Salon.com
22 4th Street, 16th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103
Phone: 415/645-9204
If the New York Times is the traditional "newspaper of record," then Salon.com is the New Economy's Web site of record. Launched in 1995, the Webzine provides reporting
and analysis on everything from politics to pop culture. More than 2 million people log on each month to read stories, join communities and download audio commentary. A
syndication deal with United Features Syndicate pushes articles to print and Web-based media around the country, including the Chicago Sun Times and the San Jose Mercury
News. In a virtual world where content is still king, some might argue that Salon.com is king of content sites.
Content/Contacts
Says managing editor Scott Rosenberg, "We're not the narrowly targeted niche-publication you usually find on the Web." His words become an understatement with a look at the
site's nav bar. You've got such disparate topics as "Arts & Entertainment," "Mothers," "People," "Sex" and "Tech & Business."
New content is posted every day on the main page, after which it filters down to sub-sites for a week. All stories live indefinitely in the site's archives, which house nearly
14,000 articles. Rosenberg says 50% of visitors hit them to find past stories.
Contacts:
Arts & Entertainment: Bill Wyman,
editor, [email protected]
Books: Laura Miller,
editor, [email protected]
News: Joan Walsh,
vice president and news editor,
[email protected]
People: Douglas Cruickshank,
editor, [email protected]
Technology & Business: Andrew Leonard, editor, [email protected]
Pitch Tips
We're not going to lie to you - getting a pitch onto Salon is about as easy as making your company come up first when someone searches "business" at Yahoo. But that's not to
say it won't happen.
Dayna Macy, Salon's in-house PR director, suggests instead of story ideas, you pitch story sources. "If one of our technology writers was doing a story on Linux, a PR
person might get results by offering a CEO who was an expert in the field."
The best way to contact editorial staff is through email and email alone (Salon.com doesn't even accept "letters-to-the-editor" that arrive via snail-mail.)
If pitching an idea, put the words "EDITORIAL SUBMISSIONS" into the subject line of your e-mail. Don't include attachments - they can easily turn to gobblety-gook when opened
in the wrong version of Word.
And don't bother faxing. That's soooo last millennium.
Comments
Salon.com fights the dumbing-down of the mainstream media, where nightly newscasts are tailored for 6th graders and daytime talk shows lower the bar on the lowest common
denominators. Provocative and controversial stories dominate. For example, last week columnist Caleb Carr called for action to regulate the Internet - a view with which Rosenberg
and most of his staff take issue. Another recent story helped blow the whistle on White House staffers who colluded with TV networks to get anti-drug messages into programming.
Salon.com readers meet the profile of your standard wired nerd. Fifty-eight percent are male, over half are between 30-49 years old, average household income is over $70K, and
70% are professional or managerial. But as attractive as these stats are to you tech marketers, save your product pitches for CNet and PC World. Salon.com rarely covers
specific gadgets.
Avoid sending press releases. Rosenberg says he finds so many of them useless because they come on the heels of an event that's already old news. But give a Salon staffer a
real scoop tinged with controversy and social commentary, and you may get your client on the monitors of a few million regular users.