Salon, One of the Earliest Online-Only News Magazines, Is Shutting Down

Salon, one of the first online-only news magazines (a publication with no print edition), has announced that it is ceasing publication. The farewell, an unsigned post titled "Goodbye from Salon", was published on November 5, 2026, and is also featured on Salon's homepage.

The post opens with the sentence "Today, after 31 years, we are saddened to announce that Salon is ceasing publication." Salon describes the decision as a difficult one, reached after careful consideration, and says its publishing model is no longer sustainable. The outlet also said the business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years. The Verge reported the same reasons and named general manager Amanda Wolfe and chief content officer Erin Keane as the company's leadership.

TheWrap reported that Salon shared the shutdown announcement as an open letter and that the outlet permanently shut down on a Thursday, which in the calendar of this announcement is November 5, 2026.

Salon launched 31 years ago. Find.co acquired the outlet in 2023, according to The Verge, and the acquisition was announced through a press release from that company. The farewell message closes with the line "It has been an extraordinary privilege."

The Associated Press described Salon as an early staple of internet discourse and one of the early internet's most influential websites, in its report on the shutdown. Salon's editorial archive will stay live for now, according to The Verge.

Salon did not attribute the closure to a single event. It described a publishing model that is no longer sustainable, a structural judgment rather than a discrete failure. For anyone who builds or runs digital publications, that wording is familiar. Advertising, traffic and subscription revenue have been under pressure for years, and small independent titles have absorbed much of that strain.

In my view, the detail most worth watching is the archive. Its continued availability means that two decades of reporting, criticism and commentary remain indexed (catalogued so that search engines can find them) and retrievable after the newsroom stops producing new work. That matters to researchers and to anyone who depends on the web's historical record, and it keeps the outlet's contribution to online journalism accessible while its operations end.