Left-wing Mouthpiece Salon Goes Silent

Salon, a digital magazine popular in left-wing circles, announced that it has ceased publication after 31 years. In a statement posted on its website, the outlet highlighted its 1995 launch, when the internet “was a very different place.”

“A small group of journalists set out to create something original: a publication with a strong voice, a curiosity about the world and a belief that the internet could bring journalism and readers together in new ways,” Salon continued. “They helped pioneer a form of journalism that would come to define an entirely new era of publishing.”

To its credit, Salon was indeed a pioneer in online media, but calling its work “journalism” could be considered a bit of a stretch. The publication had no shortage of unhinged headlines over the years – here’s just a handful:

“White guys are killing us: Toxic, cowardly masculinity, our unhealable national illness”

“Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American”

“Human-on-dolphin sex is not really that weird”

“My abortion made me happy: The story that started the #shoutyourabortion movement”

“I’m a pedophile, but not a monster”

With headlines like these, who needs fallacies?

What Happened?

Salon’s announcement came as a surprise to many. The outlet provided very little information about what led to the decision to close, saying only that the “business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years” and that its “publishing model is no longer sustainable.”

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Nineteen full-time employees and a number of contractors were impacted by the publication’s closure, according to a Salon spokesperson. The outlet’s chief content officer, Erin Keane, wrote on the far-left social media platform Bluesky that the magazine notified the editorial team of its demise Thursday morning, telling them “the publication was closed, effective immediately.”

The decision comes less than a decade after entrepreneurs Drew Schoentrup and Chris Richmond purchased the progressive magazine for $5 million in August 2019, and just three years after a Malta-based digital marketing company called Find.co bought it in November 2023.

Is AI to Blame?

While the precise cause of Salon’s downfall remains unclear, researchers have found that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots and AI-generated summaries on search engines — like Google’s AI Overviews – are hurting web traffic that online publishers have depended on for decades. 

Helen Havlak, publisher of the tech news site The Verge, said search engine users are less likely to visit individual sites after reading an AI summary. "The Verge's Google traffic has been declining, and I would say a lot of that decline has lined up pretty clearly with the rise of AI Overviews," Havlak said. "Publishers are kind of in a bind because if you want to opt out of AI Overviews, you opt out of Google Search entirely.”

"The extinction-level event is already here. And a bunch of small publishers have already gone out of business," Havlak warned. We may never know if AI played a role in Salon’s decline, but if it did lead to the loss of groundbreaking headlines like “‘The Legend of Zelda’ is classist, sexist and racist,” maybe AI deserves to be rebranded as SI (super intelligence) after all.