Get woke, go broke: Salon edition | THE COLLINE GATE

Optimus
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Get woke, go broke: Salon edition May 15, 2019 11:53:12 GMT -5

Post by Optimus on May 15, 2019 11:53:12 GMT -5

Can't say that this is at all surprising, given the rash of other farther left media outlets hemorrhaging money and laying off thousands recently (e.g., Mic, Vice, Gizmodo/Wired, Buzzfeed, Vox, etc.).

But, given what a "woke" garbage dump hate rag that Salon has been over the past several years, I can't help feeling more than a little a bit of amused schadenfreude over their demise. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.

Maybe their employees can learn to code.

Salon Media Group, a one-time digital darling, has fallen on hard times. It lost its CEO of the past three years last week and appears to be on the brink of a deal to sell itself for a fire sale price of $5 million.

The struggling company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on May 8 that it reached an deal to sell itself to a company called Salon.com LLC.

The filing contained no further info on the mystery buyer or buyers but said the deal would only require a $550,000 payment at closing. It said $100,000 would go to an escrow account and $500,000 was already paid as a deposit.

The remaining $3.85 million would be a promissory note payable in two installments over two years.

Even with those favorable terms, Salon issued a dire warning in the filing: “There can be no guarantee that the asset sale will be completed and, if not completed, we may have to file for bankruptcy and liquidation.”

Full article: nypost.com/2019/05/14/salon-media-in-talks-for-5m-fire-sale-in-last-ditch-effort/

Last Edit: May 15, 2019 18:20:06 GMT -5 by Optimus

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nighttimer
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Get woke, go broke: Salon edition May 15, 2019 22:50:04 GMT -5

Post by nighttimer on May 15, 2019 22:50:04 GMT -5

May 15, 2019 11:53:12 GMT -5 Optimus said:

Can't say that this is at all surprising, given the rash of other farther left media outlets hemorrhaging money and laying off thousands recently (e.g., Mic, Vice, Gizmodo/Wired, Buzzfeed, Vox, etc.).

But, given what a "woke" garbage dump hate rag that Salon has been over the past several years, I can't help feeling more than a little a bit of amused schadenfreude over their demise. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.

Maybe their employees can learn to code.

Your glee at the likely demise of Salon and the looming unemployment of it's staff and contributors is tacky, tasteless, boorish and just plain mean. Or to put it another way, it's typical Optimus. As usual you spit your typical venom about something being "woke" without any context or examples of content that show what about Salon made it "woke." What is it about the site that made it a such a "garbage dump hate rag?" Who knows? We sure won't if we depend on you to provide any details because you don't DO details. You're too busy taking a big, stinky shit all over a website that hasn't been relevant to anyone for years.

But I will admit: you aren't entirely wrong. Salon is a truly terrible site and it has been that way for years. Back in it's glory days it was one of my first stops on the internet. Now? It's not even an afterthought.

Because...reasons.

A Facebook page dedicated to celebrating the 20th anniversary of digital media pioneer Salon is functioning as a crowdsourced eulogy.

Dozens of Salon alumni have, over the past several months, posted their favorite stories from and memories of the once-beloved liberal news site described as a “left-coast, interactive version of The New Yorker,” a progressive powerhouse that over the years has covered politics with a refreshing aggressiveness, in a context that left plenty of room for provocative personal essays and award-winning literary criticism.

“We were inmates who took over the journalistic asylum,” David Talbot, who founded the site in 1995, wrote on the Facebook page. “And we let it rip — we helped create online journalism, making it up as we went along. And we let nobody — investors, advertisers, the jealous media establishment, mad bombers, etc — get in our way.”

They are mourning a publication they barely recognize today.

“Sadly, Salon doesn’t really exist anymore,” wrote Laura Miller, one of Salon’s founding editors who left the site for Slate last fall. “The name is still being used, but the real Salon is gone.”

Salon, which Talbot originally conceived of as a “smart tabloid,” began as a liberal online magazine and was quickly seen as an embodiment of the media’s future. For a while, particularly ahead of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, it even looked as though it might be a success story. It lured famous writers and tech-company investors and went public in 1999. At the time, Salon was valued at $107 million.

“I think it’s very similar to what a Vox or a Buzzfeed seems today,” said Kerry Lauerman, who joined Salon in 2000 and would serve as the site’s editor in chief from 2010 to 2013. “There was, at first, a lot of money and excitement about Salon. There was no one else, really, in that space. ... It was kind of a brave new world, and Salon was at the forefront.”

Over the last several months, POLITICO has interviewed more than two dozen current and former Salon employees and reviewed years of Salon’s SEC filings. On Monday, after POLITICO had made several unsuccessful attempts to interview Salon CEO Cindy Jeffers, the company dropped a bombshell: Jeffers was leaving the company effective immediately in what was described as an “abrupt departure.”

While the details of Salon’s enormous management and business challenges dominate the internal discussion at the magazine, in liberal intellectual and media circles it is widely believed that the site has lost its way.

“I remember during the Bush years reading them relatively religiously,” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, told POLITICO. “Especially over the last year, they seem to have completely jumped the shark in so many ways. They’ve become — and I think this is sad — they’ve definitely become like a joke, which is terrible for people who care about these progressive institutions.”

The first time I was exposed to the world of blogging was in Salon. Between enjoying or being annoyed by the writings of Joan Walsh, Charles Taylor, David Horowitz, Jake Tapper, Camille Paglia, Debra Dickerson, and others on the Right, Left and Center, Salon was what the Village Voice used to be: a unabashedly and unapologetically left-wing news, arts, and politics publication where smart, sassy and thought-provoking writing and writers intersected. As print journalism transitioned to online journalism, Salon represented how rich and ripe the potential of this new format really was.

And for a while Salon delivered the goods. It just wasn't built for the long run. The Voice passed through the hands of several different owners before finally dying off a few years ago. Salon has staggered on, but it's been superficial, shrill, strident and stupid for so long, it's hard to recall when it was any good.

I die a little inside when yet another print or online news publication kicks the bucket. In these times when truth and accuracy and straightforward journalism is under siege, it's important to cover the stories what's left of the mainstream press doesn't. Salon used to be a valuable resource for that sort of thing, but that was a long time ago in a internet far, far away. I'll remember fondly what it once was, but when it's gone for good, I'll forget all about what it became.

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Optimus
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Get woke, go broke: Salon edition Sept 8, 2019 2:46:55 GMT -5

Post by Optimus on Sept 8, 2019 2:46:55 GMT -5

And another one bites the dust. ThinkProgress shut down for good on Friday:

Liberal news website ThinkProgress is shutting down after its parent organization said it was unable to find a new publisher for the site.

The site was a project of The Center for American Progress (CAP) think tank, which announced news of its closure on Friday.

"We are very sad to announce that after more than two months of searching, we have been unable to identify a new publisher for ThinkProgress, and we are left with no choice but to close ThinkProgress as an independent enterprise focused on original reporting," Navin Nayak, executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said in a statement.

This comes on the heels of massive layoffs across progressive or more left-leaning media (let's be honest; it's mostly "leftist" media) including:

1) 3,200 cut jobs at leftist rags like Buzzfeed, HuffPo, and Vice,
2) Mic.com shutting down late last year,
3) near bankruptcy for Salon (noted above),
4) Gawker/Gizmodo Media Group going bankrupt, bought by another company, and then sold at a massive loss with the new owners firing 25 of its staff (the remaining ones now whining that they can no longer ruin sports and other non-political news by unnecessarily infecting it with mouth-frothing hyper-political wokeness)

One might argue that this is hitting journalism as a whole, but conservative media seems to have weathered the storm relatively unscathed thus far, near as I can tell. TheBlaze hit a few similar bumps middle of last year but that's likely because Glen Beck is terrible at running a large business, and they seem to have stabilized (and even grown their YouTube presence) since merging with CRTV a few months later.

I'm interested in seeing if this trend continues. I used to think "get woke, go broke" was just a silly meme, but given the rapid downfall of far-left media, as well as the financial losses suffered by companies like Gillette when they try to "get woke," this looks more like a cultural course correction, as more people become fed up with companies monetizing authoritarian outrage.

Last Edit: Sept 8, 2019 2:47:34 GMT -5 by Optimus

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