Not With a Bang…

Posted on February 20, 2003

Well, it looks like pioneering online magazine Salon.com is lurching toward its end — apparently they can’t even make their office rent anymore.

This is sad, but expected. Salon has always had some of the best writing on the Web, but they were early victims of dot-com hubris, paying out the wazoo for fancy downtown San Francisco office space and doing everything in-house rather than focusing on their core competency. They even went public at the height of the madness, back in 1999. How many magazines do you know of that are public companies in and of themselves? They might be owned by public companies, but they’re hardly ever (to my knowledge) stand-alone public ventures. But hey, all the cool kids were going public, how could Salon say no?

They’ve limped along for a couple of years now by adding ads, subscription services, and so forth, but it looks like the writing’s on the (unpaid-for) wall.