Salon Provides A Constant Flow Of Good Reads
// November 30th, 2005 // No Comments » // Thoughts
A great story about a great site. (Via Mercury News)
Of all the technology magazines that emerged during the dot-com boom, Salon.com — one of the Web’s first “zines” — was always living more precariously than most, perpetually close to going out of business.
Now, a decade later, Salon could be having the last laugh. It’s celebrating its 10th anniversary with a party in San Francisco on Thursday night.
Although it still teeters on the edge of financial viability, the progressive online publication is very much alive, while other boom-era magazines, like the Industry Standard, Upside and Red Herring, are dead or reinvented as leaner versions of their former selves.
The magazine owes its survival to cash infusions from deep-pocketed readers like John Warnock, the founder and co-chairman of Adobe, and Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, who don’t want to see the site go away.
“Salon is a small but courageous voice,” Warnock said this week in an e-mail. “I have always liked their writing and the topics they will address. The world needs more Salons.”
With both its hard-hitting, left-leaning political coverage and trendy cultural stories, Salon has cultivated a loyal readership, many of whom see the site as a hipper, Internet version of the New Yorker. A table in the lobby of its San Francisco offices in the moderne Rincon Center is full of journalism awards.
“People love our political reporting,” said Salon’s editor in chief, Joan Walsh. “Our cultural reporting helps subsidize that.”
Walsh joined Salon in 1998 as news editor, after being warned by founder and then-editor David Talbot that the media organization was about to be vilified. Salon had just published a report disclosing Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde’s decades-old extramarital affair. It was when Hyde was leading the impeachment inquiry against then-President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The Web zine was denounced on the floor by House of Representatives Majority Whip Tom DeLay.
