knowledge.

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

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.

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-ju...

> 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.)

> suck-branded Gold Circle Coin condom

Solid collectible, right there.-

Yes! The weekly 'Filler' column with cartoons by Terry Colon was a real must-read in the early dotcom era.

And if you bend the rules a bit, Bianca's Smut Shack might sort-of count too - probably the first truly great website of any sort.

Do not forget Spy magazine !

FWIW they had it in for Trump from the start.

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.

what is dead may never die?

I don't know, I don't see any of the clickspam that the article describes on the frontpage now. No "your cat is a racist" or "relationship with my penis".

On the other hand, I also don't see anything else that's particularly interesting or thought provoking. Which is kind of sad for this US election season.

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