As a possible deal with Newser falls apart, the online news pioneer ramps up its cultural coverage. The result: an ailing stock price, but traffic’s on the rise.
Kerry Lauerman remembers the time, a decade ago, when he was Salon’s Washington bureau chief and the website had a budget three times larger than it subsists on today.
Now the Washington bureau is toast. “We’re leaner and meaner and we work a lot smarter,” says Lauerman, who took over in November as editor in chief.
ADVERTISEMENT
Salon made its name as a politically aggressive, staunchly liberal online operation. But in recent months I’ve noticed a very different kind of story often leading the site. There was “ Men: The New Romantics,” and “Literature’s Gender Gap.” There was “My Husband, the Convicted Murderer” and “My Son, The Pink Boy.” Not to mention “Grammys’ Most Memorable Red-Carpet Outfits” and “The Hardest Part About Quitting Drinking? Dating.”
So is there a personality transplant going on?
“The identity of Salon is as a political site,” Lauerman says, “but our entertainment coverage has always done pretty well.” Beyond politics, he says, “we are emphasizing everything else more. We’ve staffed up in entertainment. We listen to our readers.”
And are these stories about movies and marriages and sex designed to attract more advertising?
“I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a consideration.”
Given Salon’s precarious financial state, it’s obviously a major consideration. The struggling site quietly put itself up for sale in recent months, and talks with Newser.com, an aggregation site founded by Michael Wolff, collapsed Monday. The New York Times Dealbook blog reported that Salon board members grew concerned that they might be selling for too low a price after AOL paid $315 million to buy The Huffington Post.
The publicly traded company reported a loss of $4.8 million in fiscal 2010, with two investors making up the gap through loans. Salon’s stock is trading for a dime, down from $1.30 in the summer of 2008.
“It’s not an easy space to make money in if you’re trying to do quality content,” says CEO Richard Gingras, who provided the original seed money for Salon’s launch. “We have beefed up the investment in culture and lifestyle… It is about growing the audience.”
The first duty of any website is survival, and most of the news business—from old-line newspapers and magazines to newer operations such as The Daily Beast—is grappling with how to turn a profit online. The overhauling of Salon’s editorial mix comes as its center of gravity has shifted from San Francisco, where it was born 15 years ago, to Midtown Manhattan. Founding editor David Talbot and Joan Walsh, who stepped down last year, ran the place from the Bay Area; Lauerman, 41, is the first editor to be based, with most of the staff, in New York.
“It’s not an easy space to make money in if you’re trying to do quality content,” says CEO Richard Gingras, who provided the original seed money for Salon’s launch. “We have beefed up the investment in culture and lifestyle… It is about growing the audience.”
Walsh, who had tapped Lauerman as her deputy, was part of the new direction before returning to reporting and a book project. “Our news team is as good as it’s ever been,” she says. “But the political cycle ebbs and flows, and people get more or less interested depending on whether it’s election season and what the crazy story of the week is… We’ve probably gotten deeper into the cultural realm.”
None of this is to suggest that Salon’s political coverage has gone flat or that its liberal commentators, such as Glenn Greenwald, have lost their edge. But there is more quick-hit commentary and a move away from 2,000-word reported pieces, Walsh says. And the lack of a Washington correspondent—a job previously held by ABC’s Jake Tapper, Time’s Michael Scherer, and Politics Daily’s Walter Shapiro—signals a new focus.
This is in part a matter of necessity. Salon’s editorial budget is down to less than $3 million, well below the $5.3 million in fiscal 2009. That year the site laid off six employees, or 20 percent of its staff. “The layoffs hurt,” Lauerman concedes. “It was a seismic change at Salon.”
Says Walsh: “We were just constantly being forced by circumstances to reinvent ourselves.”
Salon’s digging has occasionally made headlines, but one of those who left last fall was investigative reporter Mark Benjamin, who broke a series of stories about mismanagement and mislabeled graves at Arlington National Cemetery.
Some folks have noticed the journalistic shift. Shapiro, who worked there from 2006 to 2008, when he was let go, says he rarely reads Salon now. “I really think they’re deemphasizing original reporting,” he says. “It is sad. I understand the economics that have governed Salon’s precarious existence since the dot-com bubble. But I’m at this point devoid of a reason to look at it.”
Traffic, though, is on the rise: 5.4 million unique visitors last month, according to Google Analytics, a jump of 20 percent from a year earlier.
Lauerman is in the process of creating five mini-sites, some of which could be spun off as separate destinations. They are politics, entertainment, lifestyle, food, and a fifth page aggregating the day’s news—shades of the Huffington Post. Salon has just rolled out a “pop-savvy health advice column.”
The site has always run arts coverage as well as first-person pieces, under the rubric of Mothers Who Think, for instance. Salon’s longtime rival Slate, which migrated to New York after years as a Microsoft unit in Seattle, has also broadened its scope but still plays up politics.
Lauerman says political junkies have long been “our most passionate readers,” but that the decision to dive more heavily into pop culture “was really a no-brainer.”
He may be on to something, judging by a list of Salon’s most popular stories in January:
1) Why I can't stop reading Mormon housewife blogs 2) The modesty of the porn generation 3) To all the girls who envy my life 4) The sexual cost of female success 5) Sarah Palin will never be president
At least politics, thanks to Palin, wasn’t completely shut out.
Correction: This story originally reported that Shapiro left when the Washington bureau was closed. In fact, the bureau shuttered a year after his departure.
