Salon, One of the Web’s Pioneering News Outlets, Shuts Down After 31 Years

November 8, 2026

“It has been an extraordinary privilege,” says the subheading on Thursday’s announcement. After 31 years Salon.com will stop publishing, according to an announcement which appeared on the site under the byline “Salon”. It remembers that Salon “was an idea about what journalism could be, born at a moment when the internet was still a largely unexplored frontier.”

When Salon launched in November 1995, the web 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. They helped pioneer a form of journalism that would come to define an entirely new era of publishing. Over three decades, Salon has brought together politics, culture, criticism and ideas in a way that was distinctly our own…

Our writers and editors helped shape conversations about the forces changing our lives. The work was never simply about keeping up with the news. It was about making sense of it… To the founders who imagined it, the staff members who built it, the contributors who gave it their voices and the alumni who carried its spirit into the world: Thank you. Salon’s legacy belongs to all of you…

The business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years. After careful consideration, we have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable…

Thirty-one years is a remarkable run, but what matters most is what happened during those years: the journalism, the ideas, the voices, the conversations and the community that grew around them. Salon helped demonstrate what digital journalism could be and could become. We hope that legacy will continue to matter long after today.
Thank you for being part of our story. It has been an extraordinary privilege.

Slashdot reader oumuamua remembers Salon as one of the internet’s first digital-native publications. Slashdot linked to Salon many times over the years — for example, this 1998 story headlined “Linus Story in Salon”.
Peter Neves was the first of many who wrote in to tell us about an article in Salon Magazine that describes an

“…analogy between MS and the Catholic Church, and Linus and Martin Luther. ”

The Associated Press remembers Salon as “an early staple of internet discourse.”
And while Salon told them there were no immediate plans to take down Salon’s online archives, the Associated Press notes the site’s announcement “did not immediately indicate what would become of its employees, though some reported they had lost their jobs.” (Longtime staff writer Amanda Marcotte
wrote on her Patreon that she and “everyone” are “the latest victim of AI’s predations.”) “A spokesperson for the outlet said 19 full-time employees had been affected, as well as a handful of private contractors,” writes the Associated Press.

Variety adds that Salon “joins later-arriving sites such as Buzzfeed and Gawker that found it difficult to monetize cultural and topical reporting for a general audience and eventually shut down.”