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Salon Asks for Help
Henry V .009 writes "Salon.com is appealing to the community for help. They haven't been able to pay the rent since December. To date, they've lost about $80 million dollars. A cause of rejoicing for some. But their many readers are understandably sorry to see them in such desperate straits. Personally I hope they stick around, I think they are one of the best sources of independant journalism on the web--even if I happen to agree with less than 10% of what they have to say. I also think that it would be a shame for them to close now that they've finally created an advertising scheme that has a snowball's chance in hell of working on the web. I can actually recall some of the adverts I've seen on Salon--what other web site can you say that about? Salon says that if they get another 50,000 subscriptions (they currently have 50,000) they'll break even for the year." In the old role-playing game "Paranoia", there was a nice quote about what would happen when the player characters (who had never been outside of their enclosed city complex) made an attempt to swim in water over their heads: "delaying drowning".
I hope they can make it. Seriously, if you enjoy their articles, consider to get a subscription. I think it's worth it.
Fleur de Sel
..and why should I care? I have the BBC !
I think worthless executives and overpaid contractors have milked this one dry, better to let Salon die than to keep dumping money into this greed-surrounded cesspool.
I can actually recall some of the adverts I've seen on Salon--what other web site can you say that about?
How about adds for MS Visual Studio on Slashdot? Especially on articles that say that MS bites the big one.
If I couldnt pay rent, I dont stay there. If I cant pay for food, I starve. If I dont pay... I DONT GET. If they want to create a pay site, fine. Elsewise they DIE.
ANyways, the only orginazation which can "die and keep on living" is the government. There's ono limits how much they can take away.
Salon committed suicide by alienating its core readership of liberals, when they brought on hyperconservatives like Sullivan and Horowitz. Note to editors: if you don't want to lose your subscribers, don't print essays that call them treasonous and anti-american.
You could see the writing on the wall when Salon hooked up with notorious blowhard Dave Winer. I bet they threw $200k down the Userland rathole, that would have been enough to pay the rent.
I think it was worth it. Salon sometimes is a bit too liberal for my taste, but even if you don't agree with some of their politics, the enormous amount of content you get is certainly good. If you subscribe you get a free dead-tree subscription to Utne Reader (uck) and Mother Jones (yeah). Some interesting audio downloads, among other things. And no ads.
All in all, I enjoy reading Salon. If you do, consider plunking a few bucks for them.
Shyeah. Like I'm going to subscribe to a magazine that I suspect is going to expire before my subscription does.
It's hard to feel too sympathetic for Salon. With all of their moaning and groaning about overhead, you'd think they had to cut down dead trees, slice them up and cover them with ink, and mail them, or something. ("Oh, wait. You mean like every other magazine in the history of journalism?")
Dr. Darwin called -- he wants to cancel his subscription.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Poor Salon, the poor, "New Media" company that was supposed to eat 'old media' and own the world in 5 years. It's so sad to see a public corporation fail, oh, I'm sorry, "the dream die. " Frankly, I don't think people should continue to support them thru what is their death throes. They've pissed away EIGHTY MILLION dollars and they're still spending money on creature comforts (200k a _month_ for rent? Are their offices solid gold with cocaine on tap?), while cutting the actual _production_ staff (writers, et al) left and right? Fuck That. Free market economy means that it's fine for people to pull stupid shit like this, but it also means that they are free to fail horribly.
If they keep saying how bad MS is then they should not be using their software. I'm not a big Salon reader myself so I really don't care what happens to them, thousands of other companies are failing too I'm afraid.
Considering more and more people in this country seem to be getting their "fair and balanced" news from Fox, this nation should be completely ignorant of everything that isn't waving an American flag within five years.. I enjoy Salon, I just subscribed to it. It's going to be sad when the only way to get information about your own country is to ready another country's newspapers.
My good looks paid for that pool, and my talent filled it with water.
Wow. Between the starving gold rock stars making a measlly 40K a year -- and a web site that pisses through 80 Million and can't find a way to keep the lights on, my heart just goes out to all these "poor" folks.
Maybe if I have any "compassion" left I will send a nickel to the evening news and a dime to the local newspaper -- they must be losing money to.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Salon offers nothing to the centrist or conservative person who does not live in San Francisco. I used to read it in 1999, when it was new, and the content was interesting (remember the Surreal Gourmet?) but it had gone steadily down hill since then. The linked article talks about their expensive office space in downtown SF. Please. If they were running on a shoestring, why get the expensive office space? Doubtless this will get down-moderated as flamebait.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
NYTimes.com lets google run over their articles without subscribing. That way, you can read the entire article without subscribing by accessing it through google news.
Salon.com, on the other hand, lets you read the first couple of paragraphs and then you have to pay. I've never been interested enough by those first couple of paragraphs to pay anything. At least with the google news method, you could read a few articles without paying, and that way you would know whether you would be interested in paying for more.
They had Garrison Keillor and Camille Paglia. In its heyday, Salon was the best internet magazine around. I'll be sad to see it go; but writers like that command top pay. What they got now sucks and it's time to shut the thing down.
If they double their subscription base, they will break even. Not make a profit. Break even.
I guess they might be factoring in the 33% discount on "gifts", so maybe they only need a 66% increase in their subscriber base. Even so, that doesn't sound promising to me.
There's also the definition of 'this'. The financial year in the US starts on April 1, right? So maybe they mean if in the last month of the financial year, they earn as much money in subscriptions as for the other 11 months combined, they'll break even. If so that bodes even worse for the next year...
Uh, the core of Salon *is* open source software. It's built on the HTML::Mason toolkit, and they've released various odds and sods back to the community.
The Washington Post prints a regular column by George Will and I don't hear too many folks screaming about "alienation"!
While I feel for Salon, and hope they make it. .how about a fund raiser for a person trying to support his family, got downsized, and on the way back from a job interview, had an engine die. I now have to come up with money I don't have for towing, storage, engine, and install of an engine.. to the tune of $2500.00 or so.
Send me your donations.. please!
{} ------ When I think of a good sig, I'll put it here
What's so special about it? I see banner ads... ?
I was going to say they are failing because they are too liberal. Just like talk radio, nobody want's to hear it. People are sick and tired of hearing how the government isn't taxing and regulating us enough to support causes that don't work. Even the good liberal articles were more libertarian than liberal. The liberal agenda offers nothing that the republican and libertarian agendas couldn't offer 10 times better. People are just sick of it.
The only reason people like Russ Smith are cheering over Salon's demise is because David Talbot is such an insufferable asshole. They do have some good people on staff -- I've talked to Laura Miller on occasion and she does a good job with the books section -- but Salon is just what Talbot intended it to be when it launched: the online version of Mother Jones. Democracy dies if Salon disappears? You can only pray for someone to fail when they make those pronouncements.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
In other news, CNN.com had a piece last week on the explosion of cyberbegging.
I have nothing against Salon, but why should we get all weepy when their business plan fails? More to the point, why is Slashdot giving them free advertising? Funny how my site wasn't slashdotted when I really needed some sales.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
If you look at the three things that anyone or anything can do if it is threatened, it can Move, Adapt, or Die. Salon is based in San Franscisco, California. WHAT'S WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!? That's one of the highest rent places in North America! There's cheaper rent within 100 miles of where they're currently based! Obviously no one considered the "move" possibility.
As for business models changing, advertising methods changing, they don't sound like they've adapted too well either. If you've been past due since December, you should have seen the writing on the wall in at least October or November. Some companies don't even have central offices anymore, they are all working from home or have one small office, and they use their colocation site for their main office servers. That would be a way to not be screwed. They haven't exactly adapted fully, either.
What's this leave us with? Die. Salon will probably die. I'd be inclined to think of them as simply the latest fallen dotcom, that took a little longer to fold than the others. I don't begrudge them for their efforts, but things were not right in order for Salon to get this far in the hole in the first place.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Most liberals I know (including myself) find it very valuable to learn what the other side is thinking. In fact, the further to the left you go, the more respect you are likely to find for intelligent debate. As Jack Ryan said in "Red October, "It is wise to know the ways of one's enemy." Accusing us of traitorous and anti-american behavior, in fact, probably causes MORE liberals to read. Having said that, throwing a $200k salary at anybody is a bad idea when you can't pay the rent.
Where I am going to go for news from a leftist slant now? Oh, I forgot about the mainstream media and the humanities department of every college campus. I guess Salon going belly up is not so disasterous after all for the lefties. By the way, appearing in Salon's "catch of the day" makes the chicks from Joe Millionaire appear to have dignity by comparison.
Even if you don't agree with all of the views expressed there, you have to agree that Salon, like Slashdot, is one of the few truly independent news sources out there. Unfortunately, not everything on the internet can be entirely free. It costs money for Talbot and his crew to write; it is only fair that we pay to read. I'm a Premium Member, and just purchased a "Make A Difference" subscription so someone else can experience the wonder of independent media. In a world where the major news sources resort to fear-mongering to sell themselves, Salon and those similar to it are a last refuge of sanity. You have to remember, the sole purpose of television news is to keep you watching between commercials. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox aren't interested in presenting the truth, only something entertaining, or scary enough to keep you from changing the channel. Salon and Slasdot are different; the two communities should support each other. Do your part to keep Salon alive, buy a subscription, it's only $30, or $18.50 with ads. In the long run, that amount is negligible, even for the pimply faced teens. This probably sounds like an NPR fund drive, and it kind of is, but this vital source of information and commentary is going to die unless we do something about it. If one tenth of the ~600,000 registered Slashdot users help support Salon, we will double the number of Premium subscribers. This is doable, even if stopping the war, or overturning the DMCA isn't.
Even if you only occasionally enjoy reading a Salon article or disagree with the politics of some (or all) of its writers, I urge you to strongly consider a $30 yearly subscription. Slashdot readers are surely aware that the big press in America is beholden to special interests. We have no BBC or CBC here, just mediocre and sensationalist networks run by the likes of AOL and Rupert Murdoch.
Just as free speech is meaningless to the American poor, so too is free press when owned and controlled by billionaires. I have found Salon to be a great source for thoughtful and challenging articles. Supporting it is supporting democracy.
sm
Will I be labled a pedant if I point out that saying something "has a snowball's chance in hell" is a negative term, not a positive one as the poster seems to think?
jrw
Forgot to search-and-replace, eh?
This is just another media voice being silenced. The more voices, the better. Anyone think this makes the world better?
Unfortunately, the company obviously has a bad business model. One wonders why an online magazine's operating expenses are so high. Moreover, it doesn't help their situation to force subscriptions (which I believe is a recent development) by blocking a large percentage of article content.
Even though the subscription cost is small, it's equivalent to print magazine subscription cost. Since I cannot view the full content of any of the articles, it's quite difficult to justify subscribing sight unseen. I imagine many others make their decision to reject the subscription fee on the same basis. Plus, now that I know they block content, I'll be much less likely to ever return to the site. If salon fails, it won't be the consumer's fault.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
I feel bad about losing Salon, since I do enjoy reading their tech section. But this has been coming for a long long time. At heart, they were basically just another dot-com the same as all the ones that went belly-up a few years back. They disguised their dot-comminess by trying to crank out a "product"--but the product was one that people were habitually accustomed to getting for free. Have any on-line magazines ever actually turned a profit on subscriptions? It didn't work for Slate; I dunno about Wall Street Journal (who charges) but I'd be inclined to guess that if they are, their reputation has a lot to do with it.
Fifty thousand more subscribers? Heh. Good luck, Salon. I'll miss you.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I'm sure there will be a lot of comments like: "this is just capitalism at work, survival of the fittest, etc."
If Salon goes under, then it's an example of how capitalism can FAIL.
In fact there are lots of comments that state that capitalism is working. Why? Because it's true. Salon pissed through a huge amount of money and failed to attract enough subscribers to survive. Salon has failed, capitalism has suceeded.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
And where is capitalism obligated to keep a site which rarely posts good content (I'm talking sub-Slashdot quality, fer chrissakes!) afloat?
It seems to me that if Salon goes under because they spent more than they earned, it'll be Salon that fails. That's capitalism at work.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Over the last few years, I have consistently been impressed with the quality of journalism found in Salon's pages. To all those of you that have enjoyed some of salon's work over the years, please consider subscribing.
Try this: Go to the Slashdot search page and search for "Salon". I get over a hundred results in the last year alone. And these are not just links to AP newswire stories hosted at Salon, these are original content, bankrolled by them. For all you out there bitching about "how can a website spend 80 million dollars?" that's how. They spend that much by funding the production of original, quality content.
It's also hilarious to see some of you bitching about how Salon is going out of business by alienating their readership by publishing perspectives that are too liberal or too conservative. While having a liberal slant in general, Salon publishes perspectives that challenge their readers. I disagree with most of what Andrew Sullivan writes, but I appreciate the diversity of perspectives that his writing provides. If I wanted a news medium that always told me what it thought I wanted to hear, I'd just tune into the network news every night.
Do you want to see this source of independant journalism go out forever? If they don't a big jump in subscriptions, it will. I know lots of you out there are unemployed, but lots of you aren't. the $20 or $30 salon subscription is nothing to you highly paid software engineers.
I'm not working right now (I'm a student), so money is tight, but I have subscribed and after I write this, I am going to go over and try to extend my subscription. And yes, I have done my best to encourage friends and relatives that read occasionally to subscribe as well (with three successes).
They are a quality publication that you have all been sporadically enjoying for many years and now they need your help. Please subscribe.
>Utne Reader (uck) and Mother Jones (yeah).
Or on The Nation or Harpers. They come in dead tree format so no more wireless laptops in the bathroom. There's a decent essay out there of how Salon spends its money (giant office spaces, high living, etc) that makes me not want to help them, especially when some very decent papers like MaJones or The Nation do what salon does a lot better.
What bothers me most is the assumption that there is no room for liberal media and people using salon as proof. Salon is just a badly run company ready to join its dot com brethrens at fuckedcompany. They simply failed to compete against more established and better left-leaning news outlets.
In the summer of 2001, I purchased a two-year subscription to Salon, knowing full well that the subscription term might be longer than the company's existence.
I knew that Salon had not made perfect business decisions, but they were pioneers in the Internet space, and there was a chance that they had learned from their errors. If a dynamic, independent source of journalism had an opportunity to succeed, then I wanted to do my part to help.
But now, it is clear that the management team lacks either the skill or the will to make a profitable enterprise out of Salon. They have had nearly two years to balance their budget, and during that team they received another substantial VC infusion. But they are out of money again, and there is no reason to believe at this point that they can manage the company out of this.
I won't be sending any more bailout money to Salon, because the overwhelming evidence is that it will go directly into the severance packages of unsuccessful managers.
I also subscribe to slashdot, ars technica, and gamespot. I am one of the few who actually support good content. Please if you have put off subscribing - to any site - do so now. Show that you want good content. No flames about slashdots quality either - you know as well as I do you check this site multiple times a day!
For all you out there bitching about "how can a website spend 80 million dollars?" that's how. They spend that much by funding the production of original, quality content.
OK, let's look at this... Big picture stuff... Server co-location, $1000/month, tops. The rest should go to content production. For $80 million, you could pay 80 writers $100,000 each for 10 years. Now, Salon hasn't been around for nearly 10 years, and they don't have 80 writers (more like 10?). And $100K/year is a nice salary, *especially* for a journalist. So, I'm still asking, where the fuck did their money go to?
80 millions!?!? I could buy, like, 50 rockbands ... And I bet they wouldn't make me read anything either! /Rumagent
Sure, there's loads of sites with advers which stick in my mind. Take slasdot, for instance, it has loads of great adverts. Like the one for that company that sells stuff that geeks would think are cool, green laser pointers and whatnot; can't quite remember their name or URL, it's just on the tip of my tongue. And there's the one I'm looking at right now, advertising some sort of hand-held three-in one communications device. And so on. So there.
Let's be clear: some of the money they've raised over the year is simply gone, exchanged for stockholder equity: that's investment capital, not lost money. They spent it, the stockholders have stock, the money isn't owed to anyone.
A very small amount of money in relative terms is actually owed, under a few million I believe, but their operating costs exceed their income and they don't have any sources of stock -> money exchanges.
It's still ridiculous, of course, to have spent that much, but it's just pissed away not owed.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Propaganda "works". Blind patriotism "works". Corruption and greed "works". But that of course doesn't mean that it is good for a country and it's people.
On a side note: Europe has never been a super power because Europe is not a single country but a continent with independent countries on it. And of course, the EU does not form a republic or state. Maybe you should listen up in class next time before posting such bullshit.
+1 Truthful
Putting up the right wing conspiracy as a bogeymen to solicit donations is pretty disgusting
If you think so, don't you agree that having the ultra-right-wing newspaper "The Wall Street Journal" printing its little diatribe against Salon to be pretty disgusting too?
Salon's biggest difficulty is the mediocre quality of its content. Salon tries to be an educated, urban, lefty magazine, but it doesn't quite make it. There are other magazines in the same space: The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, Harper's, and so on. Can anyone seriously pretend that Salon's content is the same quality as, say, the Atlantic Monthly? When I saw that Salon wanted ~$30 to subscribe, I thought to myself: "I don't want to read their articles that badly." And I like leftist opinion journals.
So when trying to get subscribers, you tell them that it's very likely that they will be out of business in a matter of weeks and what they paid for the subscription will be lost? Mod them up for honesty, down for driving away new business.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Doing some simple math, there's no way this makes sense.
80 million owed divided by 50,000 new subscribers = $1600 per subscriber which would be needed to make them break even. That doesn't make any sense
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
If you think Andrew Sullivan is a "hyperconservative" it shows how skewed your view of the political landscape is. If you have ever read any of Mr. Sullivan's works you would know that he is socially liberal on many positions. Most "hyperconservatives" don't support abortion, gay marriage, and sex outside marriage.
One of the problems with political debate in this country is that we are all too quick to label and catagorize people instead of listening to their opinions. It is all too easy for a liberal to label someone like Andrew Sullivan as an "EVIL SUPER HYPERCONSERVATIVE" and then ignore his writings instead of reading them and giving them a chance to enlighten yourself or change your viewpoint. Likewise it is too easy for a conservative to label him as "EVIL CORRUPT HOMOSEXUAL" as do the same. The problem is that he does not fit into nice predefined catagories. This is one of the reasons I enjoy reading is articles so much. I don't agree with everything he says but I still gain understanding from his insitefulness. Much more than I would gain if I just read someone I agreed with 100%.
Just a tip. If you are only reading articles you agree with 100% you are doing something wrong. Challenge yourself sometime by reading people who you don't agree with and try understanding the world from their viewpoint. It will make you a much wiser and better person. If more people did that we could get away from childish namecalling and maybe have a reasonable debate sometime.
Brian Ellenberger
We have no BBC or CBC here
I am an expat Brit living in Redmond, WA, and before I got broadband the lack of news here used to drive me CRAZY. I just didn't understand how people could be so incurious about the rest of the world, and how crap and banal is what little news there is which mentioned anything outside western Washington, or, Bog forbid, the USA. Hell, we don't even get any news from Vancouver or Portland most weeks!
Anyway, enough ranting: I just wanted to say that I preserved my sanity by going to the BBC radio web site where there is a round-the-clock stream of virtually all the BBC's radio output. For news in English, Radio 4 is probably best, though the World Service is also excellent, and also available in (currently) 43 languages.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
It's about what's covered, how long it's covered, and what words are used to cover it.
The ABC/CBS/NBC newscasts, from which most Americans get their tiny bit of news, is very left-of-center in its coverage. Extremely anti-Israel pro-Palistinean, pro Democrat. They use Democratic talking points like scripts. Good grief - look at Dan Rather!
Sixty Minutes, another prime source of news/analysis for Americans is as liberal as they come.
CNN and MSNBC in general have a liberal tenor, but I find CNN's coverage to be excellent and I'm smart enough to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Fox News is conservative, no doubt, but it is the only 24 hour news network in the US that leans right.
Most journos are liberals. (The Washington Post staff voted 80% for Al Gore. Similar results in the NY Times, Boston Globe, etc..) The result is conservatives have mustered their forces and they're winning! But the libs have no one to blame but themselves. For so long they had a stranglehold on the media. They created a huge, angry, pent-up demand for Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News, etc..
I don't have the time or the patience to get into a tit-for-tat on the merits. There are plenty of liberal voices out there. There are more and more conservative voices. Many of both stripes are jerks or idiots. (Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh)
Best of all, now we ALL have a choice. (What, don't you have a sub to _Mother Jones_?)
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
Salon.com is appealing to the community for help. They haven't been able to pay the rent since December. To date, they've lost about $80 million dollars
Only $80 million? Even in Canadian dollars, this is ridiculous.
Wow. I could buy my building, employ a few hundred thousand homeless people as slashdot editors, feed the hungry AND STILL have enough left over for an Audi A4 or three.
Where do I sign up to lose money like this?
--
Owe $25,000, your problem
Owe $25,000,000, bank's problem
The rest should go to content production.
So, I'm still asking, where the fuck did their money go to?
The last company I worked for was a software company that delivered it's products over the internet. By your logic, we should have spent 99% of our income on software development. This was absolutely not the case, as only 30% of the staff were engineers. There is a lot more to a company than its core business: marketing, sales, HR, operations. Salon needs all of these (and before you dispute it, salesmen are needs to sell ads).
Anyway, if you want to know where their money goes, just look it up. It's all in the SEC's EDGAR database. Here is their most recent filing. If you don't want to look it up, last year they spent about 4.5 million on "content production" and about 2.5 million on sales. They spent about 1.5 million on "administrative and general" which I'm sure includes that enormous rent, and all the management and HR staff positions.
Furthermore, if you read the link above, you'll see they had a 17% increase in revenue last year and a 21% decrease in operating expenses. Combined, these led them to reduce thier losses by 55%. Clearly, they are on the right track and just need more time.
Why is it that liberals and their ilk just dont understand simple market dynamics.
The American people aren't as liberal as liberals want to believe.
Therefore - rags like salon.com will fail - Rush Limbaugh and Fox News will contiune to profit and kick major ass.
Wake up! - America is conservative.
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
...antiwar protesters who can't locate Iraq on a map...
Better than warmongerers who can't locate Iraq on a map.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Do you want to see this source of independant journalism go out forever? If they don't a big jump in subscriptions, it will.
Salon is one source of independant journalism, not the only source. Their business model was terrible, demonstrated by the fact that they need to double the number of subscribers simply to break even. The best writers will be picked up by other sites and publications, while the mediocre ones will need to find other work. Don't prolong Salon's life, let it die quickly and with some dignity.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
Here is an interesting editorial on the future of online publishing and why the Slashdot model is far better suited to the Net and today's competitive environment than Salon ever was.
It seems to me that Salon's failure has more to do with it's left-wing politics than anything else. I read Salon but the constant bush-bashing is irritating to say the least. Great if you're a bitter Democrat, but I don't even look at the politics section anymore.
It's like talk radio. Mostly right wing and profitable. I hear that Al Franken and some others want to start a left-wing talkk radio network. Well, I wish 'em luck, but I thought they already had Larry King and Sally Jesse...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
"then it's an example of how capitalism can FAIL."
a pr il27/space_place.asp
What do you mean? One just has to mention The $200k/month rent to shoot holes in that little dreamboat. I am sure I am not the only one that would like to be their landlord!
If you think capitalism isn't working, perhaps you should attend their Going Out Of Business Sale... just to see what kind of bargains you can get.
PS, I couldn't blow $80 million buying premium space at a mall and stocking the damn thing!
http://tenant-search.net/dealmakers/2001issues/
Alot of ideological publications cannot make it on their own. "The Nation" has never made money. "National Review" (on the right) is supported by WFB's family wealth. NPR takes government subsidies and still tirelessly presses is subscribers for more money!
There are only two kinds of media that can independently survive in America:
1. Mass-market outlets that take a "least common denominator" approach to content, trying to appeal to a wide array of people (Fox, Rush Limbaugh, Newsweek, US News, etc).
2. Outlets which have very high-quality content (Harper's, Granta, etc), for which a few people will pay a significant amount of money.
Salon is neither of these. To survive, it will require a subsidy, just like "National Review" and "The Nation."
...where-as conservatives waste billions of dollars and line their pockets with the rest. What a shock.
they have more content than Time or Newsweek.
Salon is dying, Wired sold out to big media, Suck died. Most of the early purely net based publishers are out of business. The lesson: pure online journalism or publications don't work - yet. And it's a failure of readers as well: they hardly support good sites with subscriptions, since there still is and always will be loads of "free" content around from big media. The best way to make money in media is to sell cds, dvds, tv shows, books and magazines. Well financed web based publishing is as real as the paperless office ... hardly at all.
Those numbers, both financial and membership, make my head spin. I can't remember the last time I found anything of value on Salon.
For what it's worth though, Salon people should talk to Kuro5hin.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
I take your point, but in all fairness the $40k/year figure was for a band that went gold - 128 bands out of 30,000. So yeah, $40k/year, if you're in the top .005%. Doesn't sound so good now, does it?
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I mean, I only have so much extra cash to spend on things these days. Between supporting Mandrake and Transgaming and Opera, well thats it folks. I cant afford to support you all! :)
I think the hiring of all the conservative voices on FOX,MSNBC,CNN, etc. is in response to marketplace demand,as it should. Remember MSNBC's hiring of Donahue was heralded as the liberal answer to the conservative commentators? Well Donahue's ratings are in the toilet, and his days are numbered. There have been many attempts at a radio talk show response to Limbaugh but they all consistently fail. Could it be due to the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy(tm) Hillary spoke of, or could it be that many leftist ideas fail in the marketplace in forums where they can be directly challenged? TV and radio need to sell advertising dollars and are purely ratings driven. If a TV or radio broadcaster had a left-wing commentator who consistently scores high ratings do you seriously think they would get rid them for ideological reasons, even though they bring in the advertising bucks? Of course not- they're in business to make money. But the liberal viewpoint in these media outlets fails time after time. Is it because the liberal viewpoint is being silenced or because the liberal ideas aren't that great to begin with? (the answer to that probably depends on your own political beliefs.) As far as bias in the print media (L.A. Times, Washington Times,etc.) it does exist but now that it is being exposed it doesn't occur as blantantly. Back in the day, whenever describing a republican such as Dick Armey, Tom Delay, etc. it would be prefaced with "right-wing","extreme-right wing",or "ultra-conservative". Do you recall the last time a democrat such as Ted Kennedy or Maxine Waters was referred to as "extreme-left wing" or "ultra-liberal" in mainstream print? The phrases "big oil" and "big tabacco" are frequently used. Do you recall ever seeing the phrases "big union" or "big environmental lobby"? Pro-gun control people are referred to as "activists". Anti-gun control people are referred to as "lobbyists".
Company says, we can't make money doing what we're doing, so give us more money so we might break even and stay around, if not, you're out the money you gave us.
Did I get that right?
I think K-Mart should have used that marketing methodology.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
It's only fitting. Most of the business models of companies like Salon read like something right out of Paranoia.
I used to work for a company that used Mason -- that was, in fact, the place where Mason had been created. Every single one of us hated it; it was inflexible and stupid, and the admins absolutely refused to ditch it in favor of anything else because they were in the position of people who knew how to keep things running but didn't know how to upgrade anything for fear of having it all come crashing down. When we offered to invest our own budget in a replacement CM system, they refused.
By the time word got around that we were getting ready to burn the place down rather than use Mason any longer, and by the time they decided it might be a nice idea to upgrade to something that wasn't reminiscent of the Stone Age, we all lost our jobs.
Mason, open-source as it may have been, was still crap.
I'll tell you that's simply not the case because of all the things that do depend on physical location. The biggest example is taxes. I'm the co-founder of a small company that runs an online RPG, Meridian 59. We're a "virtual" company with people that live in both California (specifically the Bay Area) and Connecticut. Because of this arrangement, I get to do over twice the amount of paperwork for taxes. Since we pay people wages, we have to register in both states for various payroll tax reporting. On top of this, since we have workers in both states, we're considered to be "doing business" in both states, so we're subject to the Sales and Use taxes for each state. When we sold some CDs containing the installation of our game, we had to report total sales and break down the sales that happened in each state in order to pay the proper taxes on them. As CFO, this took a non-trivial amount of my time to collect and organize this information, and to fill out the appropriate form. Finally, there's no substitute for face-to-face contact. Building a small business is about building relationships with people; there's only so much you can do over Trillian or even a phone call. As for the SF Bay Area, it's not so simple. Yes, it's stupid expensive to live out here. But, when you consider that there are two major cities, one of which is known to be one of the few cultural centers in the US, you realize what you are paying for. Also, there's a strong concentration of truly clueful technical people out here, especially ones that have the required skills for game development. Two of the people that are working with us (on the cheap, I might add) I met around here due to our shared interests. Some insight on the matter,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
it's too late. your $30 will go right into the keg and coke fund for the 'going out of business' party they'll no doubt throw.
they BLEW $80 million. you honestly think, even if they get another 50,000 subscribers tomorrow, that these morons can run a sucessful online company, and be on the air long enough to get your money's worth of reading back?
why would i throw $30 at these guys (no matter how good their content is) if they'll flush it down the drain like it's water?
1) They threw away their money on pricey real estate so they could make a pretentious claim of being upscale.
2) They went public, as did many companies at the time, and soon had nothing to show for it. I don't know if I can blame them completely for this one, but it does show a bit of a lemming mentality vis-a-vis their behavior as an on-line entity.
3) They alienated their formerly left-of-center readership by signing on rabid neocon weasels like David Horowitz and Camille Paglia -- people who have the distinction of either not having a thing to say or having traded in a formerly intelligent and insightful viewpoint for right-wing ass kissing so they could have a bigger audience. We call that "selling out."
4) C'mon, maybe they weren't all that good anyway.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
Reason's commentary cuts both ways against the left and the right. Of course that's going to happen when you have mag and site written by Libertarians, Objectivists and Lockean Liberals.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
From my POV (I am in the UK) all american news media is right wing.
From my point of view, all UKers fall somewhere between socialist and communist. Then again, sweeping generalizations like mine and yours are not very helpful.
Fox news is so right wing it is like a parody.
Oh, it can get much worse than the Fox news channel. Take, for example, WorldNet Daily or Newsmax.com, which make a point of headlining stories about Christian persecution and how Darwinism is being refuted. Hell, it can even get worse than that. Perhaps check out the Hal Turner Show.
For that reason I am always amazed to see some people claim CNN is "liberal".
CNN is pretty fair, though I've never heard them criticize a government program. Dan Rather is a much better example of Leftist bias in American media.
Can you US guys get Euronews (satellite news tv channel)? I wonder what you make of it in comparison to your home grown news channels.
Let me guess: "America is the source of all the world's problems. The Government is the solution to all the world's problems. Individality must be suppressed. The Government is the source of morality. Capitalism is evil. There is nothing wrong with communism; the problems have only been in its implementations." Did I get it right?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
The best writers will be picked up by other sites and publications
Although this may be true, it is neither assured nor would it necessarily be benficial to the free-thinking public (ie individuals who attempt to seek out a diverse source of media information). Having a single, or relatively small group of publication(s) where the *best writers* have a seemingly continuous intercourse (open dialogue...) on a wide array of issues is both convenient and beneficial. The assumption that the *best writers* will get *picked up* is a bit egregious with respect to towards the *mediocre ones* (perhaps those whose views conflict with your own?). A mix of top notch and up-and-coming fledglings is appreciated and very difficult to assemble in one location. It is very erroneous for one to assume that these voices now expressed in the forum of salon will continue unaffected htrough a disaggregated media.
While it will be sad to see Salon shut down, there is another source of intelligent, insightful commentary for the new millennium.
In the name of Hades, what kind of editorial catastrophe happened that allowed this kind of immature nationalistic name-calling to be put on the internet? Who is guilty of giving this ... this ... creature called Russ Smith the power to enforce his opinion upon the masses? This man should be fired and never ever have the power to publish in any form of media again. Sure, I'm all for free speech and all, but that pretty much excludes the right to enforce your own biased opinion upon the masses through the use of mass media, especially when it involves flames/insults.
Hate me!
I get my news from everywhere.
Daily Star of Beruit, J-Post, Drudge, BBC, National Review, Global Security, Janes, CNN, Fox, Eagle Butte News, the Nation, MSNBC, North Korean News, and the list goes on.
I pick and figure out my point of view for the world from all these sources.
That said, the mainstream media (CNN, Reuters, ABC, NBC, CBS) do have a slant towards the left. While there are some conservative editorialists at CNN or MSNBC they are religated to 30 hour or 1 hour "crossfire" pieces.
Another slant can be seen because of the way they treat "Conservatives" and the way they treat "Liberal" causes views in interviews or news pieces.
An example from this month
On February 5: While other networks found Colin Powell?s UN presentation moving public opinion toward war, Jennings could only dwell on doubts: ?Many people will believe the Secretary of State today and some will not.? After George Stephanopoulos said even Democrats were ?impressed? with Powell, Jennings tried to rebut: ?Let me add a note of skepticism. Does this mean they were impressed with substance or performance??
Tom Brokaw onLate Night with Conan O'Brien, the NBC News anchor joked that the Bush administration raised the terror alert level to orange for ?high? and are advising American to not congregate in large groups ?because they may be trying to discourage anti-war protests.?
What the hell is that? It's bias.
Anti abortion activists are reported on as if they were mass murderers while terror groups like Hamas are treated as if thier views are acceptable.
That's bias.
I've said it before and I'll say it again : Reading Salon liberal journalism is like getting punched in the face with your hands tied behind your back.
I like reading opinions I disagree with but I hate it when there is no real method to rebut. Disagree with a story? Tough luck, no way to contact the author and no forum tied directly to the story.
I could go further and say the liberals running Salon run a budget about as well as the liberals in politics handle budgets. No wonder they are pleading for handouts. Small wonder they aren't blaming the successful websites for their demise and demanding a forced redistribution of the popularity.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Then Microsoft Bob was silenced. Had nothing to do with the marketplace rejecting it.
I'm not a right winger by any measure, nor am I for the left... however salon used to have content that was at least partially appealing several years ago. I don't even remember examples, but they were on my /. portal back in the late 90s.
Lately I can't remember seeing a single article I liked, and I vaguely remember some direction change making me pull it off the RDF sidebar. I'm not John Q Public - but if they don't write stories anyone cares for -- then why should anyone care?
If you want overtly liberal content you can go to kir5hoin or whatever it's called... which is another site that seems to blow smoke up it's own ass, but is at least a community portal.
The assumption that the *best writers* will get *picked up* is a bit egregious with respect to towards the *mediocre ones* (perhaps those whose views conflict with your own?).
My point was that some Salon writers are more talented and/or better writers than the others. They shouldn't have a overly difficult time obtaining a new job. The mediocre writers at Salon may have a harder time finding new work. Change is the nature of the net and it's not just techies who are affected.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
Yes, all independent news sources should be cherished, but I would also encourage people to use this thing called the 'internet' in order to check out news from other countries, The BBC, or CBC news sites are very good, but try something like the tehran times for example. By reading all news sources, comparing and contrasting to each other, you can start to pick out the truth of the situation, and get a well rounded view. And it will at least raise some eyebrows if you start to notice a certain lack/onesided bias of information reaching you through your local media
I was born and raised in Canada, and now I'm currently living in New Zealand. I grew up watching american news side by side to CBC, and now I can compare CNN and BBC side by side here in NZ. It has become very obvious to me just how very biased and sensationalistic american media is. It's just awful, very US centric. All american media is so busy blasting outwards, hardly anything penetrates from the outside. You have to actively seek it out . I'm not saying other countries are always better BBC and CBC are pretty good examples of media, but I'm sure they show some bias. I just think the last media you should trust is your own, no matter where you are.
let's enter the bubble of media narcissism.
Holy Narcissus, Batman, a 20 year old pop culture insult! Russ, you seem to be in love with yourself too.
David Talbot, a founder of Salon, will raise a glass at a San Francisco wake, comforting his staff that the online magazine, which is currently on the verge of extinction, "fought the good fight" and other such blather.
How insightful, no? No. Let me give you some help, Mr. Smith.
When you want to do a slam job, you need to understand the thing your are slaming. You need real inside details taken from personal experience or interviews. You might also have a clue as to what the slamee does, what made it different and explain those things to your reader. An excellent example of how to do that is Tom Wolf's "Tinny Mummies", a slam of the New Yorker magazine, now reprinted in his book, "Hooking Up". When you lack such insight, or fail to deliver it, your slam ends up derivative and unconvincing, just a rehash of what anyone paying attention could have picked up from the Associated Press, clueless abstracted jibberish with a mean twist.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
OK, let's look at this... Big picture stuff... Server co-location, $1000/month, tops.
BS. A decent amount of cagespace, with redundant 10mbit burstable lines, at a facility like C&W will set you back 8-14k depending on floor space usage.
Not everyone uses Jack's ServerRackEm to host their site, especially those that have outside investment to answer to.
(I still have no clue where all the cash went, they bought equipment during the internet goldrush when everyone should have been paying 60% on the dollar so at worst they could have only spent 3-4mil for a site hardware wise and thats including a lot of nice sun/cisco gear).
--- I do not moderate.
Move!
They are web-based.
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Oh give me a break. While I admit that these companies were foolish to invest in high end real estate, and real estate cost undoubtably played some minor role, none of that explains the many MILLIONS of dollars spent on marketing, sales, give aways, selling things for below cost, and so on. In a more normal company, without the dotcom hype, the real estate cost has a much larger impact, but most of these dotcoms were flush with plenty of cash to cover real estate (via IPOs, VC money, etc--while that doesn't make them is a good and had relatively small need for office space and, if they were even halfway sensible, they could have negotiated short term leases (one of the many advantages of doing business in this country) that would have allowed them to back out in enough time if they had half a clue. Certainly the cities themselves was not that big part of the problem...perhaps too much real-estate...perhaps overly expensive locations (e.g., water front, main street, whatever)...many successful companies have come out of these same cities both before and after the dotcoms (i have been involved with some). Their total overhead was certainly a large part of the problem, but the problems ran a lot deeper than mere city of location.
I would say the reason that Kuro5hin, slashdot, and others survived is mainly a function of the fact that they had little to no costs to begin with other than bandwidth and some minor handware costs. Neither produce content; salon and the others had to produce superficialy professional content and that costs a significant amount of money ("journalists", editors, fact checkers, etc)
The people who buy ads and magazine subscriptions in this world think that they would rather buy other magazines, many of them free and advertise in other mediums that have much better return on investment than Salon. The reporters are demanding certain salaries, their lawyers, accountants, etc demand certain salaries, if there are not enough people interested in the product that they are creating they might as well go to work for other people. There are a lot of other opinion magazines that probably do better than Salon and a lot better run that these lawyers, reporters,etc should go work for.
BS. A decent amount of cagespace, with redundant 10mbit burstable lines, at a facility like C&W will set you back 8-14k depending on floor space usage.
There's no way that a simple site like theirs requires that much bandwidth. Hell, I'm betting that my site garners more pageviews than what they get, and it doesn't cost $1000. I don't know what kind of webserver you're talking about, but IIS can handle well over 200K+ pageviews a day on a PII 750, all database created. There's no way they're getting more than 1m pageviews a day, and that's only a handful of boxes. Apache doesn't handle dynamic pages *quite* as fast as the latest IIS, but still, there's not a big difference. Redundancy? RAID 5 is pretty standard on co-los. If they're spending more than $1K on bandwidth + server, they're getting ripped off in a big way.
Try this: Go to the Slashdot search page and search for "Salon". I get over a hundred results in the last year alone. And these are not just links to AP newswire stories hosted at Salon, these are original content, bankrolled by them. For all you out there bitching about "how can a website spend 80 million dollars?" that's how. They spend that much by funding the production of original, quality content.
Actually, it appears to be the same story posted hundreds of times on slashdot.
Dave Wheeler worked on the original Salon code, which has since become Bricolage, a generally well regarded CMS (in fact lauded by eWeek as "Most Impressive" of 2002
If the gold rock stars can live on 40k a year and still have mansions, chicks and fleets of cars -- salon should be able to find some journalists to work for that and less...:) That way they could have stretched out the 80 meeelion just a little longer until they got a few more /. readers to pony up $15 bucks a piece... (just how many subscriptions would a website that burns through that kind of dough need to actually make money?)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I agree, where else can you lose 80 million dollars think you somewhat have a profit?
uh, we just need 50,000 more people to believe that we are running a profitable business and then we'll break even?
WHAT?!?
I wish I could run my business that way.
I know you are not using the Slashdot search page as a reference to make a point. That's like using a poll and saying that it shows the statistics of America.
Slashdot has probably 3 million users. Most will NEVER subscribe to Salon, and shouldn't on the basis of financial trouble--sorry this is Capitalism kiss my ass I don't owe them anything. Another thing, the slashdot search engine is piss poor, if you wanted accuracy you should have Googled Then you get 89, I did my best to cancel out comments but there's only so much that can be done.
Isn't it ironic that Matt Drudge is managing to build himself a little empire ... starting with nothing, while Salon can't .... starting with all that money.
When you get into the opinion selling business, you better make sure that there are enough people willing to buy what you think.
I view Salons demise as merely the rejection of elitist liberal journalism by the news and opinion consumers.
Ya, keep calling us dumb ignorant conservatives while trying to get us to buy your product.
it IS independent. that means that they don't have a corporation telling them what to print. name one other independent source of original content on the web that gets 3 million unique visitors a day. name ONE, and i'll call you smart.
Why, as a conservative libertarian, should I support the socialist authoritarian drivel that comes out of this site?
Let it die.
I sympathize with your anger, but am not really sure what to make of it.
Lots of people here are comparing Salon with media like Mother Jones, The Nation, or The New Yorker, which are commentary and review media more so than news outlets.
I'm not sure those are valid comparisons. Those magazines publish weekly at most, and don't often have writers in the field worldwide covering current events.
A more apt comparision is the New York Times. It publishes everyday, and provides original coverage of events in widely different places across the world.
I don't really know, but what is the rent and operating expense of the New York Times? My guess is that it's comparable to Salon, if not more. Suddenly that 200k rent doesn't seem that unreasonable.
But I don't really know.
I am scared crapless of the idea of Salon going out of business, because the daily news in the U.S.--with the exception of a few sources (e.g., NPR, The New York Times)--is crap. Even The New York Times doesn't get it completely right for me (it is supposed to cater to NY, after all).
I don't understand why online journalism doesn't get anything right. Salon's got the right idea, it just needs to be more nonprofit in orientation.
I'm not sure what scares me more about the idea of Salon going out of business--the fact that it would be one less independent news source, or the fact that no one--even that independent news source--can do journalism right. If their coverage doesn't blow, they can't manage a business worth crap.
Why isn't there a nonprofit equivalent of Salon? Is there? Everything I've seen is way too radical and misinformed that way.
Again your costs analysis are way off. This isn't about total bandwith used or a minimal amount of servers to pull it off. This is whats needed to give a certain level of service to every user, all the time. This requires fat pipes to handle load bursts, groups of servers, and some advanced caching mechanims in front (regardless of the dynamic nature of your service).
Just because your non-corporate run site handles such load on a low cost basis doesn't mean the costs scale the same for a company that has investors/board to answer to. They wanna know your DR plan, the survivability of your colo site, what happens during catastrophe X, Y and Z. Running a colo site for an internet based company is an expensive undertaking.
Sure you can do large portions of it on the cheap but skimping on the costs at the colo level will have a dramatic affect on your uptime stats.
--- I do not moderate.
50,000 subscribers at $30 each pa: $ 1.5m
Rent at $200,000 pm for 12 months: $ 2.4m
Even if they *do* manage to *double* their subscribr base, that still leaves $2.4m out of $3m going on rent and maybe $600k for salaries. Yeah, maybe they can sell banner ads...riiight...
Time for Salon to die so that others can learn from their mistakes. Use your subs money to support Kuro and look to the future.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
on the tangent of the so-called "liberal" media, this essay is a good (published beyond this homepage of the author) critique of his common run-ins of the critiques of Chomsky and Herman's critique of the mainstream media with their "Propaganda Model." http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/herman review.htm. check it out... you'll learn about the propaganda model, and if you don't agree with it - you might at least (hopefully) come up with more creative critiques than what jensen debunks.
Well this one finally outed me as a liberal. I went on the site and started reading. Being a first generation immigrant, I recognized a minute spark of something that I would wish for most Americans: some awareness of humans east of NY and west of LA. I subscribed, for no other reason than to help disappoint certain idiots that lambasted the magazine, especially the WSJ. Somewhat reminds me of Apple, whose demise has been predicted oft and inaccurately. I read in someone's comment that they were going to end up reading foreign newspapers. I realized that I have been reading the Economist, that bastion of stodgy britt conservatism, exclusively for the last ten years as a means of balancing my leanings and staying objective. US conservative media doesn't cut it (Good Lord: Fox is now called a news medium? {Shiver} ) It was time for me to spend $30 as the first step in a journey of exploration of what American liberalism might actually mean.
I remember reading Salon 6 or 7 years ago. This was in the relative "infancy" of the WWW, when suck.com was still independent, and most print magazines were nowhere to be found. It was wonderful how much content they had, when there were few other "serious" journalism sites. They had an advice column written by Garrison Keillor, and another by Susie Bright, and they had a lot of interesting commentators. Good stuff for the time, and all online. I remember also being very impressed because they were the first online publisher I'd ever seen/heard referrred to in the "traditional" journalism outlets (quoted and referenced by The New Yorker and NPR and network TV news, among others, as well as print media).
I got pretty disenchanted about the time leading up to the Clinton impeachment, when they were spearheading a "conservative conspiracy" theory (they even broke some news stories, though I forgot what, exactly), when they basically seemed to become just one shrill party-line voice. I was glad they tried to smear Ken Starr, but concerned for their growing narrowness (hahahaha a neologism!). After that, despite attempts to increase their diversity by hiring conservatives to write for them, they lost had their focus. When I last went there and they shilled to get me to pay to read all the way to the end of their articles, I realized I didn't care anymore. Sometime in the last few years, they bought the Well in San Francisco (another early Internet experiment which didn't scale well past their telnet BBS beginning), which cemented their loss of relevance for me.
Now they've become a media outlet for which there's no audience, and though their passing is notable, it's not likely to be much mourned by anyone outside of a very small group. Salon is Dead. Long Live Salon.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
I'm no buisness genius, but if doubling there income would get them in the black, wouldn't halving there cost do the same thing? If Salon was saying "Give us 6 months and we will drastically cut costs" I'd buy a 6 month subscription. But we've been down this road before, and it doesn't appear Salon is serious about maintaining (or, achieving) financial solvency.
On another note...
[i]Mr. Drudge, of course, has been derided for years as a cyber-gossip by snooty media elites, but when future historians analyze the Internet phenomenon of the 1990s he'll be considered a pioneer while someone like Mr. Talbot will rate a mere footnote.[/i]
This is by far the stupidest thing I've ever read on the internet, and people, thats saying a lot...
I'll be sad to see Salon go, but its hard to see this as anything but a sinking ship. Who is that guy that companies hire to come in and clean house? (Sun hired him, then fired him). Well, Salon needs that guy.
From what I've read in the articles and people's posts here, it sounds like Salon is being yet another dot-com failure..
The open huge offices, pay huge salaries, and they're probably paying Verio a few big bucks for hosting too..
It really reminds me of a small company I used to know.. It was a publishing company that wanted to get into the Internet business. They hired a dozen or so huge-salary executives, and twice as many staff (everything from support to programmers)..
Once a week, they'd have a team of masseuses come in to help relax the staff.. There was huge money spent on silly things, like overpriced servers. I was particularly impressed by the 10' tall neon logo in their lobby.. It wasn't very practical, since only the staff really saw it..
They signed into absolutely huge contracts.. One was a contract for a billboard at a football stadium. one million dollars per year for 12 years.
Their company name wasn't particularly memorable, and had no association to their purpose. We'll just say the name of the company was a motion of farm animals, and the company was an Internet development company.. I still don't quite understand why they picked the name.
Within a year, the staff found their 401k money had never been invested (the company "forgot" to send it). Their insurance lasted for exactly one month before the insurance company cancelled all their accounts for non-payment.
The sales staff had no technology knowlege, so they couldn't sell anything.
The lead programmer took over the job of sales, because sales sucked. But that left a hole where lesser programmers were handling all the large projects now..
If they had skipped the 12 million dollar debt with the billboard, millions more on other billboards (which never returned a single sale), waste like neon billboards in the office, and expensive office space, they could have done really well.
I'm kind of sorry I never participated in the whole dot-com era.. I never had a pool-table in my office, or really exotic furnature.. But I've had a job for years in an Internet company that thrives because we do what we do well, and we keep on tight budgets.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
These guys are raking it in. And they don't even really need to pay rent on their offices, just their servers.
They are making tens of thousands of dollars a month in subscription fees. More then enough to pay for servers and content. Don't bother donating to their swank offices and David Talbot's $400k salary.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Heh, they're still asking to set cookies on me lasting until 2010. There's optimism for you!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Look. 50,000 x $5 is $250,000 thousand dolars a month. They are making a quarter million dolars a month. If you can't run a print or online mag with that much money, something is wrong.
They could also save a lot of money on layout by using a CMS, soemthing a print mag can't do (AFIAK).
Salon is cool, but hugly wasefull.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
MEMO:
TO: David Talbot
FROM: John Murdoch, consultant
RE: Salon Business Plan
Executive summary: It's the math, stupid.
Dear Dave:
I have read of your impending demise on SlashDot, including links to an article on the Globe and Mail site suggesting that you are paying $200,000 per month in rent for space in San Francisco and a smaller--but similarly mind-blowing--amount on space in New York. I also read your plea to readers, saying that if each of your 53,000 subscribers just signed up one additional subscriber, why Salon would be able to break even. America would continue to have a vocally left-wing e-rag; the earth would continue to revolve.
The business problem
It's the math, stupid. If your assertion in the editorial plea is correct (that you need an additional 50,000 subscriptions to break even) then your annual budget is in the neighborhood of $3,000,000. But your annual rent ($200,000/month) runs to $2,400,000 a year--leaving $600,000 for staff and editorial content.
Simply put, you have zero reason to have any office space in San Francisco or New York. You're running a virtual magazine, remember? That's a synonym for website. If Rob Malda and Jeff Bates can run SlashDot from Holland, Michigan, what makes you think you need to be paying $100 per square foot? You need a decent connection to your hosting sites, and a place to keep the handful of full-time employees left on the payroll.
How you could re-organize
File for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11. That protects you from your creditors while you develop a plan for re-organization to submit to a bankruptcy court judge. Yeah--your main money men will take it in the shorts: John Warnock and the Silicon Valley liberals who fronted the $81,000,000 you have pissed away will have to write off their investments. But the big thing Chapter 11 will do is get you out of those, um, burdensome (read: IN-blinking-SANE) leases. No bankruptcy judge in the country will allow you to pay for top-dollar real estate for the purpose of hosting a web site--the leases will be broken. Then you can move on to the rest of your re-organization.
Re-organization:
You have 53,000 subscribers--some pay $18.50 per year, but most pay $30 per year to avoid the ads. Let's assume an average subscription of $24, and (round numbers) gross revenue of $1,270,000. Let's figure on 6 full-time equivalent employees at a fully-loaded cost of $60,000 apiece (including salary, taxes, benefits, etc.): that's $360,000 in payroll. 1000 square feet of "office/flex" space in any moderate industrial park will run you approximately $8 per square foot per year--that's $8,000 in rent. Toss in a thousand a month for heat/light/power/telephone, and another thousand for office expenses, furnishings, furniture, and equipment--soup to nuts, your total "SG&A" expenses run to $392,000. Leaving you $880,000 per year for writers and hosting fees. Top-notch editorial doesn't come for free--but almost Nine Hundred Grand buys you a lot of articles at a thousand bucks a pop.
But don't let that stop you from begging...
Hey--public broadcasting stations have been threatening their imminent demise for decades. So, for that matter, have dozens of television evangelists. If you're just scamming your subscribers for a bit more cash--hey, it helps the bottom line. Even the politically-correct have to pay the rent....
But let's be clear about one thing
Your financial problems are problems of your own making. Paying millions of dollars for glam real estate was "making a statement." It sure was--"we are D-U-M-B!" You have the ability to solve your problems--use the bankruptcy provisions the law allows you. Doing so will keep you in business, and allow you to continue to have a voice in American public discourse. If you fail to do so, your voice will be silenced by your own management failure--not some secret cabal of "voices in the present administration" who might want to silence you.
If Salong does kick the bucket, I (and I'm sure many others) would love to provide mirrors of the old Salons stories archives to a worldwide audience. Aside from basically making the Salon stories immortal by that favourite Linus trick--letting the rest of the Internet be your backup--it could prove to be a useful research tool.
Just look at enron.com.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'm not talking about skimping... one can get a a few RAID 5 boxes on a VERY fat pipe (OCx) with generator backup in a high security site with 24/7 monitoring for cheap these days. It's just not that expensive. I re-research costs & products every 6 months or so, and it's ridiculously cheap to get 24/7 availability with a fat pipe due to the massive supply glut these days. But hey, what do I know?
I understand what you're saying here, and I agree, but I wouldn't consider Slashdot a news source so much as a newslinking service. The content-to-link ratio is decidedly in favor to links, whereas Salon is a full-fledged journalistic operation. Slashdot is a manually-organized Google News for geeks, with a discussion section, IMHO. However, in these "digital times" we're living in, the lines get blurred. What actual content Slashdot delviers is more like meta-content communicated through choice of articles.
"Salon has failed, capitalism has suceeded"
Maybe Salon has failed, capitalism continues?
Notes for Modders: -1, Irrelevant, -1 Off-Topic.
T&K.
Political language
Unsustainable business models are a dime a dozen these days.
Salon has spent $80M, and has 50,000 subscribers.
That's a customer acqusition cost of $1,600 per customer.
Say they get their doubled subscribership numbers; that drops the per customer acquisition cost down to $800 per.
Effectively, this means that they would have to get $67 a monthly issue in order to recoup costs, if acquisition was for a period of 1 year, which is normally how these things are measured.
Let's be incredibly generous, and call it 5 years of acquisition. Even so, we are still talking over $13/month/60 issues.
Does anyone really believe that this is going to happen?
These people obviously do not understand cost accounting or cash flow. They may or may not be good journalists, but they certainly are *not* good businessmen.
-- Terry
Looked at the site, not bad, just to bad that until today I never see or herd about it might
Just be me, or it might be the general course of the 80mil lose ?
I just hate bit SPAM, (www.netnoise.com.kh)
I've been a member of Salon for quite a while and did what I could to support them. I would be sorry to see it go. I think it's funny that people think Salon is "left". I mean, if it is left, what is the Boston Phoenix or the Village Voice?
I also would be sorry, and more pertinently to Slashdot, because I think their design for semi-automated publishing was kind of neat, and it is one of the last examples of a house doing their own development work I know of. That is a dwindling group.
While I cannot address the questions of rent for their offices -- which if true, I agree seem excessive -- I think "the end of the dot-com bubble" means more than the crashing of way-out business models, excessive spending, and such. I mean, when MoTown was starting up, they were excessive in parties, liquor, etc
To me, these companies are failing as much because of deflation in the information technology industry as anything else. That deflation is caused:
The last effect is a subtle, I think. Since good news coverage and similar entertainment is now available on the Internet and cheaply, any premium or brick-and-mortar company has to deal with not so much with e-business competition but with the expectation that new can be had for much less. Why subscribe to the New York Times paper when most of what's good about it is available online for zip?
I think whatever happens to Salon is part of a trend, because what we earn for doing information technology is diminishing and will continue to diminish.
Jan Theodore Galkowski, (Oo) http://www.smalltalkidiom.net/ MySQL,PHP,ETL,SQL,MinGW C, and plucking the Web
"I would be sorry to see it go. I think it's funny that people think Salon is "left". I mean, if it is left, what is the Boston Phoenix [bostonphoenix.com] or the Village Voice [villagevoice.com]?" Just as anti-American socialist as Salon, but in hardcopy. Although the Boston Phoenix doesn't seem to be quite as crooked as the Village Voice.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I'm Russian, living in Bellevue, WA and guess what, after returning from Russia last week, I like US media more than ever before. Why? Because in Russia around 80% of news broadcast time is NOT about Russia. You never know what the heck is going on in your own country! Moreover, around 50-60% of news time is targeted at putting down the US and its policy (not because of Iraq, it has always been this way). This hate towards the US is cultivated to distract people from real problems, like poverty, corruption, bureocracy, unemployment rates, omnipresent dirt, people freezing in Siberia, etc. If I lived in Russia, I'd rather have the news American way, i.e. in reverse proportions, and talking about the problems in my own country. I guess that's in part is why I live here.
*
Check out http://www.sciencemag.org
Now THAT is a magazine with real content!
If you want an offline version but need the pretty pictures, they also have a PDF version that was added at the beginning of July, 2001.
You can get to either of them by clicking on Subscriber Services at the top of the main page, it's listed under "If you're new to Salon Premium." Actually, even simpler, both versions are linked from the "Premium Benefits" area at the top right of the main page and the section pages.
fencepost
just a little off
Actually, they run Andrew Sullivan so they're trying to appeal to a broader spectrum. I assume someone reads Sullivan, and it ain't me.
(Mostly I'm sick of seeing his name *everywhere* -- worse than Coulter)
I'm across the lake in Seattle, and I get both BBC(A) and CBC, plus PBS rebroadcasts of BBC World News, plus Chinese-language news and a variety of other goodies (if you can speak the language) on the International Channel. To be honest, I get most of my news on the Web, but I can't see why you couldn't get it on TV if you wanted to ... or does Redmond have a different cable provider than Seattle and not offer these channels?
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Does this remind anyone else of what Mandrake did a while back?
I'm across the lake in Seattle, and I get both BBC(A) and CBC, plus PBS rebroadcasts of BBC World News,
i.e. non-US originated material.
Yes, one can get this sort of thing on TV even on teh Eastside, but I prefer radio news, and used to prefer it in the UK as well. I didn't own a TV or have regular acces to one for the last three years I lived in the UK, and didn't miss it. Pretty much the only thing I watch on TV is The Simpsons, King of the Hill and South Park.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
In the grand scheme of things, Salon is just another online newsjournally type site, if they go away, we are not losing anything unique. The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Exchange on the otherhand, has been around since the 80's...I remember having the The WELL on my dial list as I went through my nightly BBS romp.
Unfortunately, through various twists and turns, The WELL ended up under Salon's ownership. If Salon goes under, does this mean The WELL will also? That would be horrible and ironic end for something as insignificant as Salon to take down a piece of internet history with it...in 10 years (assuming Salon shuts down, which it likely will) few people will remember or miss Salon...but 20 years down the road, The WELL is still remembered for it's place in the early internet, and I know there are plenty of people who will miss it.
Otoh, maybe more people like Salon than I realize; but somehow I doubt it is the same as The WELL.
I hope if Salon goes under, that The WELL will somehow be preserved. As for Salon.com, I could care less.
I actually enjoyed their thinking liberal (and conservative) articles and was considering subscribing since it made me think, but the link opened a page that was entitled:
Raise Limbaugh's blood pressure! Keep Salon in business
This is not something a thinking liberal would say. Of course "thinking liberals" apparently are so rare that they couldn't have a subscriber base from them (especially if you alienate some allied groups). Those who are liberals only as beneficiaries of the state can't afford a subscription, and the limousine liberals only want to freeload.
Pity that they have to decline into demagoguery in a foolish attempt to stave off bankruptcy. They may not have had sufficient value in their content to survive, but now even their content has no value, merely volume.
It is always a loss when reasoned voices lose a forum, however that happened long ago at Salon. A few are left, but they are apparently a mistake.
I don't want to get on a soapbox or anything, but there are more meaningful causes that people could contribute to. There are people out there who don't have enough to eat - why not help them out, instead of bailing out a "business" whose product simply doesn't attract enough customers.
If anyone could use some suggestions on how to help actual people, and do something meaningful, feel free to email me! avi at aviflax dot com.
How do you support "sex outside marriage"??? Is someone trying to pass a law against it?
If so, I think we can count on voter turnout being quite a bit higher in the coming years.... especially among college students.
The problem with that scale is that it is too simplistic, or perhaps that it is only measuring one variable (change vs. preservation) out of many. (and strictly speaking the word "liberal" doesn't belong - progressive would be better) For instance you could make a similar scale of another variable (government control vs. individual autonomy) from:
1. Totalitarian
2. Authoritarian
3. Moderate
4. Liberal
5. Libertarian
As you could guess people from any point on your scale could end up on any point on my scale depending on what exactly it is that they want to change and/or preserve. For instance both stalinists and anarchists would be in the radical side of your scale but their vision for society come from the opposite sides of my scale. And the same person or political philosophy can end up on different points on either scale depending on the particular issue - look at how it's impossible to tell the difference between a Communist Party member from A.N.S.W.E.R. and a Paleo-Conservative militia member when the issue is the war on Iraq and the evils of Bush family.
Note that by it's more strict (as opposed to popular) definition "liberal" really belongs on this scale and would include many conservatives - it's not unheard of when talking about political ideas to hear the phrase "liberal conservative" i.e. someone who is trying to conserve the liberal aspects of our current system from statists (ranging the entire spectrum from reactionary to radical). It also explaines the apparent paradox that the Australian "Liberal Party" is pretty much the conservative party.
I can't wait to register salon.com for myself!
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
so I'm prolly late with this question:
But how in the fuck did they burn through $80 million??
Almost $680,000/year in salary for just 4 company executives.
It seems hypocritical to beg for gift donations when you pay yourself 6-10x more than the average American's income.
There's a big difference. It has to do with the way the Ministry of Defense censors British news. See, their system is supposed to work the same way the American one does, you want to censor something, you take it before a judge. But the MoD shortcut that with what's called a D-notice, which is basically a sort of intent-to-censor that says "We might decide to censor this, so if you don't want us taking you to court, why not just leave it out in the first place?" D-notices are used in a lot of cases where a judge would rule against the MoD, too. Whistle-blowers and such often take their stories to the French or American press to get around the issue.
-m
My full-size 4x4 pickup truck only gets 18mpg out if its 325 cubic-inch V8, and the gas cost at $2.00/gallon is killing me. According to Arianna Huffington, a Salon writer, I don't need this vehicle, nevermind the fact that I had the low range transfer case engaged but 24 hours ago climbing a muddy 30 degree incline. People simply don't need such things in the 21st century, such vehicles are purely status symbols. (Not to mention that they support terrorism....for every 10 rounds of 7.62mm ammo her 24mpg Volvo XC-90 buys the terrorists, my truck buys them 15!)
Well, given that Arianna believes that my truck is unnecessary, and I can certainly affirm that Salon is less necessary than my truck, I'm going to have to decline the invitation to subscribe during these tough times.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
I have little sympathy ... I mean, come on, it doesn't take $80M to run a server farm and pay a few journos...
First of all, that $80M is the total they lost, ever. Of course it's a lot of money, but others did way WAY worse. Even amazon, who we regard as somewhat successful, was losing between 25%-125% of that amount per quarter until just 6 months ago*. And, as many others have pointed out, one of the reasons that they still have ongoing losses is the digs in downtown SF, with a lease negotiated in the halcyon days of the late 90s when it seemed like a good idea.
What I don't understand is how everyone refuses to be understanding of the situation. We all know, times were good, now times are bad; why dance on Salon's grave before the body's even cold? Even if you disagree with its political slant, Salon has had tons of insightful articles by a wide array of interesting columnists, and they're flogging a business model we'd all love to see succeed: the pureplay online publication. Salon's a great thing caught in a bad place -- be careful wishing for them to fail spectacularly, because that implies lots of other imminent failures you may not like so much.
That said, if the primary reason they're in such a tight spot is that horrible lease, then this is exactly the kind of situation that bankruptcy protection was designed for. I for one would LOVE to see Salon file for bankruptcy and reorganize, not because it would be a sign of failure, but precisely the opposite. This is a financial committment that could very realistically stop them from operating. They shouldn't be in that expensive location any more, and the landlord will most likely not ever see the money anyway. So why sink the ship along the way?
THAT said, the fact that they're still floundering with no plan is the reason I haven't subscribed yet. Times are tight; I could certainly afford $20 a year, but I'd rather not spend $20 for 1 month or possibly 2. If 50,000 of us all signed up at once, they may have enough revenue to continue indefinitely, but no one signup is going to save them. The information I'd like to see from a "fellow prisoner" is what Salon's going to do to make sure they stick around a while - I think bankruptcy could be key.
Notes:
* According to EDGAR online via yahoo financial
Honestly, 200K/month on rent could be much worse based on where they are. I worked for a startup that had a rent that was likewise ridiculous (plus we paid astronomical amounts for *leasing* the furniture... friggin' purple chairs!). It finally ended a painful circling of the plughole at the end of last year.
Here's the clincher. You think we were in sunny California? Nope, upstate NY.
BTW, I signed up for Salon, anyway... I'm in a generous mood tonight. I'll feel like an idiot later if they go down in a month and all I did was fund 1/10 of a for-old-times-sake scooter, but I don't mind feeling like an idiot now and again.
I should put in a plug for Harpers, too - my wife worked there for a summer as an intern when we were still in school, researching the Harpers Index and reading submissions, books requesting reviews, etc... we got to read a few excellent books before they were published, she had all *kinds* of interesting stuff to talk about for the whole summer, plus now she gets Harpers for free for life! Anyway, it's dead-tree, but I find some really excellent tidbits in every issue. I don't always agree, but it provides good food for thought.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Save the money and get some cosmetic surgery instead, and maybe you can get a job reading the teleprompter for ACME Newschannel.
What's not to love, especially for a Game Master? You get to act proper and fair as the GM, yet get to screw players over arbitrarily as The Computer who runs the world! Set up all sorts of plots only to have everyone kill each others' clones (you get six) and/or die at the hands of
- enemies,
- traitors,
- commies,
- mutant powers (yours or others),
- mutant powers that you can't control,
- poor experimental equipment,
- poor normal equipment,
- equipment sabotaged by your fellow players,
- death-trap missions,
- death-trap missions that your secret society explictly tells you must fail, and
- confusing and self-contradicting mission objectives!
In all seriousness, find a copy of the Paranoia manual! It's hilarious reading, and running it is the most fun ever if you have even a few of the right people.GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
i *DO* know how much they pay writers, and they pay just as much as any other struggling magazine.
Personally, speaking as someone who fits the Salon demographic, I'm unexcited by the site except for its cartoons. I find its reporting on par with what is given away for free in weekly alternative papers, and its commentary rather unilluminating (not to mention plainly weird: is the idea of paying for Andrew Sullivan supposed to be a joke?). Whoever's getting upset about it has a remarkably short fuse.
Instantly, a half dozen more interesting publications and portal sites on the web spring to mind, first stops for anyone seeking not so much to be "informed" by gobs of news wire data as to try and understand our world:
www.guardian.co.uk -- One of the world's best dailies
www.independent.co.uk -- Superb middle east reporting
news.bbc.co.uk -- Slightly three-piece suit, yet comprehensive internationally
www.zmag.org -- Wide range of progressive writing
www.commondreams.org -- Clearinghouse of progressive opinion updated daily
www.antiwar.com -- Superb international clearinghouse of news and opinion from left, right and center, ideal for keeping tabs on our warmongers
And that's not even taking into account the sites existing for such indispensable print publications as Harper's, The Nation, The Progressive, and The Baffler. There's the NY Times, too, should you crave guidance and instruction from oligarchs.
It's a pity to see Salon in trouble, but they really have blown through a remarkable amount of money -- a caviar-class feat that makes them look rather silly alongside more courageous papers and writers who would have loved to have had such dough, and didn't, yet somehow still survived and continue to be more vital.
Needs to get another business model.
Really, you can't honestly compare Amazon and Salon.
Take away Amazon's web site, and what do you have? A *huge* company with buildings, supply chains, delivery systems, etc... If they had a physical shop you could walk into, you wouldn't think that they're anything different than any new mega-chain spending money putting up shops and building market share.
The only thing with Amazon is that they are a web-based only catalogue ordering company. I know that there are alot of other companies in the US that are catalogue-only. That's what you should be comparing them to.
Salon is a web magazine site. No big inventory, no supply and distribution chains. All you need is a webserver, a co-lo, an editorial team, and some freelance writers. There is nothing forcing them to spend alot of money on fancy offices, marketing executives and coke habits. Sure, they wouldn't be as big, but they would probably stil be around.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
Well, $350/month is a really greatprice , but you to pay for *air*? You know, someone's ripping you off, everyone else doesn't have to pay for air...
See Salon Table Talk. Anyone can read the Forums but you have to pay to post there. Whether that's good or bad is a matter of opinion. Posting used to be free. When they started charging to post, regulars stayed around and trolls went away, so the quality of the forums got better. I don't know if that can be generalized, of course. The Salon boards have always had a particular dynamic and the pay-to-post model seems to fit it pretty well.
From Yahoo Finance. Looks like there annual revenues are around $3 billion (with a B).
Conservative whacko nitwits explode them. Have you seen what W did to the budget? Remember Reagan?
The policy of giveaway tax breaks to starve government because of ideology is irresponsible. It's not governance, it's the opposite. If they ever had the courage to balance the tax cuts with spending cuts, they'd be out on their asses. But they know they can create a mess for others to deal with because everyone likes free money and its easy to separate a tax cut from its consequences.
I think that you are right to demand the ability to respond - first posts are hard to get, we need more opportunities. It's just weird to see your comment on liberals and budgets.
Part of the problem is that to get financing, you must look like you already have money.
This is why a lot of dot-coms had to get offices in places that were expensive.
While it might be cost effective to have a server farm and offices in the middle of Iowa or something, it would have done damage to their image.
Bullshit. That "fake it 'til you make it" strategy has never worked. If it has, show me. It didn't work for the Wall St. wannabes in the 80s. It didn't work for interns trying to look like well-connected bluebloods by running up their credit cards, or Hollywood wannabes trying to do the same thing. And it didn't work for the dotcommers either. Gee, surprise...
Salon has supported open source by giving it visibility and decently well-informed coverage for a mainstream media outlet. And they were doing that before most of the rest of the non-technical media had any idea what open source was.
Every article has both an author email and a letter to the editor link at the end. They usually also have links to the Tabletalk forums. I just checked, unlike N8F8.
...I'll sell you a million dollars' worth of equity in my company. Then I'll go and rent the coolest possible office, so chicks will dig me. I'll lease a flashy car, so chicks will dig me. then I'll hire a really cute assistant so chicks know I'm being digged by other chicks. Rich dudes will dig my cool, chick-soaked lifestyle so much they'll want to hang out with me all the time. They'll hook me up with the best business deals for sure. So it's a can't-lose proposition. At the very least, I'll get invited to the coolest parties, with the best looking chicks. As a shareholder, you can come too. How's that sound? If business is ever slow, it's OK 'cuz you'll still have equity. Cool, huh!
By that math they'd probably need *5 million* subscribers to break even -- 100 times more than your 50k. At $16 a pop -- which is reasonable, because that's still more than most people pay for regular magazine subscriptions. It may be half of list price, but few people actually pay that -- they go for those "24 issues for $12" deals. For example, it costs $10 to renew Wired for a year.
Then start over and have all my people work from home.
If Salon survive then cool. If not then I hope it acts as another reminder that even in a boom a company should be frugal with its spending - the downturn is never that far away.
It's all in the SEC's EDGAR database. ... They spent about 1.5 million on "administrative and general" which I'm sure includes that enormous rent
Interesting, thanks for looking that up. The article claims $200,000 on rent a month with more in New York, which means upwards of $2.5 million a year - probably double the figure in SECs EDGAR database, perhaps someone who knows how should look into this more? There could be legal shenanigans afoot, or the $200k/month quote could be very wrong (which makes about 3/4 of the highly rated comments on this thread redundant).
The German left-wing newspaper taz - die tageszeitung has been in financial trouble since I can remember it, and they've been using the "begging for subscriptions" tactics for several years. Until now, they've survived. They even got me as a subscriber some time - slight information overload with two newspapers ;-) but as long as it's a good deed... So there might be some hope for Salon if we take this as a reference.
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
There's been dozens of comments pointing out how their lease in SF was signed during the economic zenith, and how that's sucking their money dry.
Why not renegociate? Sure, the landlord doesn't have to talk -- but, if Salon files for bankruptcy, he loses a tenant all together. Why not cut the rent in half and use half the space? Salon isn't using the upper floor anyway, and so cutting their rent in half would help to cut their costs and help them survive -- and pay rent for years to come.
The landlord will make less in the short term, but he'd be able to rent out the top floor (for less money) -- and help ensure he still gets ridiculous rents on the loewr floor for years to come.
The Internet community is socially and politically active, and could be motivated to help out. But Salon must seem sincere -- and their cost in rent and in executive salaries must be reduced if folks are to believe that Salon is worthy of survival.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
However, that doesn't necessarily mean that we should dance over the demise of site that promotes free thinking and thought. Say what you will about their business practices, the idea that this is one of the last sites that promotes free thought and makes this site worth saving.
Going to McDonald's costs me close to $10. I usually cruise by Mickey D's four times a month. I think that I'll just save the greasy fries and instead buy that subscription, either the $30 or the $18 version, instead.
No, I don't agree with a lot that is written there, but I also don't agree with what *some* people here have to say -- but I keep on reading!
>>...they are one of the best sources of independant journalism on the web--even if I happen to agree with less than 10%...
If you're disagreeing with it, it's an opinion, not journalism.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
... I want some of the one you smoked when you were over here.
The BBC world service and the BBC World News (the TV equivalent) are great, but here in the UK you don't get BBC World News (you get BBC News 24, which is just local stuff regurgitated all day, indistinguishible from commercial offerings) and the BBC World service is relegated to a crppay AM frequency that no radio can catch (or for nostalgia's sake you can use a World Band radio and then catch it there). Why the world service is not broadcast in FM in the UK beats me.
You want to know what is going on in Japan, China, other parts of Asia, or Latinamerica? Or even in other European countries? Good luck, the British media, BBC included, do not care.
Thank the Internet, there the BBC has a better presence, not the traditional BBC which is as parochial as the local competition.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Indeed, the companies I've worked for cost their people at, roughly, twice their salary.
And, of course, one reason why they're floundering (aside from astronomical rent) is that you and 49,999 others haven't subscribed yet. It's interesting: About this time last year, when the last batch of Salon-is-dead predictions were making the rounds, I tried to convince several of my friends-- all regular Salon readers-- to subscribe. None of them did, citing exactly the above reasons.
Could it be that the latest round of Salon bashing is intended to bring about this result? I mean, come on... the voices in the traditional media that are salivating at the prospect of Salon's demise aren't exactly impartial.
I know what I'm going to do: take out gift subscriptions for said friends who didn't subscribe last year; maybe they'll get hooked and renew next time around. Risky? Yes, but it could prove to be money well spent-- much more so than the subscription fees for several dead tree publications that I receive but don't have time to read.
--
Why bungee jumpers need more life insurance.
Take away Amazon's web site, and what do you have?
Walmart.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
One less place for Arianna Huffington spew her babble about SUV's using too much gas supports terrorists and how drilling for oil in alaska is detromental to the wastland enviroment.
Remember that PBS has News Hour every evening (with rational debates... not arguments) and then possibly the best content show in Frontline. Just in the last two weeks Frontline has covered the War on Terror from INSIDE the White House and how the idea of Preemption has gained a foothold and the effects of capitalism over the last four years in China.
Ok, PBS isn't a 24/7 news channel. But there is good content out there.
The problem is that American News is not news, it is "news magazine" fluff. Things like 20/20 and Dateline with their feelgood stories and scaremongering ("this town didn't know it had chemicals in its water supply... UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE!") are very popular with folks who don't usually like "news". The mainstream news as compromised itself by trying to co-opt such tactics. That's what happens when you aren't government/public subsudized (BBC or PBS).
But the most important thing is that most people only want to listen to what they want, not what they need. Most people (in and outside of the US) put more value in entertainment over news. The fallacy is assuming that a nation's Media reflects on the nation (as compared to the Media's income type).
What is music when you despise all sound?
Even amazon, who we regard as somewhat successful, was losing between 25%-125% of that amount per quarter until just 6 months ago*.
Amazon is a couple orders of magnitude larger than Salon, though. In terms of fiscal losses as percentage of total operating costs, I'd bet Amazon is doing better than Salon and has been for a long time now.
they're flogging a business model we'd all love to see succeed: the pureplay online publication.
It's not the business model's fault though; it's Salon's cash-hemmorhaging implementation thereof.
They should have filed for bankruptcy by now, to break the long-term leases and contracts that are preventing them from having a sustainable business and get them back on their feet. That they haven't just seems to be further proof that no one there knows how to run a profitable business.
I realize you're a troll but your post gives me a chance to explain what I mean since their probably are people out there as stupid as you are pretending to be.
I'm not talking about the popular defintion of conservative vs. liberal I'm talking about a "liberal" a word from the same root as "liberty" aka a "classic liberal" or libertarian (though libertarians have a comprehensive world view and are more docrtinaire thus further to the extreme on my scale) and the oposite of a "statist". A "conservative" by contrast is someone who is trying to "conserve" what they see as positive ascpects of society and is the opposite of a "progressive" which is trying to change society to make it "better" (in their view). So in America where we already have a liberal democracy a "conservative" may be trying to conserve those aspects of society that make it liberal (aka free) thus a "liberal conservative" would be the opposite of a "progressive statist" commonly called "liberals" but often not very liberal at all by the classic definition. In that sense "liberal conservative" is not an oxymoron. In fact Russell Kirk used the term to describe one of the essayists in "The Conservative Mind" - I think I'm in pretty good company here.
"evils of the bush family"? What the hell is that? Boom motherfucker, will you liberate your mind?
My bad if I didn't put quotation marks around that phrase. I was not myself ascribing evil to the Bush family - I was talking about the identical rhetoric coming from both Paleo-conservatives on the far right and Communists on the far left. Their conspiracy theories are essentially identical and if you were to debate them on the propriety of war in Iraq or whether or not GWB was a good president or not you would be hard pressed to discern which end of the spectrum they are coming from. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell Noam Chomsky from Pat Buchanan. I just mentioned it to point out that a simple scale from reactionary to radical isn't always helpful in making distinctions between political philosophies.
There is nothing forcing them to spend alot of money on fancy offices, marketing executives and coke habits.
Nerds tend to think of Marketing as unnecessary and even counterproductive (viz any number of Dilbert strips), but this is not true. You can have the greatest product in the world, but what good is it if no one uses it? It's a rare product that can gain widespread popularity by word-of-mouth alone.
Whether the value delivered by marketing staff is greater than the salaries and benefits paid to them is not always clear. In Salon's case I think the company certainly didn't get what they paid (and are continuing to pay) for.
Why should I delay their drowning? They are Commie Mutant Traitors. (Well, at least Commie...)
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Did you even read my post? :)
When your business is running an online magazine, software development is pure overhead. It's just smart to keep it to a minimum. Maybe you want a couple guys in there working on the code, but they should at least just be customizing what's already out there, not writing whole new applications from scratch.
So it's not the fact of having coders, but the scale they were working at that I'm pointing out here.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
First we read:
"I also think that it would be a shame for them to close now that they've finally created an advertising scheme that has a snowball's chance in hell of working on the web."
A few sentences earlier:
"They haven't been able to pay the rent since December."
Their advertising scheme obviously isn't working. Next!
Not true at all, due to the different way in which the two words are accepted in society.
In news reporting, people are usually referred to by the way they identify themselves, unless there is a very strong consensus to the contrary. Far more people are willing to refer to themselves as "conservative", because it doesn't have the stigma attached to it, which "liberal" has from years of attack from the right. Therefore, one would expect to hear the term "conservative" used more often, because more people would choose to call themselves by that name. "Conservative" implies that a person is to the right of center, even if only a little bit.
"Liberal", on the other hand, implies well to the left of center. "Liberals" who are not on the far left would typically refer to themselves as "progressives", or even "moderates", because that's how they view themselves. Hence, the media would not label them ("progressive" is a loaded term and would make the media sound like they supported the person's views), unless they were truly far to the left, but would merely mention their alignment with labor and the environment.
We all know, times were good, now times are bad; why dance on Salon's grave before the body's even cold?
Because I enjoy dancing. Especially on THAT grave
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Is there such a thing as a pro-American socialist, in your opinion?
Jan Theodore Galkowski, (Oo) http://www.smalltalkidiom.net/ MySQL,PHP,ETL,SQL,MinGW C, and plucking the Web
...if you're worried about paying for a year and them going under.
You'd also be helping their financial position even more (if that's your goal), since this is about 2.5x greater than their monthly subscription.
Nope. Government co-erced socialism is not freedom, ergo not American. However, if one wants to go be a socialist and not force the rest of us to go along with them, that's fine.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I work in the printing/publishing industry, and paper is the largest single single expens by miles, including the lease on the press (big), rent/mortgage (big), the ink (bigger), or payroll (bigger still).
To make $5 million in grodd profit, you could easily spend almost 6 in just ink and paper! Then add in the other expenses.
Publishing on the web is nothing comparitively. Even the consumable cost of T-3 bandwidth would be a dron in the well by comparison.
Enought said. I do agree with what you are saying, in the sense that they likely will go out of business. However, it definitely is not a good thing. Salon represents a populist viewpoint that has been effectively censored due to the advertising supported model of media that we currently have. What we instead have is corporate, moneyed, elite media, mixed in with tabloid infotainment crap.
Salon isn't that liberal or progressive. They claimed/tried to be progressive, even eclectic, which the Utne Reader has always done so much better, both print & online www.utne.com FREE. Salon painted MIT Prof Noam Chomsky as a lunatic or the anti-Christ because he describes US foreign & domestic policy as it is, and in plain language, so you don't need degrees in history, politics, or economics to understand. He's universally reviled by right wing conservatives because he tells the truth and backs it up with evidence (footnotes in his books are quite numerous). Even mentioning his name is taboo for commercial broadcast media (really!), for reasons you can infer. Salon's persistent attacks on Chomsky show they are run by nuts. The attacks are full of so much shit it becomes humorous when you start counting, except for the fact that a lot of people actually believe it, because it's on Salon. Therefore it is tragic.
The Utne Reader is the Anti-Reader's Digest--including extreme positions in every direction (not "both" sides which assumes only 2 sides exist), it is eclectic, & the selections aren't sanitized crap for retired people who miss the good old days. I use Chomsky & Utne as examples because I'm an authority on them.
Salon simply wasted a ton of money, had plenty of "liberal" stories, but are right wing (a la Rush Limbaugh*) on a few of the more esoteric (important) topics. They do that particularly on topics of which most readers have little prior knowledge (or depth of understanding), therefore don't notice the profound bias (and reversal from "being liberal"). The Chomsky attacks are just one example. Chomsky's not interested in fame, fortune, or power, just truth & justice.
I cite them because they were so viciously construed that they simply could NOT be an accident, or a difference of opinion. The managers of Salon are greedy turds, the liquid kind. You can't polish a turd. You have to wait, then use spray paint.
Omission is the predominant error (tactic) of the generally conservative media in America. They constantly call themselves & each other liberal, but if they really were liberal, why would they do that? They're too conservative to ever even mention proportional representation (USA is strictly geographic representation.) It's called Public Relations, an industry which is far bigger (even per capita) in the USA, than any other country. One book, co-authored by Prof Chomsky, studied the "liberal bias theory" and concluded that most media, especially broadcast, are very conservative (the First Amendment does not apply unless you OWN a broadcast license). Inclusion of the occasional naked breast or being less conservative that the prez on a couple of issues, or allowing Howard Stern & Love Line on the radio does NOT make it liberal. All the porn in the world does not make a medium liberal. The only consistently "liberal & progressive" programs are Alternative Radio www.AlternativeRadio.org & www.NewDimensions.org, found on most public radio stations. PBS (TV) has a few programs that are often or usually progressive &/or liberal, but not consistently (I may be wrong--haven't done a comprehensive evaluation for 2 years now). Any progressive/liberal news outlet would at least occasionally remind us that 32,000 people starve to death each day, 60,000 die from bad water, plus 74 species go extinct. And while >20% of US adults are functional illiterates, millions are homeless, etc, we need a whole fucking war to stop Hussein (erh, I mean distract Americans from their obesity) while a single missile would get rid of him, most of his chiefs, and maybe a thousand civilians. We spent a fortune (most of it borrowed from our children by Reagan) on GPS satellites so we can hit any particular window or door, anywhere on the planet, and now we can't use them? Have a nice day (sucker).
I get Canadian TV news, which makes US TV news look like Mickey mouse with a suit & tie. They actually deal with real news every day (what a concept!). They have less weather, sports, what the president "said", etc. thereby more time for actual news. The FCC banned all cable TV companies from adding Canadian channels a few years ago unless they pay 5 percent of their GROSS income as a "fee". So much for diversity. Freedom of speech is not right to hear or watch. 200 channels of shit is not progress. A free alternative to Salon is www.alternet.org
* Rush (the fat rat bastard) Limbaugh's main demographic is undereducated, underemployed 20-40 year old white males, who appreciate placing the blame on women, affirmative actions, "the" government, etc., as long as it's not them.
Beware of republicans posing as humans. Party Naked in the church of your Choice. If god wanted you to be naked she'd make you born that way. Self-indulgence is not a virtue. Pollution is not a theory. Recycling is not a fad. It's not cool to be fat, stupid, & arrogant.
And the reason the cockpit doors weren't closed & locked, as the FAA repeatedly recommended: "that would be an unnecessary financial burden on the industry" (in other words, FAA recommendations can't conflict with short term profits, & market forces will solve almost everything).
"Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today." --NY Times book review/
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -MIT Ling
It's another form of censorship, isn't it? Anyway, I've been browsing their site today and I was pleasantly surprised by the content. They had a great article about how cocoa beans, for chocolate production, are harvested by slave laborers over in Africa, some of them little kids. I never knew that. I really enjoyed browsing it today. I think that if they changed their forum, "The Well," to more of an anonymous forum-type site that they'd have more lurkers and therefore more subscriptions. But, $18 for a year is not a big deal. I think the problem has been that people didn't want to pay for content that they weren't sure of. $18 for information for the year is nothing. Plus, now they have the option to simply spend 10 seconds clicking through an advertisement and you can read for free. I spend more than that bursting the pop-ups on regular sites, so I have no problem with Salon charging $18. In fact, you have NO pop-ups with Salon, period, so it's worth reading for that fact alone! Hope other people check it out too.
In fact there are lots of comments that state that capitalism is working.
I'm not moved by the number of knee-jerk replies. They're easy to submit so they characteristically come in droves.
However, I can hardly blame anyone for that. I don't have much time or patience for slashdot comments either.
Salon has failed, capitalism has suceeded.
Look at the media landscape, and try to find the "success". Decent news and analysis is going extinct like the dinosaurs.
I was, as you pointed out wrong; my flame was misplaced. Please accept my apology.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
I would say the reason that Kuro5hin, slashdot, and others survived is mainly a function of the fact that they had little to no costs to begin with other than bandwidth and some minor handware costs. Neither produce content;
I believe you are forgetting Roblimo's love advice, and the groundbreaking work of JonKatz.
grep -ri 'should work'
Maybe they should cut costs? This sounds like a "duh" moment, but I don't care. This decade will probably end up being called the "duh"cade, after all the idiot things people did the last decadentade.
Very popular slashdot journal for adul