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Salon: Last One Standing

Farhad Manjoo Email 06.15.01

Just last week, David Talbot, the founder and chairman of Salon, was describing the world of online media in terms so bleak you would have thought the whole thing couldn't possibly get any worse.

"In the early days we thought that there'd be literally hundreds of sites like Salon," he said, reflecting on how the dot-com blight dried up his dreams of an online media that could rival -- or even bring down -- the traditional news establishment.

"We expected many publications that were capitalized sufficiently to support a professional newsroom, even a small one, something that prints compelling daily content. Now, I think we're the only independent one around -- and I guess Feed is still going along."

And then, over the weekend, things got worse. Feed Magazine, one of the Web's earliest general-interest daily publications, stopped "going along," as Automatic Media, its Manhattan-based corporate parent, announced that it was shutting down due to -- what else? -- financial difficulties.

Salon is now the last one standing: the only original online mag that's still alive and isn't owned by a multinational corporation. And Talbot thinks that despite the company's financial problems, Salon's uniqueness engenders a certain must-keep-it-alive ardor among its readers, who will make sure the site doesn't become the next dot-com casualty.

A few months ago, when Talbot announced that Salon would introduce a $30-a-year subscription service featuring ad-free content, Internet and media analysts scratched their heads in wonderment.

Would it work? Publications from Wired News to CNET to The New York Times predicted that Salon's move would prompt others to charge for content -- and though media-watchers said that paying was inevitable, nobody could say whether they thought it would work.

Now, several weeks into the service, Salon's site features some tactful but still somewhat desperate-sounding pleas for money, lots of free content, plus a regular column -- "Bushed!", which chronicles the president's doings and undoings -- that's only offered to subscribers.

Talbot and other Salon execs would not divulge how many people have signed up for the service so far, but they did say that they are "ahead of projections" to have 50,000 subscribers in the first year.

Talbot deemed the results "encouraging," and Patrick Hurley, Salon's vice president for business operations, said that the cost of implementing the subscription service -- a billing system and such -- "was recouped by the fourth hour of the service."

Hurley said that so far, visitors to the site have reacted pretty well to the changes. There have been few accusations, he said, that Salon is profiteering or somehow being too capitalistic for implementing this service.

"Most of the responses we have gotten so far have been fairly pragmatic and fairly positive," Hurley said. "And that's partly because we have tried from an editorial standpoint to get the message across about why we need this."

People have realized the gravity of the situation, in other words, so they've quit whining.

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