Laura Miller says Salon.com is closing after more than three decades
In a column published on slate.com, Laura Miller writes that Salon.com has announced its closure after more than three decades of digital publishing, marking the end of an era for early web journalism.
Launching a Digital Magazine in San Francisco
Thirty-one years ago, Laura Miller sat in a San Francisco architectural firm that rented out office space to a startup publishing a magazine on the World Wide Web. In 1995, few precedents existed for online journalism. Feed and Word operated on the web, but none employed a full-time staff of professional journalists. The new co-workers were newspaper veterans led by editor-in-chief David Talbot. They had recently worked for an extinct evening newspaper in San Francisco. Miller sketched grids on a legal pad to figure out how this new publication would work.
The staff did not consider themselves technological visionaries. Miller had been online since before the web existed and had an email address, a tool only about half the people she knew possessed. Scott Rosenberg was among the most internet-savvy colleagues. Communicating with David Talbot required walking across the office to remind him to check his email, which he might otherwise ignore for days. Thinking of themselves as a print magazine, the staff uploaded full issues of roughly a dozen stories over an office modem on Friday nights. This upload process took hours, often keeping them in the office until 11 p.m. to proof the pages.
Salon Adapts to Changing Web Publishing Models
An early critic compared Salon to a old-fashioned airship, describing it as richly appointed and comfortable but slower than an actual plane. Colleague Gary Kamiya observed that the description was not entirely insulting. To those who prioritized great writing, the publication offered a distinct space. Over time, an online publishing model emerged that differed from Miller’s original legal-pad sketches. Salon eventually adapted to a model that traded page views for display-ad dollars, mirroring other web publications. During the first few years, however, nobody knew what worked or how to define success, allowing the staff to experiment freely. Reliable traffic metrics did not yet exist.
Investors including Adobe, Apple, and Borders funded the operations during these early experiments. The site published a collection of stories about death, including a piece by Susie Bright, on topics that advertisers typically avoided. The publication broke news and hired security to guard its offices after publishing a story about the infidelities of a Republican congressman leading the moral charge against Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. When the September 11 attacks occurred in 2001, Miller rushed to the New York office to find a counterterrorism expert to interview after witnessing events from her apartment sidewalk. That morning marked the first time she heard the name Osama bin Laden.
Culture Editor Champions Literary Figures and New Voices
As a culture editor, Miller focused less on daily news and politics and more on literature and the arts. She published works by literary figures including Denis Johnson, Mary Gaitskill, and David Foster Wallace. The platform championed new voices such as Colson Whitehead and reviewed unsolicited pitches from unknown writers. She edited book reviews with Dwight Garner and worked alongside colleagues such as Jake Tapper, Rebecca Traister, Dave Eggers, Steve Kornacki, Michelle Goldberg, Joan Walsh, and Sarah Vowell.
The fortunes of the publication waned over the years. In 2023, the site was sold to a performance-marketing company, a fate shared by many once-flourishing online publications. Miller writes that what finally finished off the site was the introduction of artificial intelligence into web search, which caused a steep decline in traffic coming from Google. Salon’s closing announcement stated that the publishing model was no longer sustainable.
The Bitter Irony of Technological Obsolescence
A bitter irony marks the end of the enterprise. The same technological change that originally enabled a group of journalists to publish the magazine they always wanted ultimately cannibalized that creativity and industry. A former colleague remarked to Miller that the dream of the nineties internet is kaput. Miller notes that the first few years at the publication remain the most fun she ever had, leaving a cultural impact whose full shape is difficult to measure. Readers often share memories of reading the site in their youth, feeling connected to something exhilarating and unconventional in the early days of the web.