What Is Wrong With Salon?

Glenn Greenwald admits to being shocked (shocked) at some of the negative reaction concerning  his  full time move to Salon, starting next week.

He doesn’t feel he had a choice. Blogging doesn’t pay and Salon does. He needs to make a full time living and he wants to continue as a journalist, not a litigator.

I have enormous sympathy with him. Jobs are hard to come by for liberal analysts. There is ample wingnut welfare if you want to parrot The Man, but if you’re in opposition and choose to think for yourself you either deal with a subset of the market, with a separate stepladder of success (academic or foundation), or you live with hunger.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that Salon is off the Web.

This is not strictly true. Salon is connected to the Web, and its
site is technically a Web site. You can connect directly to some of its
older stories.
But because it pushes all links to new content toward a TV ad (or requires
subscriptions) you can’t effectively link to its work, not when it’s
fresh (and worth linking to).

Greenwald is now behind a firewall almost as effectively as Paul Krugman
is. And who’s heard from Krugman  since the New York Times went
"Select?"

Greenwald’s new Salon colleague, Juan Cole, has wisely kept up his
old Web site. Greenwald is moving to Salon full-time and won’t. Then
again, Cole has an academic salary to pay his bills. (Frankly,
Greenwald deserves one, but that’s not my call.)

Salon whines that it must require registration (which tracks its
users) or force them into intrusive TV ads to survive. And it barely
survives at that, which supposedly justifies the stupidity.

A personal note. I’ve been to Salon’s offices. It was nearly a decade ago, but they
were whiners then and they’re whiners now. They don’t know the Web,
they come out of the newspaper business, and they have absolutely no
intention of accommodating themselves to the Web.  Back in 1998 they
had 10 times the office space they needed, in a big office building off
Market Street, at a time when even C|Net was stuck in a renovated
warehouse near the north end of town.

Salon was born out of a labor dispute that killed the old San
Francisco Examiner. They got some dot-boom money, and ran through it
quickly because they had no Clue. They bought The Well and wasted the
asset. Then they cut costs to the bone, hit upon this stupid TV-ad
idea, and started breaking even. The Cole and Greenwald hires are part of its "growth" strategy. They do most of their marketing in the
San Francisco area. If you look at its logs you find an awful lot of
San Francisco area IP addresses, and fewer outside the area than there
should be.

Now I happen to believe it’s possible for a professional
organization to exist and still be part of the Web. ZDNet is part of
the Web. You just have to have some imagination:

• Create creative (non-Web) benefits that will encourage people to become members voluntarily.
• Use TV on the side of copy, as well as other forms of Web
  advertising. So long as what you’re linking to is directly available
  people don’t have a problem with ads.
• Get your head out of your ass and be national. You need ad sales
  "stringers" in major markets with experience calling on national
  accounts.

I don’t happen to think Salon is going to go this route. When things
don’t work they blame the market, and when they manage to succeed
anything they just did is justified.

What disturbs me is they are slowly picking-off some top names and
putting them behind their firewall. Cole and Greenwald both do
excellent work. By going on salary they insulate themselves from the
market, just as any other big media employee is insulated.

And that’s the problem.

The danger in the present trend is obvious. Pick off a few "stars,"
media companies figure, and they can keep the rest of the blogosphere
from being heard. It is incumbent on those of us on the Web, and those
who represent us, to work harder at building audiences, and building
revenue streams. (Blogads badly needs a capital infusion.) I know I work too much in my business and not enough
on it for my own good, but it’s the habit of a lifetime. I need
representation. Many of us do.

And I’m guessing we’ll get it. At which point the "co-opting" of the
Web by those who hold themselves apart from it will be proven to have
been what it was — a shallow, hollow failure.

But words are cheap. I’m looking for some action.