Salon.com abruptly folded last week. Find.co, the offshore private equity owner of the always interesting left-of-center online magazine, gave little warning to either staff or readers. It was a marriage made in hell.
Salon was founded in 1995 by David Talbot, who had been a senior editor at Mother Jones. Over the years, it incubated a lot of progressive writing talent.
Salon’s alums and recent staffers include New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, feminist cultural writers Rebecca Traister and Camille Paglia, blogger Heather Digby Parton, Nation national affairs correspondent Joan Walsh, who served as editor in chief of Salon for five years, Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald, as well as CNN anchor Jake Tapper and NBC News’s Steve Kornacki.
Today on TAP
This story first appeared in our free Today on TAP newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Prospect reporters.
No paywall, no programmatic ads — just the reporting. Unsubscribe anytime. Submitting your email signs you up for Today on TAP, our weekday afternoon newsletter.
What happened to Salon is a cautionary tale. Salon was incorporated as a for-profit, financed mostly by advertising. While it had a loyal readership, it struggled financially. An effort to sell stock to the public helped somewhat, but when Facebook changed its business model in 2016 to favor individual users rather than publications, Salon’s ad revenue crashed.
So in 2019, the in-house owners sold Salon to the owners of adtech company Proper Media. That sale produced $5 million in new money. But in 2023, Proper Media owners Drew Schoentrup and Chris Richmond sold it to a sketchier media startup called Find.co, headquartered in Malta, whose main business model revolves around coverage and promotion of crypto. That was an epic mismatch.
Last week, Find.co, with no commitment to outsider journalism, pulled the plug. This is what comes from corporate capture of independent media.
When I first read of Salon’s demise, I thought of the history of the Prospect. As a nonprofit, accountable only to our readers, we hit a serious financial wall three times in our 37-year history, typically because multiyear funding from a large donor ended. In every case, our readers saved us.
On a couple of occasions, we had to cut our budget. But we never faced abrupt closure from an absentee for-profit owner, and we never will.
(This is a good moment for a pitch. Reader loyalty is what keeps us strong. We have no paywall. The best way to support the Prospect is to click here to become a monthly supporter.)
But I digress. In other cases, such as The Washington Post, new corporate ownership allows the publication to survive but with bowdlerized content. The Graham family, longtime owners of the Post, were committed to crusading journalism. The current owner, Jeff Bezos, uses the Post mainly to suck up to President Trump in order to protect and promote his other business interests.
And there are other threats to independent media. The Prospect is a nonprofit tax-exempt 501(c)(3). Donations to the Prospect are tax-deductible. On Friday, reports began circulating that Trump’s new chief of staff, Stephen Miller, planned to demand that the IRS, relying on an obscure provision of the tax code, try to take down a large number of liberal nonprofits. Under Miller’s scheme, Trump would issue an executive order listing alleged terrorist nonprofits and then Miller and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent would direct the IRS to lift their tax-exempt status.
This sounds ominous, but the law explicitly requires evidence and due process before tax exemptions can be taken away. The courts, which have had a bellyful of Trump, would never allow peremptory changes in tax-exempt status.
Bottom line: Even in the last two years of the Trump presidency, independent journalism that relies on reader support is a far better bet than turning to corporate masters. We will survive Trump—and help point this redeemed republic to a new progressive age.
