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.
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.
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.