Salon.com RIP

Back when I first got on to the internet, in the mid-90s, I was a big fan of pioneering webzine Salon, which at the time was at the cutting edge of new media. It’s hard now to remember exactly why, but the idea of a magazine that you could read while seated in front of your computer screen, as opposed to relaxing on your couch, was tremendously exciting to me. Part of it must have been the air of novelty that the web had then, when being online was still a minority experience, which gave me the feeling that I had access to exclusive information, but there was also the inspiring sensation of being involved in a new wave of communal creativity, open to anyone with a keyboard and a modem. Among many other things Salon introduced me to the world of blogging, and was certainly an inspiration for Second Life Shrink.

I’ve kept reading Salon over the years, and while it was no longer the unique resource it used to be in the old days, it’s still been my go-to for a broadly progressive take on US culture and politics.

So I was saddened to read that, after nearly 31 years, Salon is to cease publication, apparently a victim of a precipitous fall-off in traffic occasioned by Google’s new policy of providing AI-generated summaries of content, thus reducing the number of people who click through to the full articles.

This would seem to undermine the revenue model of much of what remains of the human-generated internet, in the same way that Salon and other online publications fatally weakened the print magazine industry, but without the upside of allowing previously marginalised voices access to a wider audience (even if that turned out to be largely illusory), which doesn’t feel like a good development.

I guess it’s up to us old-school bloggers to battle the AI tide, and to keep alive the spirit of Salon, and the bright future the WWW promised back at the dawn of the century.