In early November 2026, famed Internet magazine Salon abruptly announced its closure after 36 years of operation. The end of Salon is a tremendous loss for internet publishing. It’s one less place for writers to be paid and for writers to be read.
Yet Salon’s departure from the world of active publications carries a significant amount of weight for me personally. I interned and subsequently worked for the site in the early-mid 2010s. If you’ve ever liked anything you’ve read at Typebar Magazine, hell if you've ever read anything we’ve published at Typebar, it’s because I worked for Salon. Whatever digital media skills I have, many of them developed their foundations at the storied, left-leaning journal of news, politics, and salacious personal stories about anal sex.
Part eulogy, part tribute, part pro wrestling “shoot interview,” here are my candid thoughts on Salon as a reader, as someone who worked there, and now as a magazine editor.
As a neophyte
College Matt Wolfbridge. Yikes! I don't like discussing my biography too much. I'll pull back the curtain just enough to make the essay interesting.
I had wanted to be a history professor. I always enjoyed history and reading nonfiction about historical topics. In high school I read from a WW2 almanac so big I had to clear my desk off to open it. I'd lose hours falling into Wikipedia holes about lesser known Second World War vehicles like the P-39 Airacobra. The B-17 Flying Fortress was for filthy casuals.
At some point the love of reading became a love of writing. I applied to be an official blogger for my university and, to my shock, they accepted. My first post reached 99 readers and I sat there, transported to another realm of reality. Nearly 100 people read my blog? Holy shit.
From there I read more serious text media in the form of magazines: places like The Atlantic, Slate, and yes, Salon. Salon quickly became a favorite. I was a pretty ardent New Atheist in college. Salon was a place I could reliably find interesting opinion writing on controversies like "elevatorgate" (in retrospect a chilling prelude to Gamergate) or just discussion of atheism more broadly. I read Salon's Toxic Atheism Drives People Apart by Chris Stedman, published in 2012, with a degree of conspiracism and rage. Is Salon now aligned with the Christian right? Salon almost always got my thoughts active which is really all you can ask for from a digital magazine. I wanted to work for a place like that one day.
I managed to get some paid SEO spam gigs for a glorified content farm in my last semester of college and into post-graduation. But I wanted more legitimate bylines. The few that did come did not do so easily. Years went by and I found myself no closer to full-time work or the ever-ephemeral currency of legitimacy than I'd been when I started. You have to remember, this was when people were getting book deals because they started a gimmick Twitter account. Success often was literally just one post away! A totally different era in media but if you were there, you know what I'm talking about.
I stayed in the game and kept driving myself more insane day by day, article by article. My writing career had reached peak desperation in early 2014. It had been three years of writing every single day by that point. After two heartbreaking misses, one in spring 2013 and another that fall, I took a week off from my part-time job to send out applications to every media operation and writing gig in the English speaking world.
I even considered recording a video for the Huffington Post editorial fellowship and uploading it to YouTube for the entire public to look at, as per the diabolical application requirements. A question in the second round of interviews for another fellowship asked what unique, attention-gathering activities I would do online to promote the brand. Totally flummoxed, I said "shave the company logo into my hair." A copywriting gig for a mattress company asked for the application to demonstrate how much I loved sleep. I sent them the text of my resume superimposed over a photo of me sleeping. I did not hear back.
Only two places answered.
The first? Salon. They interviewed me for, and subsequently offered me, an unpaid internship. I was living at home so I didn't need to worry about rent. But I still had day-to-day living expenses and a car. The monthly LIRR ticket to the office wouldn't be cheap either.
But at the same time, I heard back from a content aggregation app run by a tech entrepreneur who, like many others, would ultimately become a Nazi stooge. The app paid well enough. $10/hour in 2014 for writing short article recaps was not bad and the hours were indeed plentiful. For comparison: my first SEO gig paid ~$200 a month and often required near-constant spam creation to hit the pageview quota that kept you employed. I can't imagine I was making even $3/hour in aggregate. In that context, $10/hour and you can get a solid amount of hours in per day doing what's light-but-mind-numbing work? I'll take it.
I decided to leave my part time job, intern at Salon by day, and perform my various freelance gigs on nights and weekends.
As an Intern
In my china closet sits a black & white foam cat that says "Boomer Lives?" on the chest. It's apparently a reference to some kind of radio show. For me, though, it's among the most sacred of artifacts I have relating to my professional life.
I have an artifact (a keepsake, to be literal: a physical item) from most jobs I've ever worked. The hat from a McDonald's uniform. The name tag from a department store. An abstract cube from the long-defunct BuzzFeed clone start-up that laid me off, made me work several more days after the fact, and then on the last day made me sit alone amongst the desks while everyone else in the entire company went to an all-hands meeting. Etc etc.
The little foam cat, though. He's from my internship at Salon. I could tell you everything about the original office. The front door had a silver knob and a two-tone wooden frame where some parts were light and others, dark, in a pattern I believe was asymmetrical. It was an unusually narrow and tall door. I could also tell you about the empty plastic bottle so ancient the label was bleached off, only the bottle's shape revealing it once held Gatorade. There was a decaying rag inside. Why? How long had that been there? Why hadn't anyone picked it up? Could the prestigious site I'd been reading for years really be the kind of place where employees leave actual detritus on the floor for (presumably) years?
Yes! And I love Salon. And I’m not trying to diminish anyone’s work when I say this: I arrived at the publication well into a period of decline. It didn't help that I had an over-idealized notion of what a digital magazine or media company should be like. Even after some bad experiences, I kept needing to believe, places like Slate, Salon, or The Atlantic must be somehow elevated. They had to be enchanted with some kind of virtuous intellectual nobility or else I'd done all this for nothing.
But let me pause briefly for a genuinely good moment: my first-ever editorial meeting at Salon. The conference room wasn't a room so much as it was a partitioned-off space with a table and chairs. The air conditioner didn't really reach the conference room so everybody was visibly sweating at every meeting there. The editors all discussed the weekend schedule and other essays either finished or nearing completion. It was this first meeting that gave me an understanding of editorial strategy with regards to publication. That is to say: what you publish and when matters. If you have a banger essay you know will do well that isn't tied to a news hook, you can afford to sit on that for a little while until you need it. If a news story comes up and you know a freelancer who has some knowledge on that topic, reach out to them so you can meet the moment. Sounds like "no shit" statements but to me it was revelatory. I had wanted for so long to discuss editorial strategy and be around discussions of editorial strategy and actually getting to do it, to be in a room that produced essays read by millions, felt like nothing else in the entire world before or since. That first meeting was the kindling in my brain finally meeting fire.
The book Blackout by Sarah Hepola, Salon's personal essays editor for a time, cited an anecdote from her days at the publication. I don't have the book anymore so I can't quote it directly, but she discusses morale being so low that nobody bothered to pull a stray sock out of the window blinds. That was kinda the vibe! We were a money-losing operation with, I would later find out when they hired me, crushing traffic goals from upper management.
But as an intern I wasn’t wise to that part yet. I could figure out from the sorely out-of-date masthead not everything was going well. Why didn’t they just update it?
But it wasn’t an intern’s place to ask questions Like that, so I didn’t.
What place did an intern have at Salon, then?
Mostly behind a keyboard transcribing interviews. I have to admit the first month or so depressed me. This was what I worked so hard for? Transcribing interviews to get a "thanks" 48 hours later?
I was interning with three other people. One of whom would end up becoming a serious politics writer who I suspect would not remember me if I told him my legal name. Honestly, I barely remember him as well. We would occasionally commiserate about a fellow intern who seldom contributed to transcriptions.
Outside of transcribing interviews our responsibilities included sorting galley copies (or arcs or review copies) by their release date. Lots of publishers sent Salon books months ahead of release hoping we'd review them or run an excerpt or interview the author. We got to take home pretty much any book we wanted and I joked: the internship pays me in free books which was absolutely a perk. I still have some of those review copies.
We'd get lots of swag from publishers or TV shows trying to get us to cover whatever it was they were promoting. It was all odds-and-ends, plastic junk, etc. It all sat on the "intern table" which was a set of four square tables all pushed together in the back of the office, where the struggling air conditioner couldn't reach. The foam cat was one such piece of tchotchke.
The internship began with disappointment, then. After about a month the other interns left and we moved to a modern office with legitimate air conditioning. Being the only intern made me Mr. Popularity of a sort. Everybody who wanted something had to ask me for it. The increased importance (and leverage) had me feeling audacious. I asked my boss if I could resurrect the site's defunct Tumblr account so I had something to do outside of transcribe interviews, and he agreed.
Tumblr was a hot commodity then, if you can believe it now in 2026. Tons of users, all very engaged, and positioned at an influential fulcrum in internet culture. Famously, The Dress, came from Tumblr.
Operating the Tumblr account is when the internship took off. I had lots of ideas about how an institutional Tumblr account should be run. Places like Mic were getting tons of engagement on Tumblr, a feat their then-social media editor would eventually be written up for in Digiday. I knew Salon's essays could perform well on the platform if packaged correctly.
My leverage allowed me to work from home more often. I got to save money on buying a 10-trip ticket to to the office rather than a monthly. I'd transcribe interviews in between queuing up Tumblr posts and it felt like I was actually learning when I did the latter. I taught myself how to make GIFs (GIF grabber + GIF brewery if that means anything to anybody in 2026) so I could post GIFsets to Tumblr, which usually did well.
By October I was looking for paid work and I left for a short-lived editorial fellowship that bounced me out by December for not hitting pageview numbers. Around the same time Salon had an open social media editor role. I applied and they hired me in January 2015.
As an Employee
I wish I had something more interesting to say than: we all kept our heads down and worked our assess off to hit traffic goals. Every Friday we all felt that same “how did we get through another week?” feeling. I would go out to get a Carvel sundae dasher every Friday night while working there for that reason.
But that’s what it was like. We had specific and quite stern benchmarks for Chartbeat (an analytics software measuring site performance) pegged to the hour of the day. If Chartbeat wasn’t at or near 10,000 concurrent viewers by the morning editorial meeting we were going to get chewed out. Doubly so if we hadn’t gotten it to around 15,000 by the afternoon meeting. My favorite ever quote about running a magazine comes from one of these meetings. A hastily-appointed new politics editor pitched an essay and the editor-in-chief responded glibly with “we’re in the business of being read, and nobody’s gonna read that.” I'm not trying to frame the person cynically, mind you. The EiC was and is a very smart guy put into a really rough spot by the suits ("many such cases," as the meme goes). That quote from him though, I still think about it 11 years later as the editor of my own magazine. But more on that later.
Most of the time the staff made magic happen. When I was there as an intern and as an employee we broke traffic records routinely in the first half of my tenure. I don‘t like spilling too many beans but I think it’s safe to say at this point given the site is now defunct that we were pulling in approximately 20 million pageviews per month back then. Quite impressive for the relative skeleton crew manning the operation by that point.
Yet the staff would only decrease further during my time at Salon. Big traffic goals meant high daily post count quotas. The demands led to churn. People would work there, claim any institutional prestige the publication had remaining, then go somewhere else a year or two later for significantly more money. Aside from ownership and/or C-suite malfeasance, Salon had the visibility to showcase talent without the resources to keep it.
In the first six months of me working there we lost a major chunk of the site’s editorial employees including the politics editor, the culture editor, and at least two assistant editors. I know I am missing quite a few people.
The suits did little to address the problem so in summer of 2015 we unionized the newsroom. I was walking to a deli that specialized in grilled cuisines (burgers, chicken sandwiches, etc) when I got the email that management recognized the union.
The mass departures made traffic goals harder to hit at the same time an algorithm shift on Facebook landed a liver kick to our distribution. Traffic fell hard and the site resorted to less than stellar tactics to make up the difference, such as an interview with conservative agitator Camille Paglia. We also started re-publishing archaic essays with 2015 URLs to trick facebook’s algorithm into thinking it was new material. In kayfabe they were re-issued essays in celebration of our 20th anniversary. Would you believe we did this so often a woman I went on a first date with complained about it when I told her where I worked?
I left a few months into 2016 as all of these problems were reaching their nadir. After my departure, the site would be evicted from its office for back rent and the entire suite of upper management would be fired as new owners took over.
That’s the broad strokes. But what did I personally do with my time there?
I helped run Twitter and Facebook, helped edit the “cover“ (that is, move essays around on the front page of the site), and ran the magazine’s Tumblr. By this point the mainstream press had caught on to Tumblr's popularity, with Caitlin Dewey declaring in The Washington Post that Tumblr had become "the front page of the internet." I grew the following from about 8,000 or so followers then I started running the page as an intern to approximately 120,000 by the time I left. I still remember one of the first major successes on Tumblr. I posted a GIFset of this video where a Nebraska man clad in overalls and a yellow construction shirt challenges a Big Oil rep to drink fracked water at a town hall meeting. What made the post viral was someone reblogging with the comment "sick minion cosplay." I think it had over 100,000 notes and was our first post to reach that benchmark.
Everyone was happy for me when I did leave Salon for a surging news startup, which I did with a degree of sadness. Salon was the first thing in my professional life that had ever gone right. And it was staffed by many brilliant people whose devotion to the written word was so great they put up with the ownership's demands. I am grateful for the time I spent there.
As an editor, a decade later
I've been running a magazine for nearly three years now and every day that goes by I appreciate legitimate publications (historical and current) more and more. Running a site that does one thing well requires time, expertise, and inexhaustible passion. Salon, even during the tumultuous times, was able to publish worthwhile material across several formats: political analysis, film & TV reviews, book discussion, interviews, and personal essays.
When I worked there the editor-in-chief said the strategy was to "be smarter than anyone faster and faster than anyone smarter." A difficult promise to live up to yet Salon managed to accomplish this for much of its lifetime.
"We're in the business of being read," while it certainly can be interpreted cynically I think is a genuinely worthwhile lodestone if you think about it artistically. Essays exist to be read otherwise they're diary entries. And even if we lived in a communist utopia, a publication without a single reader isn't much of a publication. A magazine needs to put out material people will read, or it won't last. The challenge of being an editor is turning this truth into a tightrope to be walked rather than a pool to dive into.
If you search the URL search Salon's goodbye post on Bluesky you'll see countless posts appreciative readers who enjoyed the site for decades, and from writers who passed through the magazine as either an employee or a freelancer discussing how the magazine contributed to their life artistically or to their career professionally. I am not different in this regard. Salon helped make me what I am.
If I were forced to be concise about it: I spent my time at Salon learning how to package and frame essays to maximize the likelihood of garnering interest while also maintaining editorial integrity. What more can you hope to learn from doing social media for a magazine?
Thank you to every reader of Salon, past and present. Thank you to everyone who worked there throughout its 36 years. Thanks to everyone on Tumblr who engaged with Salon's posts during my internship; pointing to the success I'd already had there was a great point in favor of hiring me as a social media assistant. And rest in peace to Scott Eric Kaufman and Simon Maloy, two writers who worked for the site during my time there and passed away after I left.
I kept thinking Salon would last forever. I'd see announcements about well-heeled places crashing and burning, about BuzzFeed shitcanning practically all the human writers, and so on. Yet Salon kept going somehow. It seems so unfair that the end came so suddenly and after historic midterms that would give Salon's approach to news and politics strong headwinds. I could write a paean to independent media but instead I'll reiterate my gratitude: I got to work for a place like Salon when places like Salon still existed. It's now my sacred duty to pass on what I have learned in any way that I can (we can't lose the recipes).
Thanks again, Salon. I wouldn't be here without you.
Matt Wolfbridge is the founder & editor of Typebar Magazine.