I started reading Salon in the summer of 1996, a time when having access to the Web in your office was still something of a perk. I won't say it's exactly gone downhill since then: It continues to host many great writers, from Heather Havrilesky to King Kaufman to Andrew O'Hehir , and it's still the first newsy link I click on in the morning. And, to be fair, some of its content in the old days just wasn't that great; far too much of it, in fact, read like the kind of thing your college roommate might turn in for her nonfiction writing class.
Still, there are things I miss about the old Salon. In those days, Salon wasn't a continuously updated stream of content. Instead, at some moment around 8 pm on the west coast, the day's edition was published. Whatever Salon's editors deemed to be the top story the previous evening remained the top story the next day - or, if it was the Friday edition, for the entire weekend. Though this relatively glacial pace could be frustrating, it also had some advantages. Every day's Salon was a coherent package; you felt that its editors had, at some point, made thoughtful and deliberate decisions about what front-page art to use, what to make the lead story, and so on. And this sense of content being shaped by an invisible but wise editorial hand often enticed me to read articles I wouldn't have expected to be interested in. Usually, I was glad that I had.
As I remember, all hell began to break lose during the 2000 election, when the staff started updating the lead story several times to reflect the rapidly changing status quo. Further, it began to be the case that fewer and fewer prominent stories were on wacky subjects like the Kentucky Derby or book-blurb inflation or mean-spirited feminist co-ops, and many more were about current events and Styles section-esque cultural trends. These days, the content of Salon's front page changes rather frenetically, and creeping bloggishness - by which I mean constant updating and a focus on commentary rather than original content - has invaded the whole site.
As those of us who reflexively hit the refresh key pretty much every time we look at the computer screen can attest, there's nothing wrong with up-to-the-minute news coverage. But plenty of other Web publications do it well. In scrambling to keep up with every political blogger and celebrity gossip sheet out there, Salon has lost just a little bit of its originality and distinctiveness.
As I've said, I still like Salon, and I probably wouldn't even bother to complain were it not for the new design. Though I was initially agnostic (the new look is a little prettier), I've quickly come to despise it. The new design is apparently intended to allow readers to get to the content they want quickly and efficiently and ignore the rest. But one of the virtues of the old Salon was that it exposed you to content you might not otherwise pay attention to. Further, the new emphasis on reader-driven navigation is a boon only to the super-organized. I'm dismayed that I never know when some of Salon's more offbeat features, like Ask the Pilot, have been updated unless I remind myself to check, which entails scrolling way down the front page. Honestly, sometimes I don't want to take charge of my reading experience; I want someone else - like, say, a team of good editors - to do it for me.
But all this is really just by way of intro to Salon's 10th anniversary extravaganza, in which they're selecting and rerunning their best stories from the past. The years 1995, 1996, and 1997 are already up. Not everything from those years was great, of course, but a surprising amount is worth reading. And in contrast to some of the insta-analysis that's appeared fleetingly on Salon's front page in recent years, very little of it is stale.
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