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.