The salon closes. I helped launch the magazine 31 years ago. It feels like the end of an era.

Thirty-one years ago, I was sitting in the conference room of a San Francisco architectural firm that was so unlucky that it had to rent part of its office space to a group of scatterbrained people who were doing something unfathomable: publishing a magazine on the World Wide Web. At the time, in 1995, there were only a few precedents (Feed and Word, you are not forgotten!), none of them being a fully-fledged news agency employing a team of professional journalists. My new colleagues were newspaper veterans, led by our editor, David Talbot, and employed until recently by the city’s now-defunct evening paper. They knew what they were doing, except they knew how to do it in a very different medium. I sat there, drawing grids on a legal pad, trying to figure out how this new type of publication would work.

Our “magazine,” as we thought then, was Salon.com, an organization that just announced its closure after more than three decades of publishing reporting, commentary, and reviews. We weren’t technological visionaries in the beginning, but I had at least been online for a while, before the web even existed. I had email, which only about half the people I knew could qualify for, including the most Internet-savvy among us, Scott Rosenberg. However, if you were to email David, you would have to go across the office to pester him to check it out. Otherwise, it might be days before he gets the idea to check.

At first, still considering ourselves a magazine, we put complete “issues” of a dozen articles online on the office modem on Friday evenings. It took so long that we often didn’t leave until 11 p.m., making sure to check all the pages first, as if we were proofreading a printed publication. We were print people, gradually adapting to a new way of publishing, and the idea of ​​a website that would be continually updated throughout the day was unimaginable to us. An early reviewer likened Salon to an old-fashioned airship, richly appointed and comfortable but slower than an actual airplane. As my colleague Gary Kamiya said, it wasn’t as insulting as intended. For someone who cared most about good writing, Salon was heaven.

Over time, a model of online journalism publishing emerged that was very different from the version I had tried to sketch on that legal pad in 1995. Salon fit that model, which traded page views for display advertising dollars like every other Web publication, but for a while in those early years, no one knew what worked or even how to define what it meant for a Web publication to “work,” and so we could do whatever we wanted. In the beginning, there wasn’t even a reliable way to gauge how much traffic a particular article generated. Investors – a group including Adobe, Apple and Borders – paid the bills while we experimented.

We published a collection of stories about death (now impossible to find in full, but here’s a remarkable excerpt, by Susie Bright), for example, about the most advertiser-unfriendly subject imaginable. We broke the news and even had to hire security guards to guard our offices after publishing an article about the infidelities of the Republican congressman who led the moral charge against Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I moved to New York to help open the office there, and I remember rushing to work the morning of September 11 to find a counterterrorism expert to question me about what I had just seen from the sidewalk outside my apartment. It was the first time I heard the name Osama bin Laden.

However, I was a culture editor, so most of the reporting was on current affairs and politics, with their drama and controversies (and there were a number of topics) plot of these), was not my immediate concern. Instead, I was excited to publish literary idols like Denis Johnson, Mary Gaitskill, and David Foster Wallace, to find new voices to champion like Colson Whitehead, and to get pitches in my inbox from writers I’d never heard of before but who have filed deeply satisfying stories to bring to the world. Along the way, I was able to edit book reviews with Dwight Garner and work with colleagues including Jake Tapper, Rebecca Traister, Dave Eggers, Steve Kornacki, Michelle Goldberg, Joan Walsh, Sarah Vowell, and many others.

The same technological change that once allowed a group of journalists to finally publish the kind of magazine they always wanted ended up cannibalizing all that creativity and industry.

Even though I left Salon ten years ago, I never stopped encouraging him. Its fortunes declined over the years, and in 2023 it was sold to a performance marketing company, a fate all too common for many publications that once thrived online. I’m told that what ultimately ended the site was the introduction of AI into web search, leading to a sharp drop in traffic from Google; In the Salon’s closing announcement, the anonymous author wrote: “Our publishing model is no longer sustainable. » There is a bitter irony in the fact that the same technological change that once allowed a group of journalists to finally publish the kind of magazine they had always wanted ended up cannibalizing all that creativity and industry, destroying its future and making it much harder for young writers to attempt the same experiment. As a former colleague pointed out to me, “The ’90s Internet dream is well and truly over. »

I was ridiculously lucky to get involved in the beginning, and to this day, the first few years of Salon remain the most fun I’ve ever had. We were so involved in its making that its cultural impact will probably never be fully visible to me. We were grateful to all our readers, but didn’t know what we meant to most of them. Others will have to testify. People sometimes tell me that they avidly read Salon in their youth, feeling like they were connecting to something exciting and cool and a little crazy in the strange new reaches of the Internet. All I can say is: this is exactly what it feels like to work there.