It had been a very long time since I’d given any thought to Salon, the pioneering digital publication that announced Thursday it was shutting down. Founded in 1995, it was, along with a few others such as Slate (still with us) and Feed (long gone), one of the original webzines, as we called them back then.
I wrote a media column for Salon for about a year in the mid-1990s. I visited Salon’s offices during a conference in San Francisco and meeting the editor, David Talbot, and maybe Gary Kamiya, who as I recall was the number-two editor. We were going through a transition at The Boston Phoenix and I was concerned I might be cut loose, so I was hoping I could parlay a Salon gig into a staff job. It wasn’t to be, and I’m glad, since the storm clouds at the Phoenix eventually dissipated.
Only a few of my pieces are on the Salon website, but I discovered a folder of 24 columns on my hard drive. They’re not dated, there are no headlines on them, and I imagine they’re what I turned in rather than the final edited versions. I don’t know that anyone has much interest in seeing them, but maybe I’ll post them one of these days.
Discover more from Media Nation
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Some fun trivia: David Talbot is the brother of writer/filmmaker Stephen Talbot, who played Gilbert on Leave it to Beaver!
I too only found two of my pieces in their archives, but it includes my two favorites (one about hearing the band X for the first time, the second about Jon becoming a co-parent to my cat Cyrus) so I’m content. The loss of any media outlet sucks, but I’d stopped reading Salon a while ago.