Salon.com Announces Election-Year Initiative With MoveOn, The Guardian and Air America

MediaChannel.org ^ | March 13, 2004 | Timothy Karr

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NEW YORK, March 9, 2004 -- Salon.com announced Tuesday night a series of ambitious election-year initiatives, including the opening of a new Washington D.C. news bureau as well as strategic partnerships with MoveOn.org, The Guardian of London and the new progressive radio network, Air America.

The Website, which bills itself as "the largest independent news organization in the country" will also make the announcement via an email to MoveOn.org's 2-million plus members, MediaChannel has learned from a memo sent on Monday to Salon board members from company editor and founder David Talbot.

"The Web has come of age this campaign season as a political news medium and Salon is well positioned to be a leading player in the election year's round-the-clock news cycle," Talbot states.

Salon claims to have three million readers who visit its Website each month. Of this group, 74,000 are subscribers who pay up to $35 a year for "premium" access to news reports, political columns, cartoons and other editorial features. "We anticipate creating some buzz, and more importantly, new subscription revenue with this publicity offensive," Talbot wrote about this week's announcement in the memo to Salon board members.

In January Salon Media Group secured a $200,000 investment from Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone magazine to collaborate on coverage of the upcoming presidential election. This funding helped set up the Washington Bureau headed by columnist and former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal.

Blumenthal will spearhead the Website's newest editorial initiatives. "The Bush administration has put enormous political pressure on the press not to probe its radical policies and their consequences," Blumenthal states in the memo. "Salon intends to be fearless."

Blumenthal is a former Washington Post and New Yorker reporter and senior aide to President Clinton; author of "The Clinton Wars" and five other books.

Salon published on Wednesday an inside account of how intelligence was twisted in the rush to the Iraq war. The author of the article, "The New Pentagon Papers," is a retired lieutenant colonel, Karen Kwiatkowski, a Near East specialist, formerly assigned to the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon.

According to the memo, Salon will publish on Thursday the first of several advance excerpts from "House of Bush, House of Saud," a new book by Craig Unger "that explores the relationship between the two dynasties," according to the memo.

Unger "will expose shocking new details on the flights approved by the Bush White House that carried members of the bin Laden family and other prominent Saudis out of the U.S. to Saudi Arabia after September 11. Salon will publish for the first time the manifest of the passenger list and identify one passenger as a suspected al Qaeda funder who was aware ahead of time of the September 11 attack."

Salon has also agreed to a trans-Atlantic media partnership with The Guardian of London. "Salon and The Guardian will exchange news stories daily to be posted on each others' Web sites," the memo states. The Guardian has 8.5 million monthly Web readers, including 2 million in the U.S.

Salon will also contribute daily to the new progressive radio network, Air America, providing "The Salon Story of the Day." Air America announced on Wednesday that it will begin broadcasting in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and San Francisco markets on March 31. The radio network's on air personalities include political satirist Al Franken, comedienne Janeane Garofalo, hip hop icon Chuck D, radio personality Randi Rhodes, and humorist Sam Seder.

Salon, founded in 1995, has established a solid reputation as a credible journalistic voice on the Web, though as a business it has never been profitable. In recent years, the company has experimented with multiple revenue models. It now focuses on a "Salon Premium" subscription model supplemented by advertising revenues from companies including Visa, American Express, Mercedes-Benz, HBO, and Microsoft.

For the last several years, the company has had to fend off rumors of its demise. Salon reported quarterly net revenues ending December 31, 2003 of $1.3 million, but reported an equivalent net loss. The company's fourth quarter 2003 financial report to the SEC notes that if the Web publication "does not secure additional funds from the issuance of equity securities or instruments that convert into equity securities, Salon may be unable to continue as a going concern and cease operations."

Salon.com has survived thus far in part by attracting cash infusions from wealthy investors, including famed TV producer Norman Lear. Around the same time Wenner Media took a $200,000 stake earlier this year, founder and co-chairman of Adobe Systems John Warnock tipped another $600,000 into the company, enough to keep the Website going at least through the 2004 elections. Warnock is also a Salon board member.

As a part of the election-year expansion Salon will add writers for its political coverage. Edward Jay Epstein, author of numerous books, from "Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth" to "Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer," will be writing on the September 11 Commission. James K. Galbraith, the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in government-business relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, will become Salon's economics correspondent.

-- Timothy Karr is executive director of MediaChannel.org, which last month launched Media For Democracy 2004 (www.mediafordemocracy.us), a citizens-powered initiative to hold mainstream media to a higher standard of election coverage.

© MediaChannel.org, 2004. All rights reserved.

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