Salon, one of the first magazines built for the web, announced on 5 November that it is shutting down after 31 years. Its unsigned farewell note said “the business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years” and added, rather sweetly, “It has been an extraordinary privilege.” According to AP, 19 full-time staff and a handful of contractors are affected. The archive is staying online, for now.
Salon was founded in November 1995 by David Talbot, a former arts editor at the San Francisco Examiner, with colleagues who had walked out during the paper’s 1994 strike. Over the years it published Jake Tapper, Glenn Greenwald and Rebecca Traister, floated on Nasdaq in 1999 at the height of the dotcom boom, never quite turned a profit and was sold to the owners of Snopes in 2019 for $5 million. UnHerd’s Oliver Bateman called it “the oldest general-interest magazine on the internet”, and argued that it had neither rich patrons nor enough paying readers to survive. That, give or take a patron, is the whole of internet publishing in one sentence.
We’ll admit to a small, guilty flicker of something here, and it isn’t schadenfreude. SFcrowsnest started in 1991, four years before Salon published a word, back when getting online meant a screeching modem and a family feud over the telephone line. We have watched a great many brighter, richer and better-funded publications come and go since then. Most of them had offices. Some had share prices. We had a lot of people who liked reading science fiction and wanted to tell each other about it.
That, we suspect, is the trick, if there is one. A general-interest magazine has to persuade everyone, every day, that it matters, and the algorithms that decide what everyone sees change their minds more often than a Time Lord changes faces. A genre magazine only has to keep its readers, and genre readers are the most loyal people on earth. They will follow a book series for forty years, travel across the world to a convention in a damp hotel and argue about a 1966 Star Trek episode as though it aired last Tuesday. They also, crucially, keep reading reviews of books that no algorithm has ever heard of. Our reviewers have been turning up for decades because they love the stuff. That is cheaper than a Nasdaq listing and lasts considerably longer.
None of which makes it easy, and Salon’s closing is a real loss. The early web was full of odd, ambitious independent magazines, and there are very few left. Bateman points out that BuzzFeed News, Jezebel and Vice’s website have all gone the same way in the last few years. Every one of them was supposed to be the future of publishing at some point.
So, our condolences to Salon’s staff and readers, and our thanks for 31 years of argument. We’ll be here, doing what we have done since before Netscape, in a corner of the internet that has never had much money and has rarely needed it. If you’re reading this, you’re the reason. Do keep coming back.
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