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This would be more compelling if there were a prominent and handy PayPal button.

I'm a Salon subscriber already, but I'd pay forty dollars if they'd take ten away from Horowitz and Paglia. For Christopher Hitchens I'll make it fifty.

i don't mind the ads...i really don't!

Paglia has been gone for rather a while, actually. (And she was funnier than Horowitz. Almost anyone is.)

I tried their click-through-ads-to-Premium feature a few weeks ago; the ad loaded with the speed of mating snails, and there were, I think, three or four windows' worth, none of which allowed clicking through until they were good and ready. I shall be sorry to lose Salon, but I still have _Harper's_, _The New Yorker_, and _Atlantic Monthly_--and I can ignore their ads with impunity, being outside their target demographic.

If I were snarky, I'd send Talbot the URL for Body and Soul.

Well, having written for them, I must say for purely selfish reasons I hope they do hang on. Otherwise I won't have the nice link to point to when I write query letters to editors to sell my other work.

Patrick, I think you might be pleasantly surprised if you added a voluntary 'tipjar' PayPal button.

I miss the old 'Whole Earth Review' of the 1980's, but that time is gone. Publications are born, grow and die, and 'Salon' is no different.

(I'm aware there still is a WER, but whenever I look at it, it seems to be an all Guatamalan Indian issue.)

Where do I sign up?

Or, alternatively; isn't it marvellous the way hundreds of thousands of people, all over the world, have embraced the potlatch economy we're used to from fanzines? Truly we are all slans now.

Didn't you have a tipjar for a while, but removed it? With Macadamia, I even feel faintly guilty that I link my 'books read' to associate links on Amazon. (Not that anyone has ever bought anything).

As a long-time lurker (we've only actually met once or twice at a couple of NY rassef meets around the turn of the century), I think a tip jar would make sense...hell, I'd pony up.

The whole no-money-to-Horowitz-and-Paglia thing would be gravy.

Although...who's going to provide the funds for Ariana Huffington's hair dye? Suddenly the situation becomes more complex.

The thing is that, for a brief and shining time, Salon did provide journalism that was hard to find anywhere. They exposed the GOP's lies about the Clinton administration better than anybody else. While other liberal magazines were spending time trashing Clinton, Salon attacked the real enemy.

Then, for some strange reason, they decided to call off most of their dogs. They shrank back to 'conventional' standards. It really makes one wonder about media conspiracies, because Salon had a low-competition niche for online journalism.

I did have a "tip jar" on this site for a while, and I promise you that every cent collected was spent on hard liquor, dangerous women, and wild living. I took it down, though.

Actually, neither Paglia nor Horowitz writes for us any more as regular columnists, and neither has for some time now.

I agree that there's an enormous amount of great "free" journalism on the Web today. In fact, we've written a great deal about the phenomenon, in Salon. What blogs and other forms of "free" journalism *can't* do -- and Salon, pace Barry above, is still doing regularly -- is long-form investigative journalism, which takes time and money. I have yet to see the blog world find a way to support such work.

I find it distressing that readers like Barry think Salon stopped doing this kind of journalism after the Clinton era, since we work on continuing to do it every single day, and it is exactly what our 50,000 paying subscribers pay us for. I can only conclude that he has stopped reading us and so is not aware of the kind of investigative stuff we still do. (This page lists some of them; when I have time I'll put together a more recent list on my blog.)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden: Dangerous Woman.

Oh, yeah!

Abigail Adams was dangerous in the same sense.

I do take your point, though. I told my friend last night that Jenufa was certainly the best Janacek opera I'd ever been to.

Scott Rosenberg's remarks are fair comment. But the point remains that, although there are reams of worthless writing on the net, there's also more good political and cultural writing posted daily than anyone could keep up with even if they stopped only to eat and sleep.

Long-form investigative journalism is a great value proposition, and I'd give serious consideration to shelling out for an online magazine that focused on that. However, although Salon has published some good investigative journalism, that has been one of its notable sidelines, rather than its devoted focus, and moreover, other magazines regularly post similar material for free which is equal in quality to, or even better than, Salon's. I mean, you can read Seymour Hersh's absolutely dynamite New Yorker piece about Pakistan, North Korea, and the Bush Administration, for free, right now, without even having to click past a bunch of Flash animations.

I am not decrying Salon, which I used to read every day and still look at frequently. And I'm certainly all for the survival of outfits that actually pay writers. But I can't help wondering, if Salon's unique value proposition is "long-form investigative journalism," why wasn't more of the $80 million that Salon has run through spent on that, instead of gossip columns, finger exercises from writers who do better work elsewhere, and routine pop-culture commentary?

It seems to me that you can argue that Salon deserves to survive because we need outfits that finance long-form investigative journalism, or you can argue that Salon needs to survive because general-interest magazines are a good in themselves, but you can't really argue both at once. And moreover, if you argue the second, you need to engage with the fact that the modern internet affords people the chance to choose from an absolute cornucopia of mostly-free writing of the sort that was once provided by "general-interest magazines." We can pretty much assemble our own general-interest magazines, any time of day. Are there virtues to the old model that are missing from the new? Assuredly. Do these virtues justify Salon's burn rate? We'll see.

My problem with Salon's policy is that it ensures there are no archives of the site, outside of Salon's own and perhaps the Library of Congress. One can't read it at any public library I am aware of and it is at enormous risk of loss in the long term. This is a shame, and there seems to be no awareness of how important this issue is upon the part of Salon's publishers; if the work is of lasting value, there need to be multiple copies in many places, or it will not last.

What Randolph said, certainly. I fear that most of what we read on the Web today will be completely inaccessible in a century or so.

I guess Scott Rosenberg is right: Camille Paglia and David Horowitz have gone away. But Salon should have trumpeted this. "Hey, look! We're not giving any more of your money to these bozos!" Absent that, their memory continues to poison the water. Up till this minute, my Pavlovian reaction to the name Salon was to think, "Ugh, Camille Paglia and David Horowitz" instead of "Oh boy, Ruben Bolling and Patrick Smith," which is what I should be thinking. (I don't like Anne Lamott's writing, so sue me, but I don't object to her presence.)

Good point. I keep thinking about Hitchens and Walsh (the dog murders), and and coverage of anti-war protests which would be right at home in the Washington Times.

Well, I've subscribed to Salon for a second year, partially because of the investigative journalism, and partially because it's pleasant to have a feed of wire stories without the advertisements that show up on the free sites.

The columnists are generally forgetable, the same as with print journalism, but there's occasional amusement.

Main trouble I've found recently is that the Premium features, instead of being hard-hitting investigative journalism, are political diatribes and rants against the Bush administration. Stuff like the recent "Six Nightmares," with sublinks to more "Premium" editorials, with nutshell description like this:

"Reproductive rights
American women take their right to an abortion for granted. They shouldn't anymore.
By Sheerly Avni"

Regardless of whether I agree with the politics (and I generally do), you don't put editorials above the fold on the front page.

I'm hoping to see more actual "investigative journalism," and diatribes of the sort I can find for free in the blogs.

Christopher, I expect he also used some of it to buy drinks for Beth Meacham, which qualifies on all three counts.

I have a really good reason why I have no interest in subscribing to Salon: if you are from outside the US, the premium articles have no appeal, value or relevance.

I have not been the least bit curious about what subscribers might be getting since it is more self-absorbed "We are the World" boredom, like a bad date, enough about me, what do you think about me?

In their value comparison chart, most of the premiums are only available to residents of the US. So I pay in US dollars and get less. Geez, thanks.

This isn't to say Salon is not making a good product, but it is one with local appeal, and isn't the net bigger than that?