Q & A Time:
Q: Does Salon have a viable business model for an online magazine?
A: No, not really. While Salon became a public company in 1999 and has stock options that bring in an annual stream of money, they are still operating in the red, which is being made up by several investors. The frustration in not having a better business plan is what eventually led to Scott leaving Salon.
Q: Who do you think is out there that Salon shares a segment with?
A: Slate.com came along about 6 months after we did and they were the closest competitor. It was a problem for business people too, because what does online media mean? C-net and cnn.com? Yes, in a sense, but also no. We could say we were unique because we were doing our own writing.
Q: What should journalism schools do to incorporate online with everything else?
A: Propogation of ideas.
Q: How did you decide your target audience and how did you get the word out?
A: The target audience is “we have no idea.” At the beginning, the founders of salon.com were not totally sure and looking to create a publication where they could do the work they loved to do and had a “vague notion” that there was a smart audience out there for that. At that point in time, no one really knew how to target on the web. Turned out to be a semi-upscale news magazine, slightly older, slightly more affluent demographic.
Getting the word out came a bit easier. It was covered in the business section of the New York Times. However, that was not how they got their traffic. Links are the most effective way to get traffic. During the dotcom bubble they did some advertising in television, but Scott doesn’t find it very effective.
If he was doing it today, Scott would still focus on links, but also work to get people to Twitter about it, as well as getting mentioned in blogs and on Digg.
You have to find influential people who are already online in the area you’re working in, to promote your project for you.
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Scott’s book, on the history of blogging, is due out in August. He sees blogging as a spectrum, from a personal diary to political commentary. It covers all aspects of online expression.
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Journalism has to be interactive when it’s online.
Scott doesn’t understand the notion that being in touch with the readers would compromise the credability of your writing.
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80 percent of the activity of people online is email/chat/social networking… essentially, people interacting with other people.
Journalism falls within a fraction of the other 20 percent.
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Six journalists to 1 Business person: The ratio meant that the writers would have to give up previous notions that journalists had a duty not to worry about the business side of things.
Scott says originally he called Salon an “involuntary non-profit.”
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Salon.com was first launched in November 1995. Scott says the journalism was the easy part. Everyone on board was familiar with writing and editing, and had been doing it for years.
“Dealing with the web was not as difficult as you might think back then… It was fun. It was a challenge, but it was fun.”
“The hard part was the business part.”
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Salon.com is an online newsroom that has been around for 10 years. It is solely an internet venture and possibly the way of the News future?
Scott was on the “first boat” of the news migration to the internet. It started in 1994 when the San Francisco area was putting out a strike paper… They also made a website to show off the journalists’ work. They updated every day, until the strike ended in 2 weeks. It was such an exciting experience, they just did not enjoy traditional print media after that.
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Scott Rosenberg, founder of Salon.com is speaking to a group of Cronkite students and I’ll be live blogging the whole thing!
Stay tuned for more
