A Facebook page dedicated to celebrating the 20th anniversary of digital media pioneer Salon is functioning as a crowdsourced eulogy.
Dozens of Salon alumni have, over the past several months, posted their favorite stories from and memories of the once-beloved liberal news site described as a “left-coast, interactive version of The New Yorker,” a progressive powerhouse that over the years has covered politics with a refreshing aggressiveness, in a context that left plenty of room for provocative personal essays and award-winning literary criticism.
“We were inmates who took over the journalistic asylum,” David Talbot, who founded the site in 1995, wrote on the Facebook page. “And we let it rip — we helped create online journalism, making it up as we went along. And we let nobody — investors, advertisers, the jealous media establishment, mad bombers, etc — get in our way.”
They are mourning a publication they barely recognize today.
“Sadly, Salon doesn’t really exist anymore,” wrote Laura Miller, one of Salon’s founding editors who left the site for Slate last fall. “The name is still being used, but the real Salon is gone.”
Salon, which Talbot originally conceived of as a “smart tabloid,” began as a liberal online magazine and was quickly seen as an embodiment of the media’s future. For a while, particularly ahead of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, it even looked as though it might be a success story. It lured famous writers and tech-company investors and went public in 1999. At the time, Salon was valued at $107 million.
“I think it’s very similar to what a Vox or a Buzzfeed seems today,” said Kerry Lauerman, who joined Salon in 2000 and would serve as the site’s editor in chief from 2010 to 2013. “There was, at first, a lot of money and excitement about Salon. There was no one else, really, in that space. ... It was kind of a brave new world, and Salon was at the forefront.”
Over the last several months, POLITICO has interviewed more than two dozen current and former Salon employees and reviewed years of Salon’s SEC filings. On Monday, after POLITICO had made several unsuccessful attempts to interview Salon CEO Cindy Jeffers, the company dropped a bombshell: Jeffers was leaving the company effective immediately in what was described as an “abrupt departure.”
While the details of Salon’s enormous management and business challenges dominate the internal discussion at the magazine, in liberal intellectual and media circles it is widely believed that the site has lost its way.
“I remember during the Bush years reading them relatively religiously,” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, told POLITICO. “Especially over the last year, they seem to have completely jumped the shark in so many ways. They’ve become — and I think this is sad — they’ve definitely become like a joke, which is terrible for people who care about these progressive institutions.”
So, what happened?
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After the dot-com crash, the company’s stock price plummeted, and it has struggled financially ever since. But despite business challenges, it remained influential for years, with a stable of respected names — Miller, Heather Havrilesky, Jake Tapper, Glenn Greenwald and Joan Walsh among them — and a knack for picking talented young writers who would go on to become big names, like Rebecca Traister, Alex Pareene, Irin Carmon and Steve Kornacki.
But that has changed, according to many former readers and Salon employees who spoke to POLITICO.
On social media, some have ridiculed the site for its questionable hot takes on the 2016 election and torqued-up lifestyle pieces that wouldn’t pass muster at any serious publication, like “Farewell, once-favorite organ: I am officially breaking up with my penis.”
Salon’s treatment of mainstream Democrats is also a question. The left-leaning site has historically been a reliable supporter of Democrats, and built its reputation defending Bill and Hillary Clinton during the Clinton impeachment hearings in 1998.
The site’s early bias in favor of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign showed the site’s willingness to strike out against neoliberalism in favor of progressive causes. But in the end Salon always circled the wagons.
In recent months Salon has refused to do that. It has developed a reputation for being not just sympathetic to Bernie Sanders, but overtly hostile to Hillary Clinton, unable to distinguish her from Donald Trump in the same way Ralph Nader saw no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000. Salon contributor H.A. Goodman has written several columns for the publication with titles like “I wouldn’t vote for Dick Cheney, so I won’t vote for Hillary Clinton: An unrepentant only-Sanders voter fires back at critics” and “Please, FBI — you’re our last hope: The Democratic Party’s future rests upon your probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails.” (The columns spurred a debate in Salon’s newsroom after a staffer sent an email to colleagues saying Goodman’s articles reflected badly on the company.)
Actually, Salon isn’t uniformly pro-Sanders. Editor in chief David Daley told POLITICO that he aims to cover all of the intellectual arguments surrounding the Democratic Party, and that Goodman’s viewpoint is one of “a wide range of voices assessing the Clinton and Sanders campaigns” on Salon. Late last year, the site faced allegations of bias against Sanders when Daley hired feminist writer Amanda Marcotte, who got to work writing negative stories about “Bernie Bros.”
The more stinging critique is about the quality of what Salon publishes – and Goodman’s pieces in particular have reignited lamentations about the site’s downward spiral. Walsh and Miller have been outspoken on Twitter about some of the stories from the site, as have many others. Two guys even created a vicious parody account, @salondotcom, to mock Salon’s increasingly strident brand of leftism, with fake tweets like “Ten signs your cat might be racist” and “Should GMOs come with trigger warnings?”
“It's really sad,” Talking Points Memo publisher Josh Marshall tweeted last month. “These Salon headlines are like the bastard child of World Net Daily and the LaRouche Times … In retrospect it's scary to think that Salon was maybe always just one @joanwalsh or @KerryLauerman away from derp oblivion.”
Salon does have its defenders, and Greenwald, one of the most famous writers to come out of Salon and a staunch critic of Clinton, ascribes much of the criticism to politics.
“I think the increasingly strident critiques of Salon have much more to do with its willingness to publish a lot of content outside of the Democratic Party mainstream — especially articles very critical of Hillary Clinton — than it does any supposed concern over the decline of its quality,” he said.
But former staffers almost uniformly disagree, and they attribute Salon’s current editorial quality to Jeffers’ goal of getting big traffic numbers and paying little attention to the site’s editorial side.
"We adopted a Huffington Post model, but we didn't have the resources to scale in a way that would've allowed for that kind of a model to actually work. We had 20 people, not 300,” one former staffer said. “I don't think Cindy ever realized that, and instead of modernizing within reason, while protecting the integrity of the brand — which was Salon's most valuable asset, by far — she decided to go full tilt for traffic, and it destroyed the brand."
***
In 1994, Talbot, then the Arts and Ideas editor at the San Francisco Examiner, dreamed up what would later become Salon. He had chewed over the possibility of launching a magazine for years, but the cost of starting a print publication in the mid-90s was prohibitive, Salon’s founding executive editor Gary Kamiya recalled in a post commemorating Salon’s 10th anniversary. Instead, Talbot turned to the Internet — and specifically to former Apple executive Richard Gingras, who is now working at Google — to help fund the project.
Gingras pulled together an initial $60,000 in seed funding for Salon with money from Apple’s marketing budget. Another benefactor, Adobe Ventures, swooped in with a $2 million investment that allowed Salon to get off the ground. After brainstorming ideas, Talbot’s wife, Camille Peri, came up with the name for the site. With no example of what an online magazine should look or feel like, and without a model of how an online magazine should operate, Talbot and a team made up of mostly ex-Examiner staffers launched Salon.com in the fall of 1995.
The site’s ambitious writing and impressive slate of contributing writers prompted early accolades.
“Salon’s heart still beats to the rhythm of the old world: longish feature stories, Q&A’s with literary lions like Salman Rushdie, John Updike and David Foster Wallace,” Rolling Stone contributing editor Jeff Goodell wrote in the spring of 1996 about the web magazine. “There’s some excellent writing here, particularly Joyce Millman, whose pop-culture riffs are a hoot. A recent piece by novelist Denis Johnson about bikers for Jesus could have just as easily run in Harper’s.”
Three years after it launched, Salon was catapulted into the national spotlight with the publication of “This Hypocrite Broke Up My Family,” a story alleging that former Republican Rep. Henry Hyde, who was leading the effort to impeach Bill Clinton, had carried out a years-long extramarital affair of his own.
The story burst open a nationwide scandal that prompted outrage from both Republicans and Democrats (albeit for different reasons). Hyde admitted the affair, chalking it up to “youthful indiscretions,” becoming neither the first, nor the last, politician in the 1990s to admit to infidelities. Salon hired security at its San Francisco offices when it received bomb threats after the story appeared — just one way that staffers knew the magazine’s first big scoop had made a splash.
“[The Henry Hyde story] changed a lot for us,” said Walsh, who joined Salon just as the Hyde story was published. “We got a lot of attention. Some of it was negative — a lot of it negative, honestly. But it really put us on the map as people who were fearless and were going to throw some elbows along the way.”
The Hyde revelation also served as a success story for Salon’s publishing model. The concept of an online magazine had been somewhat of a novelty in 1995, but the impact of the Hyde story was so deafening it changed how people thought about the possibilities of publishing on the web.
“It taught us that … the web rewarded quickness, the web rewarded saying something that other people were not saying,” Walsh said. “The web also rewarded speed.”
After a beat, she added: “At that time, the web rewarded reporting as well. I used to make the case that it's still like that, but I'm not sure I feel that way anymore.”
The type of journalism Salon did in its early years was only made possible by cash from its benefactors — John Warnock, a co-founder and chairman of Adobe, and Bill Hambrecht, a wealthy Silicon Valley venture capitalist. For more than two decades, the two investors have watered Salon with millions of dollars.
Warnock became involved before Salon even got off the ground via a $2 million investment from Adobe Ventures. Hambrecht joined later, and in Salon’s first two years, Warnock and Hambrecht invested a reported $5.5 million in the company. The funds allowed Talbot to send political reporters on the campaign trail and hire international stringers to do the reporting that shaped Salon’s early years..
“It was a couple-year period that Salon would never really have again where you could experiment with things. We had people on the campaign trail, which is insanely expensive,” Lauerman said. “We were doing everything that the major players were doing.”
But Hambrecht’s investment in Salon was also a vehicle for him to test out a project of his own: an unconventional tactic of taking a company public called a Dutch Auction. Hambrecht, who launched an investment group in 1998 dedicated to the strategy, would famously help persuade Google to use a Dutch Auction when it went public in 2004.
In June of 1999, Hambrecht helped take Salon public, which netted the company $25 million. At the end of its first day, Salon stock was trading at around $10 a share.
The influx of cash was critical for Salon to continue its operations at the time, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. Salon used its IPO money to pay its debts and go on a hiring spree, but after the dot-com crash its stock plummeted, and the company had to undergo its first-ever round of layoffs only a year after it went public.
In 2002, the company was delisted from NASDAQ after its stock failed to hit more than $1 per share, and Salon had to issue a warning that it “may not be able to continue as a growing concern” because of its history of losses and slumping revenue. The stock is currently listed at 10 cents per share.
Salon tried mightily to achieve profitability, and out of necessity became one of the first publishers to test out various ways to monetize its site. Salon Premium, Salon’s first subscription product, launched in April 2001 as “a last-ditch effort to save the business,” according to a former staffer. The site began gating off a few stories every day, but by the end of the year, all of Salon’s news stories became inaccessible to non-subscribers. Later, the site would try out a middle-ground approach — if non-subscribers sat through a 30-second video advertisement, they would receive a daily pass to access the site for free.
By the end of 2004, Salon’s subscription program peaked at 89,100 subscribers, each paying around $30 annually. And while Salon Premium saved the business at the time, some former Salon staff members believe erecting the paywall stunted the site’s growth.
“We were doing this right as the whole blog moment was exploding,” Lauerman said. “There was this great democratization of the web, and we were suddenly behind this gate. It took a long time to recover from that.”
During the paywall years, readership and traffic flattened, even as other sites benefited from the mainstreaming of the Internet and the popularity of blogging, said one former staffer.
“The quality of our content was excellent, better than other places, but the business model was really keeping people away,” another former staffer said.
Lauerman, who joined the company in 2000, said that in the aftermath of the dot-com crash, Salon was “constantly pivoting in order to make sense of this new reality and come up with a business model that would work.”
With the pivoting came a bumpier road in journalistic ambition and quality, as the company continually tried and failed to match expenses with new business ideas.
In February of 2005, Talbot, who was serving as both CEO and editor in chief, stepped down. The board tapped Elizabeth Hambrecht — then Salon’s president and CFO, a member of the board and the daughter of investor Bill Hambrecht — to replace Talbot as CEO. Walsh, then Salon’s managing editor, was promoted to editor in chief.
Walsh served in that position for the next five years, and under her direction the company tried out a number of alternative revenue streams, like Open Salon, a “curated blog network” that won a National Magazine Award in 2009. Walsh also began putting the company’s content in front of the paywall, undermining Salon Premium, which by that time was in desperate need of new security features and other repairs.
During Walsh’s tenure, Salon’s C-suite was a revolving door: Elizabeth Hambrecht was CEO from February 2005 through September 2007, Chris Neimeth was CEO from September 2007 through September 2008, Elizabeth Hambrecht was CEO again from September 2008 through May 2009 and Richard Gingras, the tech and media maven who set up Salon’s first funding round, was CEO from May 2009 until July 2011.
Gingras said he encouraged Hambrecht and Warnock to take the company private. It probably would have cost less than $1 million for Hambrecht and Warnock to buy out the other investors and take the company private, but they wanted Salon to remain a public company.
In the middle of Gingras’ tenure as CEO, Walsh stepped down as editor in chief and become editor at large. She was replaced by Lauerman, the site’s executive editor. In a subtle shift, Lauerman began reporting to Gingras, the CEO. Previously, the CEO and editor in chief had been treated as equals.
Talbot returned as CEO in September 2011 to replace Gingras, who left Salon to join Google. Under Talbot’s watch, Salon shuttered its online discussion forum Table Talk, and the company attempted an unsuccessful merger with Michael Wolff’s news aggregation site, newser.com.
Talbot also announced that he wanted to resurrect Salon’s paid subscription offering. In a statement encouraging people to sign up, he warned that a revenue strategy based on aggregation – a shot at the surging Huffington Post – could never support independent journalism.
“Nowadays the Web is dominated by the robotic news recycling of big aggregation sites. But these news recyclers will never create the courageous and original journalism that the country desperately needs,” he said. “By joining Salon Core, supporters can help ensure that Salon remains independent, free of the corporate forces that dominate the rest of the media.”
Talbot’s return was short-lived. After only nine months, he left the company for the second and final time in May 2012. People close to the company said he was pushed out by the board because of a series of expensive and ultimately unsuccessful experiments, which also included an attempt to launch an original video unit called Salon Studios. Talbot declined to comment for this article.
After Talbot left, the board replaced him with Jeffers, a young veteran of The Huffington Post who had joined the company as chief technology officer just a few weeks before. Jeffers arrived when the company was in a dire financial situation, and honed in on a revenue model based almost entirely on display advertising, ending the company’s paid subscription service in the process.
“We were on the brink of disaster,” someone close to the company said. “There was a failed video studio. There was a failed paid model. So what does that leave you with? It leaves you advertising.”
The relentless focus on pageviews wasn’t entirely new. While Gingras served as CEO, traffic was “among everyone’s interest and concern,” a former staffer said, and during his tenure the company began pushing for staffers to aggregate on top of their regular reporting efforts, mostly in the site’s news section.
After Salon shut down its paid subscription service in 2012, the company saw little financial incentive to invest in the kind of in-depth reporting that people would pay for. Now, Salon’s revenue was tied almost entirely to the number of people who visited the site.
Jeffers’ new strategy also valued video content, since video ads command higher rates than banner ads. At first, Salon just focused on publishing video clips taken from other sources, like popular TV shows, but starting in 2015, the company hired a handful of video producers to begin an original video production unit.
But above all, the new strategy rewarded aggregation and provocation – in other words, hot takes. Both are easy to produce at scale, since they do not require writers to spend time reporting out a story.
“With [Gingras] and [Talbot], the emphasis was maintaining a valuable brand,” said another person close to the company. “When Cindy came on, she became focused much more on coming up with goals for traffic, increasing the number of posts and charting it month-to-month so every month we would have very specific traffic goals we were trying to meet.”
Salon’s most recent annual report spells out the strategy in more detail.
“In May 2012, we adopted a strategy that has led to the most significant period of user growth in our history. In June 2015, we reached our all-time high of 19.6 million unique users as measured by Google Analytics. Our strategy focuses on growing our user base, which in turn increases our attractiveness to advertisers, leading to growth in revenue.”
Lauerman, then the editor in chief, was assigned to implement the site’s new strategy. He hired three staffers charged with aggregating five to six stories throughout the day for the site’s different verticals. Lauerman told POLITICO that when he implemented the plan, he hoped it would free up other staffers to spend more time on longer, more thoughtful pieces.
Not everyone was happy with Lauerman’s leadership under the new strategy. Some staffers recall that the financial pressures led to tense meetings where traffic became the main concern.
“Kerry could be really hard to work for, and there were some people who did not work well under Kerry,” one staffer recalled. “But he also wanted to run these big stories. He wanted to rise above the grind and do something significant.”
Lauerman left the company in 2013, and Daley, the executive editor who had joined the company as culture editor about two years earlier, was named editor in chief.
A person familiar with the company said that the business pressures at the time remained intense, and Daley seemed committed to keeping the ship afloat. If Salon needed to get to a certain level of traffic to keep the lights on, Daley would answer: How do we do it?
In his nearly three years as editor in chief, Daley has carried out Jeffers’ strategy, helping lead the site to an era of unprecedented traffic growth. The company has ratcheted up its social media presence and began publishing more frequently — especially on the weekends, doubling weekend traffic. In June 2015, the site peaked at 19.6 million unique visitors. That’s nearly triple the seven million unique visitors that the site received at the end of 2011. (Meanwhile, The Huffington Post had about 214 million monthly unique visitors as of June 2015.)
“We’ve grown Salon to the readership levels it needs with high-quality, sophisticated work by a brilliant team of writers and editors,” Daley told POLITICO.
Eleven current and former staffers also said Daley assigned staffers to write repeatedly about certain subjects that he believed would drive high traffic. If traffic was too low, according to six former staffers, Daley would go into the CMS and write posts himself, often posting them under the byline “Salon Staff.” To improve the amount of traffic on Saturdays and Sundays, certain staffers were asked to work over the weekend and post short video clips from television programs like “The Daily Show.”
It became harder to find “high-quality” work amid all the clutter. Twelve current and former employees said they were discouraged from doing original journalism out of a concern that time spent reporting could be better spent writing commentary and aggregate stories. Even the site’s marquee names, like Walsh and Miller, were expected to produce quick hits and commentary on trending topics, staffers said.
The strategy alienated some of Salon’s longtime journalists.
“The low point arrived when my editor G-chatted me with the observation that our traffic figures were lagging that day and ordered me to ‘publish something within the hour,’” Andrew Leonard, who left Salon in 2014, recalled in a post. “Which, translated into my new reality, meant ‘Go troll Twitter for something to get mad about — Uber, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Tea Party Republicans — and then produce a rant about it.’ … I performed my duty, but not without thinking, ‘Is this what 25 years as a dedicated reporter have led to?’ That’s when it dawned on me: I was no longer inventing the future. I was a victim of it. So I quit my job to keep my sanity.”
Last month, there were more departures when the company implemented a round of layoffs. Ruth Henrich, who had been with Salon since the 1990s, was one of six staffers let go. And after the layoffs, two more Salon staffers departed, including deputy editor Peter Finocchiaro. (Daley said the amount of turnover year-over-year is standard for the company over the past several years.)
On one level, the strategy has worked. Salon’s decision to double down on increased pageviews helped gradually increase the company’s revenue, and in the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2015 (the most recent quarter for which data is publicly available), Salon had $1.95 million in revenue and $2.19 million in expenses, for a net loss of about $250,000. That’s better than the year before — in the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2014, Salon had $1.47 million in revenue and $2.27 million in expenses, for a net loss of about $800,000 — but it’s still a net loss.
Many websites would be thrilled to be closing in on self-sustainability. But here’s one area where Salon’s long history is a disadvantage: At the end of 2015, Salon had an accumulated deficit of $124 million.
This week, Salon’s board of directors replaced Jeffers with Jordan Hoffner, a media veteran and venture capitalist who has worked at places like NBCUniversal, Google and YouTube, and founded investment firm TCP Advisors. Hoffner, who is based in San Francisco, flew to New York on Monday to meet with Salon executives and staffers on the East Coast. According to people who spoke to Hoffner during his visit, the new chief executive talked about building out a media group and said he had a goal of raising Salon’s stock price.
It’s uncertain what exactly Salon’s board and Hoffner are planning to do — Bill Hambrecht and John Warnock could not be reached for comment, a call to Warnock’s son was not returned, and Elizabeth Hambrecht and Hoffner declined to be interviewed through a company spokesperson.
But Hoffner’s history, and what he told staff, indicates that Salon’s future might hold some big moves — attracting new investors, launching new products, acquiring smaller companies — that will drive up its stock price and eventually make it into a real acquisition target.
Daley told POLITICO the day after Hoffner’s hire that the company is not for sale, but some people close to the company privately speculate that the intention could change as Hoffner takes over the C-suite.
It seems there is a sense of urgency about Salon’s future. Hambrecht is in his early 80s, and Warnock is 75. Because Salon has run deficits for almost every quarter since it was founded, the company has relied on regular interest-free cash advances from Warnock, chairman of Salon’s board, and Hambrecht, a board member. From Salon’s founding until the end of 2015, the most recent data available, Warnock and Hambrecht have given the company nearly $20 million in cash advances, and Warnock also personally guaranteed a $1 million line of credit.
“You have two founders who are aging who were writing six-figures checks every year to cover operating costs,” one person close to the company said.
If Salon’s continued existence remains dependent on them, the company could be in a precarious position. People close to the company are not sure whether Warnock’s heirs will be as willing to continue covering the Salon’s expenses as he has been over the years. For years, staffers and Salon readers assumed that Warnock, a staunch First Amendment supporter, backed the site financially because of his commitment to journalism and to Salon’s mission.
People have predicted Salon’s collapse almost since it launched. “Can Salon, or any other Internet content site, survive by itself?,” Scott Herhold wrote for the Mercury News in 1997. “Call it a hunch, but I don't think the online magazine Salon will survive year one of the Clinton Downturn,” Alex Beam of the Globe Staff predicted in 2001. In 2005, on Salon’s 10th anniversary, Talbot described the mass of media predictions about Salon’s impending demise as a “gleeful death watch.” Lauerman remembers going-out-of-business stories predicting Salon’s closure “going back to 2001.”
So in some ways, Salon has beaten the odds simply by surviving this long. But to others, the true Salon was lost once it stopped publishing the types of stories that once made it so well-regarded.
“I love that Salon still sails on, years after I left. I will always think of it as my baby (all grown up and away from home),” Talbot said on Reddit late last year. “Of course I always think of ways it can be improved -- and yes, I'd like to see more investigative reporting to balance its commentary. That's how Salon's name was made. It's expensive and hard to do. But hopefully that tradition will be revived at some point.”
Miller, and many other former Salon staffers, just want to see the company preserve its history. Some of the high-impact reports, essays and reviews from the site’s glory years are lost behind a tangled mess of broken links and deteriorating web pages. Older stories can be nearly impossible to find.
“There is a need to preserve this, if you think there is something there even worth preserving, and worth thinking about,” Miller said. “In 30 years, who knows where Salon will be then? Then it will seem important to people.”