Post by mdorman

Salon.com shuts down with no notice.

I mean, I can't say that I'm absurdly surprised—obviously the media landscape has been hellish for a long time, and I don't know that Salon really had anything that distinguished it from any other allegedly-liberal news website. Still, they've been around long enough—been enough of a fixture—that it's somewhat surprising to see them gone.

A weird coincidence arose as I was thinking about writing this: for some reason I thought that the late, great, Suck.com had grown out of or been affiliated with Salon. That of course led me to look at the Wikipedia page for Suck.com. I realized that I had misremembered Ana Marie Cox as writing the "Polly Esther" bits. In fact, though, those were written by Heather Havrilesky, who is apparently originally from around the Durham area.

Although she no longer publishes under that Nom de Plume, her Substack newsletter is still called "Ask Polly"—a title she's dragged through a few different publishers. I looked it up for fun, and her latest post is a mordantly amusing rant about AI.

Anyway, back to Salon.com: in reading the Wikipedia article on it, I discovered that basically everything I thought I knew about it was wrong. I didn't know that it grew out of a newspaper strike in San Francisco. Given how old it is, there are some adorable moments in the history of the site, like "Subsequently, for the month of October 1999, Nielsen/NetRatings reported that Salon had over two million users." Eventually, though, I realized I was confusing it for Slate.com, a similar site launched less than a year later. Oops.