Surfing the Web for Soul

__"Raising Caen" by William Powers, in The New Republic (May 12, 1997), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.__

Before television stole their breaking news, chain ownership destroyed their local character, and bland, rootless young "professionals" took over their newsrooms, the nation’s great metropolitan newspapers were the soul of their cities. Today, they are spiritually dead, asserts Powers, a New Republic senior editor and former reporter for the Washington Post. Now, some San Francisco journalists are trying to revive that spirit in a hightech form: a daily "webzine" called Salon.

Powers is skeptical.

David Talbot and a handful of other writers and editors left the struggling San Francisco Examiner in 1995 to launch the on-line magazine. Salon now has about 30 employees and is backed by the Adobe Systems software company and a leading high-tech venture capital firm. In 1996, Time tapped Salon as the year’s best Web site.

Daily newspapers today, says Talbot, formerly the Examiner’s arts and features editor, "have become so corporate, so bureaucratic, so politically correct—all these things have sucked the life out of them." The best newspapers of the past, in his view, built reader excitement and loyalty "around personality, columnists who make you feel like you’re part of that world, whatever they’re writing about." Salon has tried to do that with established national names such as Camille Paglia and David Horowitz, along with less known writers such as humorist Cintra Wilson.

"Among the high-end online magazines," Powers writes, "Salon seems to be doing as well as anyone." The number of "page views" ("visits" by readers to individual pages of the webzine) recently reached three million a month. Salon, according to Talbot, has 75,000 registered readers. It will need a much bigger audience to attract enough advertisers to make it a commercial success, the editors acknowledge.

Powers does not try to predict Salon’s financial future. But he doubts that its attempt to recapture a sense of local community can work. The newspapers of yore were physically rooted in the places in which people made their lives. Salon, in contrast, serves a "virtual community," made up of people who like the publication’s ideas, slant, or sensibility. It’s just not the same, Powers maintains. "A newspaper wasn’t a club you wanted to join, it was an expression of a club you were already in."