salon musings
Feb. 10th, 2006 06:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
likethebeerI started looking at Salon.com about 4.5 years ago, just about a month before 9-11. I was really looking for something beyond Time magazine, and this seemed to be it. At that time, Salon was free and they had some really good columnists, writing on all sorts of subjects. I regularly was reading about things that didn't show up on the regular journalistic media for months--months! Shit, I submitted things to them for awhile. They had "Mothers Who Think", a section called "20th Century masterpieces," w/visiting writers who wrote about things like the design of the Concord airplane, the beauty of the Holiday Inn sign--just icons of 20th century life & design that aren't high art, but that had some classic points to them. They had a woman who wrote Confessions of a Manhattan Call Girl, which was really fun to read sections of (even though she totally sucked as a sex columnist on Salon--she lasted, literally, 2 columns). They had an hysterical writer who concentrated on reality tv. Good stuff.
The summer of 2001 was, as you probably all recall, after the dotcom bust and within a few months, Salon started instituting a subscription fee. mda bought me a sub for my birthday in (wow) 2002? and I've kept up with it. It's my home page, actually.
But Salon has changed for me.
I don't know whether it has to do with the fact that they now have ads (for non-subscribers), or just a change-over in staff. They changed their editor-in-chief last year some time. Then maybe 2 months ago, they changed their format. I wasn't too happy, but I told myself I would get used to it. Before that, they had their "cover" story (the story at the top of the home page), then things divided into categories--tech, arts, news & politics, etc. So no matter what the day of the week, if there was something in the arts section that I wanted to read, I'd scroll down to that section and click on it. Their new design consists of the latest things put up chronologically. So you have arts, sports, news & politics all up there together (under the cover story), in the latest order that they've been entered. I still haven't gotten used to it. Everything is all together and I feel like I miss some things. There might be something I tell myself to read on Monday but by Friday I can't find it. They've also gotten some blogs (which was a smaller thing before). In fact, they have a whole little blocked off section devoted to blogs by their staff and while it can be interesting, I want to read longer articles that people have developed rather than little shoot-'em-off things.
I guess I need my journalism to be journalism (people who are trained in the ethics and writing style) and my blogs to be blogs. I accept that the two can interact, but if I'm paying for the privelage, I want the professionals doing it.
Anyway, so all this leads me to the latest (you're dying w/anticipation I know). A letter from one of the staff of Salon:
They had a letters section connected to this announcement and practically every letter, including the one that I sent, said "please don't do this." There are some good blogs out there (DailyKos seems to be one), but people don't want to pay to read other people's "interactive" blogs. Well, they can and they do, on this here site, but I just think Salon is currently jumping on the bandwagon and don't know what they're doing. Besides, I don't have to pay at the moment to read your journals. I have to pay to do some things with my journal. I don't have to pay to read DailyKos.
My thought is, if I can get great content from DailyKos and Google News, and I've been checking out The American Scene, why do I want to pay $35/year to read, not professional journalists, but blogs? Nothing against blogs, and some of you fine people pay $20/year for the other livejournal privelages, but pay $35/year for blogs? Yeah, if I want to subscribe to DailyKos, I can do that and it's got some pretty damned good stuff. But from Salon, I want professional journalists--that's what brought me there in the first place. People in the news rooms and going to the foreign countries and reporting first hand. People who submitted pieces and had an editor cull through them.
Funny enough, Salon put the poll up, and all these people wrote in to protest, and they haven't put these letters up on their "most active letters" section, even though it has more letters than some of their other "active letters" sections. The whole thing is just gone, unless you know the URL. I have it because I found it in my browser history.
Who knows what will happen? I still have my subscription until the end of this year, I think. We'll see what they do.
The summer of 2001 was, as you probably all recall, after the dotcom bust and within a few months, Salon started instituting a subscription fee. mda bought me a sub for my birthday in (wow) 2002? and I've kept up with it. It's my home page, actually.
But Salon has changed for me.
I don't know whether it has to do with the fact that they now have ads (for non-subscribers), or just a change-over in staff. They changed their editor-in-chief last year some time. Then maybe 2 months ago, they changed their format. I wasn't too happy, but I told myself I would get used to it. Before that, they had their "cover" story (the story at the top of the home page), then things divided into categories--tech, arts, news & politics, etc. So no matter what the day of the week, if there was something in the arts section that I wanted to read, I'd scroll down to that section and click on it. Their new design consists of the latest things put up chronologically. So you have arts, sports, news & politics all up there together (under the cover story), in the latest order that they've been entered. I still haven't gotten used to it. Everything is all together and I feel like I miss some things. There might be something I tell myself to read on Monday but by Friday I can't find it. They've also gotten some blogs (which was a smaller thing before). In fact, they have a whole little blocked off section devoted to blogs by their staff and while it can be interesting, I want to read longer articles that people have developed rather than little shoot-'em-off things.
I guess I need my journalism to be journalism (people who are trained in the ethics and writing style) and my blogs to be blogs. I accept that the two can interact, but if I'm paying for the privelage, I want the professionals doing it.
Anyway, so all this leads me to the latest (you're dying w/anticipation I know). A letter from one of the staff of Salon:
Then they would bring you to a poll.
Feb. 2, 2006 | You've heard the buzzwords: Citizens' journalism. "User-generated content." Peer-to-peer media. Blogging.
At Salon, we've always called all this stuff "interactivity" -- and we've been doing it, in one form or another, for many years. Table Talk is one of the Web's most respected and longest-tenured forums for lively discussion. We started a blogging program before a lot of our media colleagues had even heard the term. More recently we've transformed our Letters to the Editor feature into a real-time readers' soapbox for responses to our articles.
But there's more we can do and would like to do. We want to open Salon up even wider, to find ways to connect the welter of creativity among our readers and subscribers with the more classic journalism that remains our primary mission....
And so I want to ask for your ideas and thoughts and reactions. What in the way of new personal publishing tools and interactive features would you like to see Salon offer? What have you seen on other sites that you think we ought to try? What haven't you seen on other sites, or on ours, that you'd like?
They had a letters section connected to this announcement and practically every letter, including the one that I sent, said "please don't do this." There are some good blogs out there (DailyKos seems to be one), but people don't want to pay to read other people's "interactive" blogs. Well, they can and they do, on this here site, but I just think Salon is currently jumping on the bandwagon and don't know what they're doing. Besides, I don't have to pay at the moment to read your journals. I have to pay to do some things with my journal. I don't have to pay to read DailyKos.
My thought is, if I can get great content from DailyKos and Google News, and I've been checking out The American Scene, why do I want to pay $35/year to read, not professional journalists, but blogs? Nothing against blogs, and some of you fine people pay $20/year for the other livejournal privelages, but pay $35/year for blogs? Yeah, if I want to subscribe to DailyKos, I can do that and it's got some pretty damned good stuff. But from Salon, I want professional journalists--that's what brought me there in the first place. People in the news rooms and going to the foreign countries and reporting first hand. People who submitted pieces and had an editor cull through them.
Funny enough, Salon put the poll up, and all these people wrote in to protest, and they haven't put these letters up on their "most active letters" section, even though it has more letters than some of their other "active letters" sections. The whole thing is just gone, unless you know the URL. I have it because I found it in my browser history.
Who knows what will happen? I still have my subscription until the end of this year, I think. We'll see what they do.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-11 03:54 am (UTC)Salon.com was the place I went to for all my Election Debacle 2000 coverage. I adored Jake Tapper.
Sorry to hear that they are adapting, changing, modifying again, and just not filling the stellar amazing potential they had.
I was one of the Big Brother fans that went crazy on Table Talk. And those recaps -- the writer was ... Chiara? Corrina? I don't know. But when TT had a meltdown one time, one of our members in San Fran actually delivered pizza to their offices. That's how devoted we were. But after they went pay, we all faded away.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-11 04:38 am (UTC)Funny thing on liberal--some people were pissed off after the '04 election b/c Salon had gotten _too political_ on the left side. They were really devoted to stories from the left, and people were looking for more balance. Well, my subscription lasts until Dec. so we'll see where we go (and god knows I'm a sucker).