When was salon com founded

Along with Andrew Ross, the Examiner's veteran foreign-national editor, he started scheming in earnest. David began talking to Apple, which had plans to launch a Web network called eWorld.

With that sum in hand, in August David lured Andrew Ross and the extravagantly talented Mignon Khargie, who designed and illustrated features at the Ex, to quit their jobs to work on the prototype for what would become Salon. It was probably just as well that none of the people who left their union jobs were aware of this meticulously planned investment scheme, which appears to have been modeled on a failed lottery in American Samoa.

The brave and clueless stalwarts whom David lured away from the Ex in the fall of were Scott Rosenberg, a first-rate film and theater critic who also knew more about the Web and technology than anybody who knew from Samuel Beckett had a right to; Joyce Millman, the Ex's top-drawer TV critic; and me. Rounding out the list was a razor-sharp freelancer named Laura Miller, whom David and I had worked with at Image. With the exception of Laura, we all had years of daily experience, and we all had one ability that proved indispensable: We could write and edit reallyfast.

This group, along with Salon's first publisher, David Zweig, first met at Talbot's house in Bernal Heights sometime that fall.

One of the things we did, besides gawk in confusion at sites like Feed at least I was confused, since I had never been online before , was kick around various names for the new magazine. I cannot remember any of them except "Limelight," which mercifully ended up in the ashcan of history.

Salon's first office was a humble affair. We rented out a small portion of an open-floor-design architects' office on Main Street in downtown San Francisco.

We sat at two long tables, our baud modems beeping and clicking. It was a homey and intimate atmosphere -- at times a bit too intimate. Occupying the large area closest to us was a middle-aged architect of choleric mien who was manifestly not pleased at the sudden appearance of a bunch of journalists who spent their time talking loudly on the phone and crawling under their tables trying to hook up their computers.

One day, this architect, whose name was Art, suddenly yelled in a piercing voice that echoed across the office, "YOU HO! We were somewhat taken aback by this. None of us were familiar with what sort of behavior is customary in architects' offices, but it seemed a bit beyond the pale to summon a colleague by screaming "You ho!

I believe Art observed this, and it did not contribute to the bonhomie of the office. Neither did his habit of loudly farting as he moved about in his domain.

Lori Leibovich, now our Life editor, was our first intern. We also briefly employed a young tech consultant named Paul Vachier. Vachier just had a cup of coffee with us, as the baseball saying goes for a player who passes through so quickly he never even moves out of his hotel, but David nonetheless insisted on putting him in our first staff photo because he was young, handsome and looked cool. He made up for the rest of us who, although much younger than we are now, utterly failed to conform to even the most generous interpretation of what Hip Web Pioneers should look like.

This was an early indication of Talbot's cheesy cunning -- a quality that more than any other probably ensured our existence.

We started as a biweekly, and we thought we were cranking it out. I remember looking at the stats for the first issue. It was thrilling, coming from print where the only measure of readership was letters to the editor, to be able to know exactly how many people had read your story. It was fascinating to see what subjects drew the most eyeballs. And it was deeply depressing to realize that no matter what you wrote, half of your readers would bail after the first page.

Stats are the great dirty-little-secret revealers, not just for what they tell writers and editors but for what they reveal about readers. To this day, whenever we run some lower-chakras, sexy, gossip-ridden story, one of those penis-enlargement, lifelike doll, Brazilian-bikini-wax, are-big-breasts-making-a-comeback kinda things, readers send in angry letters denouncing our lowbrow, vulgar sensibility and threatening to cancel their subscriptions.

Meanwhile, our servers melt under the demand and the page views soar into the stratosphere. Strangely, no one ever writes in to say how much they liked that big-breasts-are-making-a-comeback story. In fact, not a single one of the 50, people who eagerly read every page of that story, as compared to the 1, people who read the big essay about Iraq, has ever admitted having read it.

But the server, like a gentleman's valet, knows all. We paid an inordinate amount of attention to page views not just because of the novelty but because we believed our financial future depended on them. We dimly believed that if we reached some magic but unknown number, gold coins would cascade down from the great slot machine of the Internet.

In those antediluvian days, getting more than page views was grounds for vaunting pride. For good reason: I have no idea how anyone even found our site, with its meaningless salon address. But we had enough investment to keep going for a while, and like cartoon characters happily walking above a void, none of us looked down. Well, the people on the business side probably did, which might explain the gaunt, Edvard Munch-like expressions I would sometimes see flitting across their faces.

Mercifully, I had nothing to do with that side of Salon. We had very few ads. The biggest, which Zweig brought in, was a sponsorship by Border's Books. We published a mix of book and movie reviews, short news items in a section called "Newsreel," interviews and features, mostly on cultural subjects. Our statement of purpose in Issue No. In it, Talbot proclaims that Salon stands for a "militant centrism" -- the term borrowed from an expression the writer Jim Sleeper used in our roundtable about race relations.

That positioning made sense in an era when black-white acrimony seemed like the biggest issue facing the country, but it hasn't aged well. Today, the idea that Salon would describe itself as "militantly centrist" is laughable -- when you think of Salon, you don't think of a fired-up Joe Lieberman. And our utopian rhetoric about Salon becoming an interactive, Whitmanesque choir of varied American voices was about to have a rude encounter with reality.

The Whitmanesque choir sometimes sang in harmony with us, but really it wanted to warble its own tunes -- some good, some bad, some inspired by Yoko Ono's Janovian Screaming period. We quickly discovered that trying to bring Table Talk readers into Salon in any kind of organized fashion was like trying to herd cats. As we slogged along that first year, the media began to pay a little attention to the oddball little "e-zine" staffed by refugees from the newspaper world.

There was a novelty factor at work that helped us. Ultimately, it saved us. If we were a print magazine of the same quality, we would have been dead, buried and forgotten long ago. I seem to recall being probed by an inordinate number of European reporters, most of whom were obviously working some kind of "electronic media revolutionaries" angle.

We were frequently asked if there were any inherent differences between online and print journalism. We didn't, and still don't, all give the same answer to that question.

Talbot thought that online journalism was a different breed: faster, more irreverent, less controlled by the increasingly zombified gatekeepers of traditional media. He was also always pushing for our stories to be punchier and shorter, arguing that people didn't want to read New Yorker-length stories on their computer.

I agreed with him that we were doing something different than most print news media, but I wasn't convinced that was because of anything unique about online journalism. Editing and writing is pretty much the same whether you're working with cuneiform tablets or a DSL line.

As for length, I wasn't convinced readers couldn't be trained to read long stories online. There was some self-interest involved here; I realized that if we stopped running long pieces, I'd be out of a job. The reviews began to come in. Some were decent, some were mixed. One memorable piece chided our lumbering, print-journalism ways by comparing us to a "stately flying boat. Stung by this weird metaphor, after five months, in April , we decided to trade in the mahogany-appointed Pan Am Clipper for a slightly zippier model.

We went weekly. I confess I can no longer remember what that change felt like: We've all been boiled in the daily pot for so long that any slower pace is simply inconceivable. Toward the end of we parted ways with David Zweig and hired a new publisher, a big, amiable former University of California at Berkeley quarterback named Michael O'Donnell.

Michael stayed with Salon for seven years, through the mad euphoria of the dot-com bubble, the great bust of , the layoffs, the jolly Christmas party when we had just announced to the staff that we might be closed down in two months, and eventually into somewhat less shark-infested waters. We ask and seek to answer in good faith — through original reporting, news analysis, investigations, left-leaning and politically independent commentary, insightful cultural criticism, personal essays and in-depth interviews — big questions, such as:.

What are the most influential movements across the political spectrum, and where are they going next? Who are the most compelling cultural figures, what are the works that are defining this moment, and why? How did we get to this moment in entertainment, culture, food, science and public health? Key Data Points Twitter Followers 5. Similarweb Unique Visitors Majestic Referring Domains Salon Media Group Former Investors Salon Media Group Acquisitions 1.

Salon Media Group Exits 1. Contact Us info pitchbook. Terms of Use Privacy Policy. Vox Media. Venture Capital-Backed. Private Equity-Backed. Formerly PE-Backed. West Palm Beach, FL. Humilis Holdings. Adobe Ventures. Bruce Katz. On Nov. Henry Hyde R-Illinois , who was leading the effort to impeach Bill Clinton, had carried out a years-long extramarital affair of his own.

Salon has been a publicly traded for-profit company since June As a result, the company had to undergo its first-ever round of layoffs only a year after it went public. Since , Salon has on multiple occasions fired a large number of employees.