That why Salon is disappearing. I used to read it, and I thought it disappeared around the time Brill's Content and The Standard went under.

I haven't seen Salon in a Google search result in years.

A whole class of site is on the chopping block as ad revenue and clicks dry up. For actual journalism worth paying for increasingly paywalls are popping up to compensate for these factors.

Us: "Here Google, I've done your bidding to earn higher placement in your search engine"

Google: "Thanks for all the data, idiot. Now we'll show it on our site and claim it as ours"

Our organic traffic is WAY down despite nonstop kowtowing to their demands.

I don't understand this viewpoint at all. I follow specific writers for their voice, not in spite of it. A whole lot of people seem to be hallucinating this past moment in history when news was strictly factual information, delivered with no editorializing, from people who had no opinions or ideas, and I genuinely have no idea what they're talking about. Walter Cronkite would frequently editorialize about events he was reporting. All the major historical men and women of news would, that's... the point, you're not just tuning in to know what happened today, you're tuning in to experience those events through the eyes of someone you've at least got some vague trust relationship with.

And I categorically reject any notion that it's better to get a summary via AI. I can clock articles written with heavy AI use and I dislike their monotone and... well, inhuman writing style. Frequently, especially as of late, current events need the touch of an empathetic human with their own ideas.

If you require your news filtered through a bias-remover, IMO you just lack media literacy. I can read something from someone I disagree with on basically everything and still get the facts out of it. Frankly: skill issue.

So yes, people lack media literacy. Billions of people currently online are experiencing their first generation of exposure to the what the world of news and other media has to offer in any real sense. Instead of wagging a finger at them and calling them ignorant lets accept all of what's changed and adapt accordingly.

   I follow specific writers for their voice, not in spite of it

I mean, I think there are numerous things to point to explain such things, but I think the two big ones would be:

* The ongoing deadening of our attention spans and the normalization of products that foster addiction in their users often to the detriment of those users to drive profits

* The ongoing attacks on education fostered by the right wing here and elsewhere creating a more ignorant, and less literate electorate. Media literacy itself requiring literacy to be taught, and as is touted frequently, most people can't read above 6th grade.

> Then the radio and TV democratized that to an extent, but nothing has remade the marketplace for information like the internet and smartphones.

I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "TV democratized media"? TV (and radio really) is still incredibly centralized, now more than ever. As to a marketplace of information, I don't think information is the issue at hand, we have more information now than at any time in human history. Almost all of us carry a device in our pockets that would give us the answer to any question we had, were we so inclined to ask, yet misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda are perhaps more prolific than ever before.

What is lacking now, IMO, is the ability for the reader, again, to think critically and sort the wheat from the chaff of that massive wellspring of information. Which follows neatly into...

> Instead of wagging a finger at them and calling them ignorant lets accept all of what's changed and adapt accordingly.

I'm not calling them ignorant, I am stating the fact that they are ignorant. Ignorance is not a criticism, it's the natural state one finds themself in when they are uninformed on a topic. It's also pretty easily fixed unless one is unduly attached to their ignorance in some way that benefits them.

I also don't believe it's strictly their fault that they are ignorant, because our country has spent decades defunding and attacking it's own education system, and other countries similarly, ultimately I believe because a less educated, less thinking electorate is easier to manipulate.

It's pretty much everywhere. I just assume it of apps on my phone.

That alone has made me much MUCH more leery to subscribe to anything if it's not something that can easily be canceled (For example, using Google play to subscribe to things since they make it easy to unsubscribe).

Then the credit card processor asks for card details, full address, phone number, captcha, browser fingerprinting, IP address reputation, validate the payment in your bank's app, reject foreign cards, reject prepaid cards, and so on.

Then a customer like me who is literally on the sign-up page trying to give them money isn't allowed to.

Nor can we forget David Brooks, the moralizing conservative who left his wife for his research assistant 24 years his junior.

David French accusing Mayor Pete of fixing bread prices, Lulu Garcia-Navarro with more glasses than good faith questions, etc.

Say what you will, but the NYT has a deep bench of shenanigans. They truly love the game.

If you just wanted people to agree with you, Salon definitely had you covered!

The NYT happens to staff people on the intellectual right, which is whatever. It's a core part of who they are. My issue is lack of intellectual rigor.

I miss suck.com.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suck.com

Suck.com Net.Moguls Internet Mogul Trading Cards:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181211075708/http://www.suck.c...

Rick Adams, Front:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180802115113im_/http://www.suc...

Rick Adams, Back:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180802143444im_/http://www.suc...

And the hard hitting parody of fuckedcompany.com.

Fucked Company published an excellent documentary on the Digital Entertainment Network.

(It's from "Fucked Company", so obviously it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but who's at work any more these days?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W41Ttr73TqU

>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network

>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network

>I rescued this from the Internet Archive before it got taken down, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.

Yes, THAT creepy Epstein buddy pedo crypto shill guy, Brock Pierce:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s

>Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Brock Pierce's Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein Went Deeper Than Anyone Knew:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/brock-pierces-relationsh...

Fucked Company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

Oh no :(, the Internet Archive fucked them:

https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/

>Sorry.

>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

Alternative alternative archive of the front page, only existing in the web.archive.org snapshot of wayback.archive-it.org:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240326164342/https://wayback.a...

Then they went from sorta fucked:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20091016001955/http://www...

To fucked:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20130104195206/http://www...

For creatives, however you care to define the term, probably. But there are a lot of professions where fairly run of the mill professionals and even tradespeople still make a pretty decent living even if they're not partners in their organizations or own their own businesses. Of course, you get down to the tier that's doing taxes at Walmart or working in an auto parts stoor, not so much, although probably still more reliable income than the average Substack writer.

you mean this?

https://www.google.com/search?q=white%20people%20site%3Asalo...

In fact, you sell it in all colors and make more money:

https://www.google.com/search?q=black+people+site%3Asalon.co...

It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to sell.

But then someone democratizes the publishing (Substack).

Someone else then mechanizes the producing (LLMs).

And you no longer sell.

Bummer.

the tone is very different, don't you think?

knowing that most of them had already been replaced with diverse individuals prompting an inclusive LLM for equitable $2/hr pleases me immeasurably.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210219012551/https://www.polit...

I’d like to see a better way to shutter journalism. Some kind of entity, possibly distributed, similar to archives that: holds domain names, fixes link rot, removes all formatting caused by dead ads, and hosts the actual content that had been abandoned or donated;, while also offering new navigation and discoverability through the collections.

It could be partially funded through libraries similar to perma.cc and look a bit like Wikipedia/longform/longreads.

RIP Salon. When it launched in 1995 it was a total breath of fresh air and it launched at a time when the optimism for the future was through the roof.

The big difference though is that Slate has always had corporate ownership, first by Microsoft and then by Graham Holdings. It's never really had to stand on its own feet.

it was also the era when Microsoft was trying to expand it's dominance in software into new realms as well as into media such as Slate and MSNBC.

See this 1996 cover of Wired Magazine: https://www.originalmagazines.com/products/wired-magazine-ju...

I think it was more of a defensive play. Keep in mind that Microsoft saw the web as a threat. Gates was worried that the browser will undermine their OS monopoly (which it eventually did). Gates launched a bunch of web sites including Slate, HomeAdvisor, CarPoint, Sidewalk, Expedia, MSNBC and so on, and told the world that he didn't expect any of these sites to be profitable any time soon, which in my opinion, was intended to dissuade others from investing in the web.

A sticker, a suck-branded Gold Circle Coin condom, and something else that I can't recall right now. (I still have the sticker on an old ammo can.)

Solid collectible, right there.-

And if you bend the rules a bit, Bianca's Smut Shack might sort-of count too - probably the first truly great website of any sort.

FWIW they had it in for Trump from the start.

I'm in the Seattle area now and the Seattle Times has been a great source of independent local and national news. Most local city news orgs have gone under at this point but I'm glad we still have one here.

On the other hand, I also don't see anything else that's particularly interesting or thought provoking. Which is kind of sad for this US election season.

https://www.salon.com/1998/10/30/feature1_6/

Very, very different from what you'd expect from Salon in the later years.

This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves.

For the most part, your choice of news platform is just a layer of coverage choices and political spin on top of a very thin market of original coverage.

And for a reason. It's expensive. Only the tiny handful of winners of the digital transition (including The Atlantic) can now afford it.

The Atlantic and the NYT are now quite flush. IMO people should be subscribing to local newspapers instead, to fund local reporting, which is in a dire state.

Most people can get their celebrity news straight from that celebrity’s insta feed. Unless you’re TMZ breaking the juiciest news about celebrities, you can’t compete with that.

Big newspapers early in the internet age tried explain why journalism was needed - to explain the story behind the story - and that was the correct move, imho.

  This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI.

Cost effective but soulless. Local news was killed by private equity and consolidation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Davies#Bibliography

1. By "decline of the open internet and AI" do you mean "decline from the open internet and AI and AI"?

2. That may be so, but I feel like statements like this, about trends that started before the current thing, have the effect of distracting people from the contemporary causes that are active now.

For instance: a lot of negative social trends currently blamed on modern "screens" and social media has their start long ago, but that doesn't mean smartphones and social media haven't had an extremely negative effect. "Screen" as a problem probably started long ago, with television, but each iteration has become more invasive and more difficult to control, eventually overwhelming many people's ability to choose healthier activities (e.g. there wasn't always something "on" TV that you wanted to watch, which gave you more space to choose to do something else, but that never happens with a smartphone).

I posit things would have likely stabilized at a healthier level without the current technologies, so it's quite right right to blame those technologies for their effects.

I know we point a lot of fingers at social media and/or the dead internet theory - but exactly to your point the process was started simultaneously or a little bit ahead of things like the smartphone, and long before Facebook was a news source.

Google was using it's version of AI to push "answers to questions" a while before ChatGPT, these just weren't very good so they weren't sorted first.

But it's hard to really say - as long as the Internet has existed, people have been crafting schemes to control/manipulate it and by now those schemes have tremendous weight.

The main thing is the early Internet was a unique because it's success was an accident. Corporations and bureaucrats imagined the "Information Superhighway" as an enriched cable TV and this made it such a failure that amateur use of the Internet wound accidentally "going viral" and only over time did all the crap but it's been a while and the Internet is close to a "super-duper-information superhighway" today.

And each of them can journal on their phones

Long before humans had languages and sense of preservation of culture humanoids were nomadic hunter gatherers

And since language and nation state/religious holy war appeared exponential growth in violence appeared

All the sedentary clinging to old allegory, political tropes, arbitrary academic semantics... oooh this little cabal signed off that I am a journalist! ...ground truth is its all conservatism

We don't need Flock if we are all experience hunter gatherers mobile and able to record shit.

Though 84% of Americans do live within 100 miles of where they grew up. Would be baller if the country just adopted a high speed train system and nomadic cultural practices, less sedentary and car focused practices.

Women, it turns out, do not want to be beat reporters.

And I doubt the pendulum is done swinging. Buckle up! My guess is that journalism will get even more hollowed out, and even more feminized - as with so many other careers (HR, anyone?) it seems we are continuing in the direction of UBI by proxy.

Lord they keep making dudes that do the “if the average person was as smart as me”. Probably time to move to Mars. If only someone would write a newsletter about how to do it.

To be clear, I mean the dude you’re replying to who has seen through the veil the fourth estate cast over our eyes.

The only other real value-add is that the journalist is a better 'communicator', an assumption mostly based on stereotypes about the people being interviewed, especially with tech journalism. This has broken down too - the largest outlets regularly release pieces filled with run-on sentences and typos now, and often obfuscate the point rather than clarify it. See any NYT article about any hot-button issue over the past ten years or so.

I don't know the answer, but I'm confident it's non-zero, and probably higher that whatever my initial guess might be.

They recently cut production down to 3 days a week and laid off half their already tiny staff.

Their current list of formerly great papers includes the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Boston Herald, The Mercury News, East Bay Times, The Orange County Register, and Orlando Sentinel.

They also bought my hometown daily paper, just a small, nowheresville town. The paper went from being respectably sized for a small town, and featuring many local news stories, to being slim and having one randomly selected story from one of the 5-8 papers they own in the region, and a bunch of wire stories. Once a week, they copy and paste the local police blotter.

The outlook on the news industry is exceedingly bleak. :(

The major publications, e.g. AP, NYTs, WaPo, Economist, FT, Bloomberg all have reporting an seem to be doing well. It's not like beat reporting is going to die.

And the world suffers as a result, IMO. It’s all very thinly veiled opinion rather than original reporting. How many YouTubers are reporting out in the field rather than just reacting to stories other people reported?

More than anything else Substack shows to me how valuable editors are in the journalistic world. So, so many people are in desperate need of an editor to challenge them before they hit publish.

You forgot podcasts which are available on numerous platforms. One of which is YT for video podcasts.

Most of the sports news now are breaking on podcasts. Same with pop culture. News sites now mostly refer to some podcast and the person on the podcast whatever bit of news they have come from there.

As of September: Roughly 478,000 podcasts have released at least one new episode in the last 90 days

Podcasts have become the way a majority of people I know are now getting their news, which is pretty crazy.

podcasts and web stuff is where the majority of people go to seek journalism, but I hesitate to say that's what replaced it. I see a void where it once was, and the product offered largely different than what I came to expect from journalism wholly.

A lot of punditry has moved to those platforms, but roughly nobody on those platforms is actually doing investigative journalism.

People doing actual useful news work, in other terms.

(I'm joking, but then again, if demagogues can remove specifics to make statements punchier, why can't I?)

Reporters are people who actually get out into the world, collect facts, collect opinions from real people (some of them experts at something, some of them not), try to actually see "newsworthy events" in person.

Journalists write essays based on the work reporters do.

I'm not saying I want less journalists, but I do want more reporters.

That was a scary number so I Googled it. You should always check scary numbers. It's misleading.

It's true that newspaper newsroom jobs fell 57% (from roughly 71,000 to 31,000 jobs) over that period. However, newsroom employment across all mediums fell by only 26% (from 114,000 to 85,000).

A lot of hose jobs went digital, they didn't just disappear.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/13/u-s-newsr...

> Newspaper newsroom employment fell 57% between 2008 and 2020, from roughly 71,000 jobs to about 31,000. At the same time, the number of digital-native newsroom employees rose 144%, from 7,400 workers in 2008 to about 18,000 in 2020.

So we are going from 78k to about 49k, a drop of almost 40%. It would be interesting to see a finer grained breakdown by type of jobs.

https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/new-local-journalist-index-...

(Measured as local journalist equivalent per 100,000 people.)

I have some journalists (for a local newspaper) in my circle of friends and they all complain there's no 'newsroom' anymore for most (dutch) newspapers. All journalists now are supposed to 'self-redact' and their copy is just pasted into the newspaper without anybody else looking at it.

Lots of 'journalists' are freelancers who just send in their piece. Even those often get published with minimal oversight. There just isn't enough money to have a redaction.

Fact-checking is(or should be) done by the one writing the piece. So personal biases are hardly ever caught.

Admitted, all these stories are for a small local newspaper with very tight budgets. But according to my friends it's the same everywhere when they speak to their friends, and even the big national newspapers here have very minimal supporting personnel.

It's no wonder the world polarizes.

Historically, public/mass news services were dependent on adverts or classifieds to pay for their running. That business has been consumed by ad tech.

YouTube has become a source for journalism now, but the viability of newspapers and local beats has reduced.

They aren't funded exclusively by subscribers because that would exclude a source of revenue that enables cheaper subscriptions. But you can have no ads for a reasonable premium.

https://support.theguardian.com/us/contribute

My reaction was a little different. I said "that's it? Only 60%?"

Accuracy is actually MOST important when strong feelings are involved. If we're talking about what time to eat lunch 'noonish' is good enough. If we're talking about about how many people died in a tragedy exact numbers help prevent misinformation, hyperbole, and panic from driving everyone into a frenzy.

I was reading The Victorian Internet [0] in the late 2000s and the author mentioned how the telegraph killed off a lot of small local newspapers. The reasoning was that who cares about local news when you can instantly get international news from around the world.

This was so topical for that time period that I assumed it had been written a few years earlier e.g. 2006. Turns out it was written in 1998!

0 - https://link.amazon/B0bh3AKaw

The dotcom bubble burst and the GFC were a tiny fraction of the country misbehaving and causing a crisis that they used as an excuse to rob the lowest earners - the ones who hadn't already been abandoned, anyway. More work, lower pay, have an inferior version of the old product or service for more money (or just go without, you're too poor for our target demo anyhow). Of course you're going to hollow out your consumer base eventually; you can't profit off volume if you kill the volume. The people who can still pay don't care because they can still pay, but any given manager or exec only needs one newspaper, and you're not going to be able to charge $50 for it, even if they can afford it.

When people talk about a wealth tax, or an unrealized capital gains tax, or a 90% top marginal income tax rate, it's not about jealousy or entitlement. It's because those vehicles are where the money to support our institutions gets stashed once it's skimmed off the top of the wages of workers who are too desperate to demand their real worth (and risk losing their jobs in the process). If you want these things to continue existing, you can't rely on a captured market to cap wealth and ensure a floor. Sorry.

We don't need to tax them to make up a shortfall; we need to tax them to remove their power to distort government in their favor.

Trying to make Salon’s failure about tax policy is bizarre.

If you tried to ban all of the known strategies they would just come up with new ones. That's why we need more general solutions like unrealized gains tax.

Of course for the long term it would be better to replace traditional shares with time limited ones that give you a percentage of profits for 5 years but no voting rights. Power stays with workers and no one gets unlimited returns on a one time investment. And enforce pay equality where no one can get more than 20x median total comp. But I think that's too radical to pass anywhere today.

The problem with this is that is a good reason we don't tax unrealized gains. Yes, there are people using this as a loophole. But if you tax this, everytime home value goes up, there is a huge wave of bigger tax bills for every home owner and business owner. Which would crash the housing market overnight and probably kill 90% of the job creation in the economy. I'm sure you could make some carve outs for it, but if you do that, you probably won't collect much in tax revenue.

The biggest thing you don't seem to understand is that there is an economic concept called the Laffer curve. It relates tax rates to the total amount of tax a government takes in. And we are already at or near that tax rate. Increase taxes and the government won't take in more revenue. Growing the economy, that increases government tax revenue. But increasing tax rates past the optimum rate DECREASES not increases the tax revenue. Even ignoring the increased rates of tax avoidance, it constricts economic growth which reduces the employment tax revenue.

Basically, you can't tax your way to pay for your desired programs. Either allocate the budget you have or cancel the programs.

PS 1/2 of the federal budget is social spending, 1/6th is military (1/4 of which is the VA), 1/6 is interest on the debt and 1/6 is everything else the government does.

https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1148666/FULLTEXT0...

You don't have to rely on your domestic media for international coverage. Especially with machine translation being so good these days, you can get your international coverage directly from the outlets abroad.

Edit wonder what the verdict will eventually be, he certainly saw the turbulence back then.

We have to change the system somehow so that independent investigative journalism is either funded without compromising its independence (this is difficult, as the recent bullshit coming out of the BBC is proving), or we replace this method of holding politicians to account with something that works just as well (I have no idea what).

Or we have to change our systems of democracy so that politicians cannot abuse them. Something like "no politician, or any members of their family, or their close friends, can ever be employed by any organisation that contracts with the government, or receives government funds, or benefits from government legislation". This is obviously going to be tricky.

You look at multiple perspectives, and tease out reality from all the information, understanding that it's all biased. This has always been required.

Investigative journalism, done properly, takes time and money. And it produces long articles that can be challenging to read and involve the detail that backs the claim. In a clickbait world, this doesn't produce profit.

There's no functioning business model for it now, but we have built our democratic systems on the assumption that there is. Rich folks buying newspapers and then meddling with their editorial policy was always a problem, but with the editorial office completely dependent on the rich folks for their salaries it gets harder to resist.

twitter and facebook were supposed to fill this purpose. oh well

And then you can also get analysis from people who have dedicated their professional lives to studying the geopolitical, historical, and other issues involved in these conflicts. What does a journalist really bring to the picture here? So really we have more sources of news than ever before, and I think that's largely killed "the news" as an industry, because it's not really clear what their role is supposed to be anymore.

---

Robert Kaiser, who worked at the Washington Post through its glory years til its purchase by Bezos, wrote a really excellent article about this some time back, 'The Bad News About the News.' [1] It was written back in 2014, but summed up what had happened and accurately predicted where things would be headed:

"[Companies] have both decided to cater to their audiences not with original reporting of the news (which is expensive), but with commentary on the news interspersed with broadcasts of set-piece events like presidential news conferences. Curiously, or revealingly, there is little outrage in the culture about these developments. We seem to have adapted to the demise of the old expectations about accuracy, fairness, and reporting without much of a fight."

[1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...

That's the good side of the Internet (and smartphones) and what all of us early adopters always said the Internet will be great for. But then there is the other side of the coin: fake news, fake account, coordinated disinformation campaigns from foreign state actors, bad taste pranks etc. Some of those existed before with classic journalism as well but the scale at which things are now done was simply impossible before.

So, having journalism and journalists as a trusted source, and filter, that can already digest and filter out the fake from the truth are still needed. Or even more than before, I dare to say. The issue is that there are too many monetary incentives to not act like that.

In modern times I'll again take the glass half full side here. The truth of things tends to come out over time, because it's the only 'narrative' that can hold up under scrutiny from any angle. And even in the anonymous internet age, there's still the issue of reputation. It's perhaps more important than ever now a days because you can look at some entity's predictions or statements from one time period, see how it played out over the next e.g. 6 months, and see whether they were onto something, or blowing smoke.

I think this is why it's so hard for the government to drum up support for war now a days. They have no ability to control the narrative and so framing invading some country half way around the world as being 'defensive' is a narrative that usually collapses in rapid order. Even during Vietnam it started becoming clear that the narrative around the Gulf of Tonking was dodgy, but it's a process that took years. Now a days it'd probably take about 24 hours.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident

And how are YOU expected to figure out the truth? Journalists should be akin to scientists and researcher: specialized in their field, with better connections and expertise and be able to follow a trail to reach ground truth. Now, can and will be they fooled. Absolutely, and there should be still some peer-review of what they publish.

Also this is an ideal scenario, and it's not what happening right now, or at least it happen only for a handful of media outlets all over the world. This model still support (and expect) having biased publications - I mean, it's just how we humans are - and you as a responsible citizen are still required to look at least at a couple of sources and form your own opinion.

I do agree with you that the truth tends to come out at some point because it follows the path of least resistance, but sometimes the lie can be so well written that it takes decades for the truth to come out.

That would require them to actually have studied that field in university in a masters degree (or PhD) like researchers have.

Very few journalists have. Some journalists are good, many are talking heads.

Again, this is an ideal scenario, I know, but IMO there is nothing that makes it technically impossible to achieve.

The 'citizen journalist' is at best a part time volunteer and at worst an astroturf'd contractor of a PR department.

And as the quip goes about volunteers -- willing to work for free, altruistic, and competent: pick two.

Occasionally you get delightful humans that combine all three, but they're needles in haystacks.

This is exactly why professional journalists, with employers who can restrict strong pressure, are important.

The truth about things which are widely observable tends to come out over time.

There are many, many things which are not widely observable.

You know the easiest way to do something secretly in government today?

Have an in-person meeting, gloss over it in online-posted minutes, then bury the evidence of it being done in the most detailed, voluminous reports.

Because finding that requires a butt in a seat through boring meetings and tracing / reconciling line items through reports.

And generally speaking, most people who aren't being paid aren't willing to do that for fun.

Journalism had a pretty strong code of conduct and drive to publish the facts. They couldn’t get it right all the time, but they had a stake in doing the best they could and not losing their reputation.

The truth of things doesn’t tend to come out in time. We know the truth about many things now, but after the window in which a change could be made was obfuscated and stopped.

Facts coming out when it is convenient to the people withholding them is not a success. If they come out at all.

The old system of journalism did a surprisingly good job, until people gave up on playing by the rules and decided to play by the trappings of journalism.

Reputation matters to the center and the left of the information ecosystem today. The right has connected its media to its politics entirely, to create a propaganda machine. Part of its routine is to state that journalism and the left are biased, and don’t want to deal with the truth, and then shoehorning their narrative into it.

https://www.tiktok.com/@darntootin85/video/71685843451401372...

I tried to find a source other than TikTok, c'est la vie.

Guess that didn't work out. I enjoyed reading their creative journalism before they went all the way in on dogmatic politics.

I payed for salon briefly in the late 90s. I used to have bets with how many words it would take Paglia to cite Sexual Personnae in literally every one of here articles.

Then it just turned into everything that is cringe about the anti intellectual left. Don’t get me wrong I’ve always been aligned with progressive politics for all 56 years of my life, but Salon just went off the deep end.

https://www.salon.com/2022/10/07/glenn-greenwalds-bromance-w...

Greenwald did promotional appearances with Jones

https://knowledgefight.libsyn.com/709-2-dans-2-war

When someone says "GG's crazy," I substitute "I'm an angry lefty" who's upset he's not on my team any more. I don't think he was ever on anyone's side, one of the things I like about him.

He used to do two-source rule, no longer does.

He used to provide contextual clarity, no longer does.

He used to disclose conflict of interests, no longer does.

He used to provide citations and audit trails for his work, no longer does.

Every single rule from the society of professional journalists he's thrown out the window. Here he is pushing conspiracy drivel with a bunch of emdashes: https://substack.com/home/post/p-222186026

We may quibble over quality, or standards, but you seem to be a bit too invested. No one is right all the time, and there is opinion in his piece. Take with a grain of salt.

Not to mention in a country as big as Brazil, anything could and probably did happen.

https://share.google/DzxpUJN6Ss31AIhDt

The podcast (so far, not heard the whole thing) is angry someone tried to make a non-judgemental documentary and/or interview.

Also, you mention Rumble without mentioning why he went elsewhere—censorship during Biden administration. These examples suggest a common lefty myopia.

Instead, I would have expected an article or video where GG directly supports a batshit position. Rather than a simple constitutional freedom of speech position where he allows an unsavory person airtime. At very least a direct link to the source material.

Crime stuff.

These are consequences for crime.

I’m imagining the shutdown was timed for right after midterm elections ( and not before ) so Salon could exercise influence through that event.

"Piss in the milk of the oligarchy".

https://youtube.com/@breakingpoints

https://web.archive.org/web/20120217111837/http://www.salon....

One day without warning, they deleted it.

Complete contempt for writers who were frankly far superior to any on staff. I was just a lurker, I've no personal investment beyond that.

I can't remember the last time since that that I visited the site with intent, the arrogant, contemptuous destruction of brilliant writing - that's its legacy for me.

It's either killing off forums completely, or "upgrading" to the point of being unrecognisable, or requiring everyone to make a new account and ... I can't even be bothered to write it.

At the time, I was angry at this as a user. But looking back, the forums would have declined anyway. With most people today using the internet from their phones, and younger generations chiefly interested in video, there just isn't the same societal support for thoughtful long-form text typed from a computer keyboard. The surviving independent forums I'm on are greying out at best, or have shrunk to a few cantankerous or dotty people at worse.

It changes at some point, no doubt triggered by the crash of journalism, but it didn't try to be interesting and I gave up on it so far back I don't remember when.

It was ahead of it's time in terms of it's model for publishing large sites with staging, editorial desks, etc.

I assume there's good money in that, whether you're peddling your slop to leftoids or to rightoids. But maybe they weren't writing the right kind of slop? Not sure.

31 years in operation and you just ... close completely?

The long tail of 31 years of goodwill is worthless?

Why not turn it into a news aggregator site like yahoo news or something, at least?

ask.com closing was more along the lines of what I was talking about then. that bugs me that they don't still have any form of simple search or a news portal or anything.... just, "bye!".

Seems like a waste.

Craigslist was the first nail in the newspaper coffin. Classifieds and adverts ate a LOT of local money. And all of that went poof. CL cost $0 to post. Why would I pay $10 for a week advert?

All the aggregators grabbed news from everywhere, and paid 0 for it. It cost to make. And made nothing. Encouraged the closed/paywall web.

Ganett etm bought a LOT of local papers, and lowered quality as low as they could go. Inertia kept many older subscribers. I know 0 millrnial and younger subscribers.

NYT and other major papers are easy to sign up, and you basically have to die to get rid of. I would never recommend.

There's a lot of factors. Basically most journalists are going to the glue factory, like horses did with motor vehicles.

My project had a brief window of modest profitability from about 2012 to 2020. Before and after that time, I've mostly operated at a break-even or a loss because I love doing it, and it gives me a sense of purpose, and the thought of packing it up is deeply depressing. But the past few years have been an extreme drought of donations, which leads to extreme drought in ambition and energy. I sometimes wonder if my mental health would improve if I turned out the lights and moved on to something else. I don't want to, but sometimes we humans fail to want what's good for us.

I'm sure it doesn't help that I reject advertising and rely solely on donations. But perhaps the only thing more depressing than shutting down is slapping ads on everything. Blah.

I am sorry. I hope things work out.

Salon hosts one of my favourite short stories that still holds up 24 years later: https://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/

Read it while it's still there.

Your choice to do the whole page or just copypaste the story.

Goodbye Salon! Thanks for the dating help!

"410 Gone

This page was part of the old salon.com site and has been removed."

Pretty sure that's the first time I've ever seen 410 in the wild.

One of my later work friends, who became my CTO at InfoWorld, had worked at Salon as his previous gig. He spoke fondly of his time there. Salon was always digital-only long before that was chic in the magazine business. At InfoWorld we weren't forced to do it until the mid-2000s, a good 10 years after Salon did in the mid-90s, when the internet was just awakening in pop culture.

I stopped reading Salon over 15 years ago, but it's still surprising to see. That includes realizing they lasted this long in the first place through all the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the low CPM ad markets.

Idk what I meant to say, but don't count newspapera out, yet. A small but non-loosing cadre of sellers and buyers ecosystem may still exist.