Back in the mid-1990s, I started reading a new online magazine called Salon.com. At that time it seemed that Salon and Slate were the only games in town, and I liked Salon’s (relatively) contrarian and feisty style. ((Slate seemed far too concerned with proving how cool and professional they were. Odd, that.)) I was enough of a Salon fanboy that when they launched their paid Premium service in April 2001 I signed up immediately, as a gesture of solidarity. I can’t remember if I kicked in a few bucks when they made their appeal to stave off bankruptcy in 2003, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Although the content was uneven, there were a number of regular contributors that kept me coming back, particularly Patrick “Ask the Pilot” Smith, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Miller, and – above all – Joe Conason with his excellent – and relentless – political work. The resident “agony aunt,” Cary Tennis, was occasionally insightful but increasingly self-indulgent, and Tom Tomorrow provided essential political cartoons.
At some point I switched to using RSS feeds for my web content, which meant that I rarely saw the Salon home page. Instead of being a magazine, it became for me just another collection of feeds. Around about the same time, the Huffington Post kicked in and eventually swamped the rest of the liberal political news sites. Salon had attempted to combine both news and commentary, but after HuffPo arrived Salon’s commentary became less incisive. Conason gave way to Blumenthal, who (while better connected) is much too much of an insider.
And so I found myself skipping more and more of the Salon content, and not really missing it. So when my Salon Premium subscription came up for renewal a few days ago, I paused. I took a look at the current issue, to see whether there was anything worth subscribing to, and my eye fell upon this interview by Steve Paulson with the theologian John Haught. Once again a quirky liberal theologian – someone who would never be able to pass for a Christian in a Red State – was lambasting “the new atheists” for being ignorant of religion, and the Salon interviewer was serving up softball questions that did nothing to expose the serial contradictions in Haught’s so-called argument. I thought about adding a comment, only to find that 333 people had got there before me.
If I want that kind of stuff, I can get it for free on any one of a dozen blogs. It’s as bad as HuffPo’s love affair with the ridiculous Deepak Chopra.
And so, Salon, this is goodbye. I appreciate the pioneering work you did in helping to define online journalism in the late nineties and early oughts, but I won’t be subscribing any more. Good luck.
