Salon, an Early Online Magazine, Announces It Will Shut Down After 31 Years
Salon, one of the first magazines built for the web, is shutting down after 31 years of publication.
The announcement came in a farewell post on the site itself, titled "Goodbye from Salon." The post went up on November 5, 2026, at 2:28 p.m. Eastern time. ABC News reported the closing the same day.
In its message, Salon said the business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years. Independent outlets, which are not owned by a large media company, have had to find their own way to pay for reporting as readers and advertisers shifted online.
Salon began in the mid-1990s and was founded by David Talbot. Over the years its writers included Jake Tapper, now a CNN anchor, and Glenn Greenwald, who later co-founded his own news outlet. Talbot and Joan Walsh both served as its editors-in-chief. Slate, another early web magazine, launched the year after Salon did.
Salon started out focused on culture and criticism. It widened into breaking news in 1997, when Princess Diana died, and that coverage helped define the site for many readers. For a generation that grew up reading online, it was one of the first places to find long, opinionated writing on politics and culture.
Salon has not said what will happen to its online archives. Those decades of articles are the main public record of the site, and for now it is unclear whether they will stay online. Readers who want to see the farewell message can find it on salon.com.
Salon's closing is one of several recent changes for online publications that began with the web in the 1990s. Its shutdown leaves Slate and a smaller group of early sites as some of the last original names from that first wave of internet magazines still running.
