How are Salon.com and Slate.com doing?

In My Humble Opinion
1

These are two websites I visit regularly. I’ve never found another site like them, so if you know of one, please tell me. How to define what they are? Curated news and opinion about politics and events and whatnot?

Anyhow, here is my take on how they are doing. I don’t have a lot of information, so please add your own facts and opinions…

Salon.com

They had their numbers up online a few years ago, and they looked absolutely disastrous. I have no idea how they’ve survived so long. No idea. And they always seem to be peeling away writers and scaling down the site (while adding new writers and stuff) but never going away.

The founder David Talbot came back a couple years ago to, um, fix stuff? And that seemed to last a couple months.

The content has changed over the past couple years as well. They rely now a lot on book experts, and they are getting a lot of (deserved) flack from the readers for egregiously click-baity headlines. There are still some good writers on there, however, and I feel that I can get a good grasp on the major news by visiting there, so I don’t stay away.

I can’t imagine they can last much longer, and yet they just keep surviving.

Slate.com

They redid their site design last year, and it’s friggin’ awful. The main purpose of the redesign, or one of them, seems to have been to hide the fact that they just don’t have that much new content up each day.

They just started a “Slate Plus” program that gives you greater access to the writers, crap like that. Not interested.

I really don’t know anything about Slate’s finances. There is not a huge smell of success about the place, however. Content seems pretty sparse. They seem to have a few writers (like the craptastic Matthew Yglesias) writing a lot of stuff.

I’m not a huge fan of the site, even less than Salon, but here again it gives me a good dose of the news and an interesting article now and then.

Your thoughts?!

2

My impression is that the quality of both sites has declined precipitously. Slate used to be a must read for me; now it’s a slightly smarter Buzzfeed with an advice columnist. And Salon, which used to be protected by a paywall (meaning people actually paid to read it!), is now just Upworthy with a lefty twist. “You’ll Never Believe What this GOP Senator Said!” Both are nearly unreadable for me.

3

I thought HuffPost did the same thing; am I wrong?

4

Clickbait? Heck yes. But HuffPo doesn’t aspire to be more than trash, does it?

5

According to Alexa.com, Slate is the 577th most visited website and Slate is the 1,237th.
So both are within the Top 5000 sites visited worldwide.

Reference:

Slate: Amazon Alexa
Salon:Amazon Alexa

6

The second Slate there should have been Salon, in case anyone else was wondering which was which and was too lazy to click the links.

I used to really enjoy Slate, but find that the majority of their articles are now very short, and just barely scratch the surface of a story. I missed when they were better at going in depth, and offering a different angle. And I find their stories titled “X: You’re Doing It Wrong” and “[Complex Issue] Complete Explained In One Graph” to be really irritating.

Salon I never liked as much, but they’ve gone the opposite way, where now their articles will wander on for paragraphs, never really approaching any real point. And worse, they doing that irritating dynamic loading thing so I can’t even use scroll bar size (or number of pages) to estimate the article length.

7

I agree that they’ve both gone way downhill, both content and design-wise. I have a vague recollection that Salon once had some fairly good political analysis, but now it’s a jumble of tabloid-sheet dryer lint and Onion-class opinion pieces from a handful of social justice warriors glibly hectoring other liberals for not rending their garments at the pop culture PC scourge du jour, e.g. Ching-Chong, Ding-Dong Colbert, the rape culture of Westeros, or the last thing Ann Coulter tweeted.

Slate’s marginally better, but only by comparison. Both of them paid handsomely for eye-searingly ugly site redesigns that united all their readers in a rare unanimity of focused hatred and disgust, and staunchly refused to listen to criticism, make improvements or even admit they’d fucked up.

So how are they doing? I don’t know, and caring is not currently a high priority.

8

My understanding is that politically-oriented opinion magazines (think New Republic, National Review) historically have never made money. There’s always a patron or a rich publisher willing to bankroll the losses out of zeal, or at least vanity. So if these sites are not making money, that’s not unusual.

Slate used to have Microsoft backing it, then the WaPo; not sure who’s paying the bills now.

9

I’m pretty sure it’s people who click on stories like “Dear Prudence: I just found out my step-son is fucking my grandma! Help!”

10

The websites I go to that are like what Slate used to be are the Atlantic and Mother Jones.

11

Exactly. Prudie’s column is like open mic night for trolls. Even puts this board to shame.

12

Some changes to Slate that I’ve noticed (post-disastrous redesign):

  1. Lots of articles used to annoyingly be just a page and bit. Had to click to read a paragraph or two on the 2nd page. Now, they are generally one pagers. They didn’t fix the bad page break issue, just shortened the articles.

  2. Too many redundant articles. They just ran a bunch on spring cleaning. None of them at all useful. Gave up trying to read them after the 2nd or so. But they still kept coming.

  3. “In depth” articles on things like Mad Men episodes are now just chatty things. The great comparisons to previous episodes, other shows, stylistic matters, are mainly gone.

  4. Even The Bad Astronomer columns aren’t what they used to be before he moved. Fewer, shorter, with less “data”.

I am amazed that Salon is still in business.

13

Nice comments, thanks.

One other thing about the devloution of Salon: they used to have a .mobi site that worked really well. Now they don’t have a special site for mobile at all! In fact, after their AWFUL redesign, I used to read the .mobi site on my laptop, but then they took that away, and it was shitty new site or nothing.

At least Salon’s comments are readable on mobile. Slate’s pretty much are not (doesn’t work on IE on Windows phone, at least).

14

Slate’s still owned by the Grahams/WaPo.

15

Same here.

I’m close to deleting Salon from my bookmarks. Slate is dead to me after their awful redesign. I haven’t visited their site since.

16

Were those redesigns intended to make them easier to read/use on phones? They’re horrible on a desktop and screen but perhaps the new Slate and Salon designs are an improvement for phone users.

Is that it?

17

I’ve already read both of them. Nowadays, not so much, mostly because of their watered-down content/bad redesign.

If I had to choose, though, I’d pick Slate over Salon only because to me it’s a bit more “serious” and therefore a bit more “comprehensive”. But not by much. And nowhere near the way it was.

18

I’ve been the same way with NBC News. I can’t figure out who convinced these executives that crappy mobile design should be the default. I used to go there all the time; now I haven’t loaded it in months.

19

Many years ago I used to pay yearly to read Salon.com. That seems crazy to me now. The internet is slowly killing journalism. It is all about clicks. No one cares about accuracy or truth. Just clicks.

20

It’s the same thing with the Direct TV interface for the on-demand movies. Great for mobile users, useless for people watching on, you know, actual televisions.