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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Our staff suddenly ballooned to an obscene size. All at once we were surrounded by marketing and biz-dev types, as well as so many new staffers in every department that it was impossible to keep up with them. All those high-powered rainmakers set to work drumming up money. And some of those jungle drums played a pretty weird tune.
As mentioned earlier, I was strictly forbidden for obvious reasons from having anything to do with the business end of Salon. However, I do remember one business meeting that I was inexplicably asked to attend, and which for me will always sum up the weird illusions and emperor's-new-clothes desperation of those years. Present were several of the hotshot biz-dev and sales and strategic-planning types who had been recently hired. The agenda was to plan a major new campaign to sell products on our site. On the face of it, this was a ridiculous idea: We had insignificant traffic, an audience that only wanted to read our articles, weak technical infrastructure, no fulfillment capabilities, and we were planning to jump into a saturated market filled with cutthroat competitors whose entire business was to sell goods. Other than that, though, it was a brilliant idea. The truth is we were pushed to it by an inexorable logic: We couldn't think of any other way to make money. The Web audience, as Slate discovered after its brave but premature attempt to charge, was not ready to pay for content, and advertising revenue wasn't enough. So I sat there for two hours as a roomful of sharp Harvard MBA types discussed whether it would be better for us to sell knives or wine. It was like being a member of MoveOn.org sitting in a prewar meeting in Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans. Never has so much IQ and business acumen been expended on a total will-o'-the-wisp. It was like watching a bunch of medieval scholastics trying to prove that a circle was actually a square.
Another demented memory from the Gilded Age: After one of the super-glitzy Webby Awards one year, I was wandering drunkenly through City Hall holding the trophy we had won for being best "print/zine" (whatever that means) when I was suddenly set upon by two voracious-looking babes in low-cut dresses. Batting their eyes, they lasciviously asked -- or as lasciviously as it possible to ask a question containing the words "pre-IPO" -- what site I represented and if we were planning to go public. Then, pressing up against me, they exposed their firm young business cards, which revealed to my glazed eyes that they worked for a venture capital firm. These cruel harpies were trolling the Webbies for winners, wielding their coldblooded cleavage on hapless techie geeks who would be so dazzled that they would immediately sign over their billion-dollar algorithms for peanuts. Telling myself, "Yuho, get out of here!" I fled.
Then one morning it all came to an end. The NASDAQ crashed. The end of a Ponzi scheme is never pretty to behold. There was a mass slaughter of diseased dot-coms, whose remains were bulldozed into a mass grave. We hid beneath some corpses and slipped away when darkness fell. But the mad delirium was over. It wasn't about getting rich anymore -- it was about keeping away from that bulldozer. Our stock fell and fell and fell. One half-witted Salon staffer, who shall go unnamed except that his initials are G.K., had exercised a large number of now-worthless stock options, which he suddenly had to pay alternative minimum tax on -- to the tune of $110,000. The Hegelian cunning of history turned out to be a hell of a lot more cunning than some of us had thought.
After the collapse, Salon began digging itself out. This was a long, painful process. Around about the seventh year, it became difficult to come up with anything whatsoever to say when friends, family and nosy strangers would ask, "So how's Salon doing?" My mantra was, "We're about to turn the corner." This worked for five or six years, but then it began to exude a faint rotting smell, like a once-cheery Halloween pumpkin that has collapsed into a hideous blob, or a Scott McClellan press briefing. Toward the end when asked that question I simply smiled inanely, like Harpo Marx.
Over the next few years, digging out from the hole, we added key people who are still with us, notably A&E (originally news) editor Kerry Lauerman and sales V.P. Melissa Barron. We also acquired the pioneering online community the WELL. And we realized that our business model wasn't working, that we had to take the plunge or die. So in April 2001 we launched Salon Premium, gambling that our readers would pay money to read Salon. There were several more near-death experiences, but the gamble paid off. Our subscriber base slowly rose; advertising began to come back. And our investors, principally our two largest, oldest and most loyal ones, John Warnock and Bill Hambrecht, kept the faith. No account of Salon would be complete without an acknowledgment of these two men, who have hung in there through good times and bad -- actually, it was more through bad times and worse times -- and never once tried to interfere with our editorial vision. A lot of people owe their livelihoods to them.
The world turned. Bush was elected. The Florida recount debacle was another turning point for us: We threw more reporting resources into covering that bizarre saga than any previous story, sending our talented Washington reporter Jake Tapper, and correspondents Anthony York and Alicia Montgomery, to Florida, where they stayed for weeks. Our readership grew, and we came of age as a news organization.
Sept. 11, and Bush's response to it, was another signal event. As it became clear what sort of presidency we were dealing with, Salon was fired by a new editorial mission, one as old as Voltaire: to expose the infamy. Meanwhile, the media world was changing. Bloggers appeared, circling the mainstream media like Indians firing from ambush at redcoats marching in formation. The change of uniforms we have carried with us from Day One came in handy: We're still redcoats on Monday and guerrillas on Tuesday.
And our own wheel of fortune kept spinning. Staffers had children, got divorced, got cancer, got married. (Two staffers married each other.) Founders like Andrew Ross and Mignon Khargie moved on. (We were able to lure Mignon back, to join art stalwart Bob Watts, who began as an intern in 1998.) Some of our most talented writers ended up at prestigious print publications: Carina Chocano (who wrote better about reality TV than anyone) went to the Los Angeles Times, and our brilliant media critic, James Poniewozik, went to Time. But others stepped in. A publication is like a sports team: The players come and go; the team keeps going.
After battling side by side with Talbot to keep Salon alive for seven years, Michael O'Donnell passed the baton to a new publisher, Betsy Hambrecht. And late last year, David Talbot stepped down as editor to write a book.
There must be a god that looks after upstarts and dreamers, because Talbot, though at the end so exhausted he had to be lashed to the wheel to keep him upright, lasted at the helm of his listing, shell-riddled pirate ship long enough to see Salon sail into safe waters. Joan Walsh, our longtime news editor and managing editor, took over the top job. In Joan and Betsy's hands, the future of Salon has never looked brighter.
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There remains only to say a word about our readers. Every editor, I suspect, has a mysterious and powerful relationship with his or her audience, one that's impossible to articulate. This is truer online than in print, because we online editors get to talk to our readers more. It's a little bit like a marriage, except that we've never met our mate. Sometimes there's passion, sometimes there's anger, sometimes there's boredom. But most of all, there's a kind of intuitive knowledge that is built up gradually over the years, a kind of shot-in-the-dark intimacy. At bottom, maybe it's nothing more than the simplest of understandings, a kind of contract that is essential for any human communication. Our end of the bargain is to publish things we think you want to read; your end is to read them.
We hope we've lived up to our end of the bargain, at least most of the time. We know you have, because we wouldn't be here today if you hadn't.
In the end, the greatest thanks are due to you, our readers, not just for making it all possible, but for being the reason we wanted to push this Sisyphean rock up the hill in the first place. We've made it this far together -- a decade's journey! Maybe it's just altitude sickness, but this time I think we really may be about to turn the corner. Here's to making it over the top, and to going on.
