Goodbye from Salon

The advent of internet and the notion that news should / could be 'free' has caused a steep decline in quality journalism worldwide, I think.

I have some journalists (for a local newspaper) in my circle of friends and they all complain there's no 'newsroom' anymore for most (dutch) newspapers. All journalists now are supposed to 'self-redact' and their copy is just pasted into the newspaper without anybody else looking at it.

Lots of 'journalists' are freelancers who just send in their piece. Even those often get published with minimal oversight. There just isn't enough money to have a redaction.

Fact-checking is(or should be) done by the one writing the piece. So personal biases are hardly ever caught.

Admitted, all these stories are for a small local newspaper with very tight budgets. But according to my friends it's the same everywhere when they speak to their friends, and even the big national newspapers here have very minimal supporting personnel.

It's no wonder the world polarizes.

Your page has:

> Newspaper newsroom employment fell 57% between 2008 and 2020, from roughly 71,000 jobs to about 31,000. At the same time, the number of digital-native newsroom employees rose 144%, from 7,400 workers in 2008 to about 18,000 in 2020.

So, if we group digital publications with newspapers we are going from 78k to about 49k jobs, a drop of almost 40%. It would be interesting to see a finer grained breakdown by type of jobs. I would speculate that there was probably an even bigger decline in the number of journalists per se.

The rest of the numbers you are quoting are mostly broadcast TV, with some radio and cable TV folks thrown in. My impression is that quite few of those jobs / stories are serious journalism.

It's down 81% since 2002:

https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/new-local-journalist-index-...

(Measured as local journalist equivalent per 100,000 people.)

That's still a huge loss. Now imagine if the tech jobs fell by 26%. You won't be saying it "only" fell by 26%.

> The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020. [0]

My reaction was a little different. I said "that's it? Only 60%?"

"digital" sadly nowadays means regurgitation of someone's Twitter "X" post

Let me rephrase it: "long before the decline of the open internet, and the rise of AI".

I know we point a lot of fingers at social media and/or the dead internet theory - but exactly to your point the process was started simultaneously or a little bit ahead of things like the smartphone, and long before Facebook was a news source.

I think the open Internet is often said to have begun declining with the rise of walled gardens, notably Facebook, 2010 or so. A further factor was Google's degeneration from relatively fair broker to (biased) "question answerer", with a notable step 2019-2020 but with earlier steps also.

Google was using it's version of AI to push "answers to questions" a while before ChatGPT, these just weren't very good so they weren't sorted first.

But it's hard to really say - as long as the Internet has existed, people have been crafting schemes to control/manipulate it and by now those schemes have tremendous weight.

The main thing is the early Internet was a unique because it's success was an accident. Corporations and bureaucrats imagined the "Information Superhighway" as an enriched cable TV and this made it such a failure that amateur use of the Internet wound accidentally "going viral" and only over time did all the crap but it's been a while and the Internet is close to a "super-duper-information superhighway" today.

> Now if you want to read about e.g. Ukraine/Gaza/Iran/etc, you can read first person accounts from people on the ground, get imagery of things seconds after they happen, and so on.

That's the good side of the Internet (and smartphones) and what all of us early adopters always said the Internet will be great for. But then there is the other side of the coin: fake news, fake account, coordinated disinformation campaigns from foreign state actors, bad taste pranks etc. Some of those existed before with classic journalism as well but the scale at which things are now done was simply impossible before.

So, having journalism and journalists as a trusted source, and filter, that can already digest and filter out the fake from the truth are still needed. Or even more than before, I dare to say. The issue is that there are too many monetary incentives to not act like that.

If anything newspapers over much of the past were even more partisan than today.

> we replace this method of holding politicians to account with something that works just as well (I have no idea what).

twitter and facebook were supposed to fill this purpose. oh well

I wish would stop using "journalist" and "reporter" interchangeably.

Reporters are people who actually get out into the world, collect facts, collect opinions from real people (some of them experts at something, some of them not), try to actually see "newsworthy events" in person.

Journalists write essays based on the work reporters do.

I'm not saying I want less journalists, but I do want more reporters.

"The vast majority of what was lost were journalists." Fixed it for both of you!

(I'm joking, but then again, if demagogues can remove specifics to make statements punchier, why can't I?)

There’s still a supply of opinion & analysis writing that people will pay for, but Salon and similar online publications got disintermediated for it by Substack.

But there is tons of newspapers still? And online publications? It's not like there is a shortage of news sites

the internet made it ~free for anyone to publish to the whole world, which eviscerated the premium of space in the newspaper. it'd have been hard for newspapers to not get destroyed no matter what they did, but losing classifieds to fuckin' craigslist wasn't their finest moment, either.

They were always just opinion and commentary, but did have staff writers.

The federal gov is essentially just entitlement programs for the elderly and the military, and all the wealth of the billionaires wouldn’t pay for it for even a year.

I hate that CEOs make 325x more than an average worker whereas is 1965 they made 21x. But whenever I see something about taxing unrealized capital gains, it makes me wonder: are we also going to give tax credits for unrealized capital losses?

Completely wrong because Salon wasn’t “high-quality journalism”. It was opinion pieces. There’s a zillion free substacks where you can get that today. Salon’s business was commoditized and is now grossly oversupplied.

Trying to make Salon’s failure about tax policy is bizarre.

> A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc

And the world suffers as a result, IMO. It’s all very thinly veiled opinion rather than original reporting. How many YouTubers are reporting out in the field rather than just reacting to stories other people reported?

More than anything else Substack shows to me how valuable editors are in the journalistic world. So, so many people are in desperate need of an editor to challenge them before they hit publish.

"The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020" - those jobs were the pipeline for the jobs at the publications you mention. Journalist is hardly the same career path it was prior to the Internet, which pretty much destroyed the business model of newspapers. Lets concede for discussion that it's going awesome for the New York Times of the world - they don't cover local stories, which, will not being relevant to the whole world, are quite relevant to people living where they are occurring. We have also lost a professional class of people who's job it was to find out what's going on. It's definitely a huge loss in my book.

> A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc.

A lot of punditry has moved to those platforms, but roughly nobody on those platforms is actually doing investigative journalism.

>> A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc.

You forgot podcasts which are available on numerous platforms. One of which is YT for video podcasts.

Most of the sports news now are breaking on podcasts. Same with pop culture. News sites now mostly refer to some podcast and the person on the podcast whatever bit of news they have come from there.

As of September: Roughly 478,000 podcasts have released at least one new episode in the last 90 days

Podcasts have become the way a majority of people I know are now getting their news, which is pretty crazy.

It's a bloodbath for local journalism, and by extension democracy. No viable business model for local independent journalism is known to exist.

I suspect it is. I think the real problem was sites like craigslist (and online advertising in general) removing much of the (classified, job listing, etc) advertising that made publishing a newspaper profitable.

I remember in a very early 1990s (maybe '91 or '90) the Utne Reader had an article talking about how journalism outlets were merging at a rapid rate, resulting in layoffs and consolidation. The author feared that by 2000 there would only be 4-5 news conglomerates left. The internet was pretty much for engineering Universities and Tech companies (and all command line at that) so certainly before the 'open internet' as most people think of it.

Nick Davies wrote "Flat Earth News" about this very problem in 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Davies#Bibliography

It was discussed extensively at the time and in the years since

I am so confused by the implied timeline of the top comment here. And if the open internet happened after 2008 it’s … news to me.

Many people in the news industry were complaining about this situation. It's very well known.

It is very true. Back in early 2000s , I was in a startup that built publication management tools for newspapers. I recall making about 700 phone calls and speaking to the editorial staff to get them to sign up. And this is where I learnt that only a handful of obscure companies owned nearly all of local newspapers.

Cost effective but soulless. Local news was killed by private equity and consolidation.

For context, I have worked in news/media since 2003.

Yes, newspaper circulation had been declining since the late 1980s/early 1990s. The real economic damage came as classifieds, recruitment, real estate and advertising moved online. Craigslist and other online marketplaces ate the business model long before social media and AI entered the picture.

So "open internet" doesn't refer to a specific historical moment, but in this context I'd place its emergence in the early to mid-1990s.

My shallow, poorly worded, comment was aimed at time of the "open internet".

Newspapers took large revenue from advertising that had little to do with journalism. That subsidized foreign bureaus, statehouse reporters, investigative work and specialized beats. When those dollars moved elsewhere, the economics of reporting collapsed. The 2008 recession accelerated that.

That 60% figure is specifically newspaper newsroom employment, not journalism employment.

Are you saying that journalism, though inherently biased, serves no useful function in our society and only ever serves to mislead people?

Frankly, the pitch of news - the 'moat' - is a lack of bias. You pay to have someone who is not actually an expert in the field being discussed (or even a beginner, in most cases today) give you an unbiased view of the situation. The idea is that the expert is too close to the situation and can be biased, so the journalist is the filter. They supposedly know enough about the subject to ask smart questions about it, and their capability to do that is judged by other journalists with... even less understanding of the subject at hand. If journalists violate this assumption by being so blatantly biased, like they were at outlets like Salon, there is no information being shared anymore AND no benefit to listening to them outside of having your assumptions hopefully reassured by another ignorant person. Journalism moving from a comparably open and meritocratic field to being entirely populated by PMC failsons about as illiterate as their peer majors doesn't help this.

The only other real value-add is that the journalist is a better 'communicator', an assumption mostly based on stereotypes about the people being interviewed, especially with tech journalism. This has broken down too - the largest outlets regularly release pieces filled with run-on sentences and typos now, and often obfuscate the point rather than clarify it. See any NYT article about any hot-button issue over the past ten years or so.

It's spelled "populace". I learned that by reading newspapers!

Weird, sexist take.

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.

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.

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....

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.

Now poorly-written trumps actual knowledge.

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...

The far superior 'S' from that era was Suck.com, but sadly it failed much earlier.

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.

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.

Whatever happened to Carl Steadman? That guy was dope.

https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2016/02/founders-of-s...

We have to. The articles aren't even readable behind all the ads, nags, and paywalls.

Old-school corporation-run internet forums being killed off in the 2010s was usually due to costs of moderation (IMDB, Amazon) or brand-protection reasons (Lonely Planet) or both.

At the time, I was angry at this as a user. But looking back, the forums would have declined anyway. With most people today using the internet from phones, and younger generations chiefly interested in video, there just isn't the same societal support for thoughtful long-form text typed from a computer keyboard. The surviving independent forums I'm on are greying out at best, or have shrunk to a few cantankerous or dotty people at worse.

Came here to say this. The main reason I cared about Salon at all was they basically had peak Greenwald.

I agree.

I’m imagining the shutdown was timed for right after midterm elections ( and not before ) so Salon could exercise influence through that event.

and just to be clear in case people missed it, here's an apt story

https://www.salon.com/2022/10/07/glenn-greenwalds-bromance-w...

I think the most damning fact about the readers of The New York Times is that they're much more interested in the opinion page (which is just Charlie Blow blowing it out his ass) than they are in the actual reporting which might concern some people you don't know in some place you never heard of that did something that involves a lot of explaining.

it's amazing how much long form content there is over the past 5 years, especially the past 2. my reading list is so flooded I have given up

Booming is a relative term. I would have to see how many writers are making a "living wage," a favored term of people in tech circles which generally means a fraction of what they make.

I agree. In the last 10 years, a huge number of popular independent journalists and pundits (opinion writers) have moved to Substack. For me, in 2026, it is the OnlyFans of blogging.

If it sells, you sell it and make money.

In fact, you sell it in all colors and make more money:

https://www.google.com/search?q=black+people+site%3Asalon.co...

It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to sell.

But then someone democratizes the publishing (Substack).

Someone else then mechanizes the producing (LLMs).

And you no longer sell.

Bummer.

hotwired, suck, boing boing, CNET, digg, slashdot, segfault, geocities, flickr...

IDK if this is a salon issue, but another major issue is so many subscription businesses have made it damn near impossible to end your subscription without sitting in a queue for an hour and having their retention specialist give you 900 offers to stay.

That alone has made me much MUCH more leery to subscribe to anything if it's not something that can easily be canceled (For example, using Google play to subscribe to things since they make it easy to unsubscribe).

They've gotten hooked on the data sales revenue. It's now expected that you'll both give them the money and the information.

It's pretty much everywhere. I just assume it of apps on my phone.

Never used Salon myself, but I've also seen this a lot. I assume a lot of these organisations pull in some third-party credit card processing, then when asked "do you want high security and low fraud?" they answer "Yeah of course"

Then the credit card processor asks for card details, full address, phone number, captcha, browser fingerprinting, IP address reputation, validate the payment in your bank's app, reject foreign cards, reject prepaid cards, and so on.

Then a customer like me who is literally at the checkout trying to give them money isn't allowed to.

And they're selling digital goods - pixels are free, a non-paying customer doesn't cost them anything!

Oh I for sure see this in my day job.

Us: "Here Google, I've done your bidding to earn higher placement in your search engine"

Google: "Thanks for all the data, idiot. Now we'll show it on our site and claim it as ours"

Our organic traffic is WAY down despite nonstop kowtowing to their demands.

> I expect a lot more of this, partly for the monetization issue, but also because these sites went all-in on SEO and then Google AI ate their lunch. Who wants to pore over a 3 page rambling “article” that contains one or two sentences of useful info when an LLM can read and summarize it?

I don't understand this viewpoint at all. I follow specific writers for their voice, not in spite of it. A whole lot of people seem to be hallucinating this past moment in history when news was strictly factual information, delivered with no editorializing, from people who had no opinions or ideas, and I genuinely have no idea what they're talking about. Walter Cronkite would frequently editorialize about events he was reporting. All the major historical men and women of news would, that's... the point, you're not just tuning in to know what happened today, you're tuning in to experience those events through the eyes of someone you've at least got some vague trust relationship with.

And I categorically reject any notion that it's better to get a summary via AI. I can clock articles written with heavy AI use and I dislike their monotone and... well, inhuman writing style. Frequently, especially as of late, current events need the touch of an empathetic human with their own ideas.

If you require your news filtered through a bias-remover, IMO you just lack media literacy. I can read something from someone I disagree with on basically everything and still get the facts out of it. Frankly: skill issue.

   I follow specific writers for their voice, not in spite of it

as a young'un, i've only ever known salon as calorie-free partisan nonsense. i have at least vague memory of when VICE was good, and would be sad if they dissolved, but the same does not apply here.

OK so they're not shutting down shutting down.... they're just not penning articles any longer?

ask.com closing was more along the lines of what I was talking about then. that bugs me that they don't still have any form of simple search or a news portal or anything.... just, "bye!".

Seems like a waste.