After 31 years Salon is ceasing publication. The online journalism game is obviously nothing like it was when they started back in 1995. Yikes I’m old.
They don’t say, but it’s probably the AI-ification of Google Search that done 'em in. That, and I can’t remember any particularly better-than-average journalism from Salon since the 2000s.
This is presumably a result of the demonetisation of sites thanks to Google stealing their news, and now Google stealing all the site traffic with it’s shitty AI overviews? AI continues to ruin the internet and peoples livelihoods. And AI won’t be producing this journalism.
At some point - hopefully soon - people will realize that LLMs simply can’t make anything new. They’re amazing at making derivative work, but that’s about it.
amazingdoing a lot of heavy lifting there…I mean… when you consider that the bulk of the world’s work products are produced by totally average people, not amazing ones, an LLM spits out completely average derivative work at an extremely high rate. Think slop speed, not slop quality (and for me, 90% of bio-slop and machine-slop are interchangeable)
I’ll keep saying it. Stop fucking tracking me and I’ll disable my ad blocker.
Yeah exactly. Run respectful ads and don’t track and I’ll consider it. But if turning off ublock means another few megabytes of dense JS script that’s sending network packets every time my mouse moves, fuck that and fuck you.
Nah. Even without tracking there were popups, auto playing sound, punch the monkey, shake the tree, bonzi buddy, etc, etc.
I am saddened to hear of their closure. As a fellow oldie who began reading them in high school when they debuted (and thought of myself as very sophisticated for doing so), I shall miss them.
I went looking in the Wayback Machine for the earliest archive of salon.com, which is from April 3, 1997 - https://web.archive.org/web/19970403013441/http://www.salon.com/
Amusingly, this domain wasn’t even theirs at the time, since the page welcomes hair salon professionals to the WWW! However, that site links to “Salon Magazine” via the charmingly quaint “E-Zines” link, which links to a different domain, salon1999.com . IA’s first capture of this site seems to be from December, 1998: https://web.archive.org/web/19981212032509/http://www.salon1999.com/
Are the first three years of Salon archived anywhere, or lost to internet history?
Well damn. I haven’t read it in years, but I enjoyed it.
Key reason is here and exactly as you suspect. Funding models are changing as we continue the race to the bottom.
The business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years. After careful consideration, we have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable.
Damn that sucks, I can still remember their beginnings. Another loss for plurality.
Goddamn
