Salon

About Salon

Salon is a progressive online news and opinion magazine based in the United States, publishing daily coverage of American politics, current affairs, culture, and entertainment through its website at salon.com. Launched in April 1995, it is one of the oldest continuously operating publications born on the web, and it helped define what digital journalism could look like before most newspapers had websites of their own. Over three decades it has been an award-winning pioneer, a publicly traded dot-com cautionary tale, a near-bankruptcy rescue story, and — since 2023 — part of the media portfolio of the Malta-based company Find.co. Through every ownership change, Salon has kept its identity as an unapologetically left-leaning outlet known for original reporting, political analysis, and a willingness to publish provocative opinion that larger mainstream newsrooms often avoid.

Founding and the 1995 launch

Salon was founded by journalist David Talbot and launched on April 18, 1995. Talbot had been a senior editor at Mother Jones and the features editor of the Sunday magazine of the San Francisco Examiner, known as Image. After a 1994 newspaper strike damaged the economics of the Examiner, Talbot persuaded several colleagues — including Gary Kamiya and Joan Walsh — to leave the paper and start a magazine built for the internet. At the time the web was still in its infancy, and Talbot is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of online journalism. The name was chosen to evoke the literary and political salons of earlier eras: a virtual drawing room where people with sharp, clashing views could argue. Talbot said he deliberately wanted to mix things up, bringing in conservative and libertarian voices alongside liberal ones, because a room full of people nodding in agreement would be dull.

David Talbot and the early editorial team

Talbot, born in 1951 in Los Angeles to character actor Lyle Talbot, served as Salon's editor-in-chief and publisher from 1995 to 2005 and also became chairman and chief executive of the publicly traded Salon Media Group. His deputies formed a newsroom that functioned as an incubator for a generation of digital journalists. Among the writers and editors whose careers passed through Salon in its early years were Joan Walsh, who would later become one of the most prominent liberal commentators on cable news; Glenn Greenwald, who went on to co-found The Intercept and win a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Edward Snowden disclosures; and Jake Tapper, who became a leading anchor and correspondent at CNN. The presence of such names on Salon's early masthead is frequently cited as evidence of the site's outsize influence relative to its modest size and budgets.

A must-read of the early web

In its first decade Salon built a large and loyal readership by breaking national stories and publishing writing with a distinctive voice. Entertainment Weekly described the site as one of the net's "few genuine must-reads," a verdict that captured how the publication punched above its weight in an era when most legacy news organizations treated the internet as an afterthought. Salon's coverage mixed hard politics with arts, sexuality, and popular culture — the "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" spirit that Talbot himself later said defined the site at its best. The magazine's willingness to be both crusading and playful gave it an identity distinct from the drier wire-service style of other early web portals.

The dot-com boom: IPO and expansion

Like many web ventures of its era, Salon rode the dot-com boom into the public markets. The company went public in 1999 with its stock priced at $10.50 a share, giving the business a market capitalization of roughly $105 million. Flush with investor money, Salon expanded its ambitions: it acquired the Salon.com domain name from a network of hairdressing businesses, relaunched the site with a busier portal-style look, and bought the venerable subscription-based online community The Well from the Marin County venture firm Rosewood Stone Group, betting that a paid community business could provide new revenue. For a time the strategy looked plausible. But as with many internet companies of the period, the revenues never caught up with the costs, and the stock's long slide began. By 2017 the shares that had debuted at $10.50 were trading for around 12 cents, and the company's market capitalization had fallen below $9 million.

Salon Premium and the search for a business model

Salon experimented with nearly every digital revenue model the industry invented. It launched Salon Premium, a subscription offering that at one point reserved roughly 20 percent of new content for paying members and promised ad-free viewing; after subscriptions fell from about 100,000 to about 10,000, the program was rebranded in 2011 as Salon Core with a different mix of benefits. The site later adopted a hybrid model in which readers could earn a "day pass" by watching a 15-second full-screen advertisement, or subscribe to avoid ads entirely. In 2018 Salon launched a beta program that let readers opt out of advertising in exchange for allowing the site to mine cryptocurrency in their browsers — one of the more unusual monetization experiments in digital media. Through all of it, the core free product — roughly 15 new articles a day supported by in-page advertising — remained the heart of the business.

Leadership changes in the newsroom

Talbot stepped down as editor-in-chief in February 2005 to work on a book about Robert F. Kennedy, handing the role to his longtime deputy Joan Walsh, while Elizabeth Hambrecht, the company's president, became chief executive. Walsh led the newsroom until November 2010, remaining afterward as editor-at-large, and was succeeded by Kerry Lauerman. Lauerman stepped down in 2013 to join a startup venture, and David Daley became editor-in-chief, serving until mid-2016. Each transition reflected the broader turbulence of digital media in those years, as the company cycled through strategies to stabilize a business that had been dependent on repeated cash injections from its board chairman, Adobe co-founder John Warnock, and longtime backer William Hambrecht. In 2017 the company was even evicted from its New York offices on West 31st Street over about $90,000 in unpaid back rent — a low point that underscored how precarious the finances had become.

The 2019 rescue sale

By the spring of 2019, Salon Media Group told regulators it faced imminent "bankruptcy and liquidation" if it could not complete a sale. In an 11th-hour deal, the company sold substantially all of its assets — including the Salon.com website — for $5 million to a privately held company, Salon.com LLC, owned by entrepreneurs Chris Richmond and Drew Schoentrup. Richmond and Schoentrup, who also own the fact-checking site Snopes and the wiki TV Tropes, paid $550,000 at closing with the balance in installments, and set about cutting third-party vendors and overhead rather than laying off newsroom staff. According to the new owners, the site was profitable within three years of the takeover — a striking turnaround for a publication that had lost money for most of its existence.

Acquisition by Find.co

In mid-2023, Salon changed hands again. Find.co, a fast-growing media company founded by French entrepreneurs Mendel Benoit and Jonathan Amsellem and based in Malta, announced it had acquired 100 percent of Salon.com for an undisclosed sum. Find.co's portfolio already included technology and finance properties such as CCN.com, Webopedia, and Cryptomaniaks. Under the deal, Salon was to operate as a standalone, U.S.-based brand within Find.co's portfolio, with existing editorial staff continuing in their roles. Drew Schoentrup agreed to continue as chief executive for six months after the sale, while Chris Richmond stayed on as an adviser for a year. Find.co's Benoit said the goal was to build on Salon's legacy of "smart, informed, timely reporting and provocative opinion" while expanding coverage of finance and technology. Salon's chief content officer at the time, Erin Keane, said the nearly 30-year-old publication looked forward to its next chapter.

What Salon covers today

Salon remains a progressive-leaning news and opinion site focused on U.S. politics and current affairs, with regular coverage of culture, entertainment, science, health, and lifestyle. Its daily output blends original reporting and news analysis with commentary and criticism written in the site's characteristically sharp voice. Long-running areas of emphasis include the presidency and Congress, the courts, elections, media criticism, and the intersection of politics and popular culture. The site continues to publish the work of staff writers and contributing columnists, and its opinion pages remain a platform for liberal and left-wing writers, activists, and academics.

Salon's place in media history

Few publications can claim to have been present at the creation of online journalism the way Salon was. It demonstrated that a web-only magazine could break national news, nurture major journalistic talent, and sustain a distinct editorial identity without a print counterpart. Its financial history — the 1999 IPO, the long decline, the 2019 rescue, the 2023 sale — also reads as a compact history of the digital media business itself, from dot-com exuberance through the advertising collapse to the current era of private ownership and portfolio consolidation. Whatever its balance sheets have said, Salon's editorial influence has consistently exceeded its size, and its survival into a fourth decade makes it one of the true veterans of the internet news era.

Visiting Salon online

Salon publishes at salon.com, where most content is free to read with advertising, alongside subscription and membership options for an ad-reduced experience. The site offers email newsletters, a mobile-friendly layout, and an archive stretching back through decades of political and cultural coverage — a record of American public life as seen through one of the web's first and most durable progressive lenses.