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Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - |
Welcome to the new Salon - - - - - - - - - - - -
April 5, 1999
| Dear Salon reader:
Back in 1995 we launched Salon as a weekly "interactive magazine of books,
arts and ideas." We aimed to offer sharp writing, lively voices, news
unavailable elsewhere and an online community with the élan of great salons
throughout history. As a group of "refugees from the atrophying world of
newspapers and magazines," we cast our work onto the Net -- and listened in
wonder as online readers responded with cantankerous arguments, sporadic
catcalls and generous applause.
Since then, as you know, Salon has grown into something much more than a
magazine. As the Web mutated from a high-tech toy to a vast marketplace, a
media stew and a virtual commons for humankind, Salon continued to evolve,
too: We picked up our pace to a daily fresh-content fix, added new
departments and columnists, built our Table Talk discussion area into a
home for thoughtful exchange and added our own Salon shopping mart.
Today we're launching the biggest and most exciting set of changes to Salon
yet -- a new look, new sites
like Health & Sex and People, a new Weekend edition and a continuous
publishing cycle. Salon magazine has been reborn as a round-the-clock
network of Web sites.
We even have a new Web address. I'm delighted to announce that as of today
you can reach us
at www.salon.com. Don't worry -- our old addresses at
salonmagazine.com (and salonmag.com) will continue to work, too, and so
will your old bookmarks. But from now on you can save your typing fingers a
few precious keystrokes and find Salon right where you'd expect it to live
on the Net -- at salon.com.
This change isn't simply a matter of convenience. We don't think the word
"magazine" properly describes what we do any more. Magazines don't publish
round the clock; magazines don't build communities where readers can talk
to one another without need for an editor's OK. We're proud of the values
that we've inherited from the world of traditional journalism -- like
independence and trustworthiness. But we feel we no longer need the "online
magazine" metaphor to explain what Salon is and does.
Another change you'll find beginning today is that Salon has revved up its
schedule once more. From now on you'll find news updates and fresh stories
posted throughout the day on Salon, particularly in our News, Technology
and Arts & Entertainment sites. And this coming Saturday look for our new
Weekend edition of Salon, highlighting News updates, extensive Travel
coverage, our Urge
department (with Susie Bright's column and other articles on sex) and other
features for your weekend enjoyment. We're now, proudly, a "24-by-6"
operation.
We're giving up more of our sleep because we know we're working in a medium
that never rests. We're committing ourselves more than ever to delivering
news scoops, information and commentary in the Salon tradition by
bolstering our news staff at our New York, Washington and San
Francisco offices, and by augmenting our original coverage with
up-to-the-minute dispatches from the Associated Press and Reuters. Last
week we sent reporter Laura Rozen to the Balkans to cover the situation in Kosovo.
Our goal remains to provide you with unique coverage you can't get anywhere
else on the Net, faster than anyone else on the Net.
The more we publish, of course, the more thought we have to put into
organizing our Web pages. Today Salon transforms itself into a network of
10 related but free-standing sites. Many -- like News, Arts &
Entertainment, Technology (formerly 21st), Books, Mothers Who Think, Media,
Travel (formerly Wanderlust) and Comics -- are familiar to you. We're also
introducing two new sites: Health & Sex, featuring lively coverage of
personal health issues in the Salon tradition (like today's lead story on
"Sex Police -- When surgeons decide if your baby is a boy or a girl");
and People, featuring our Brilliant
Careers profile series and Nothing Personal, an irresistible daily dose of
dish and dirt by columnists Amy Reiter and Douglas Cruickshank.
You'll still be able to find a complete listing of all of Salon's new
articles at our central home page at www.salon.com. But each of our
10 sites will now offer its own home page, with article listings and
timely "Elsewhere on the Web" links. These pages -- which you can access
directly from any page on Salon via the upper-left-hand-corner listing --
will change frequently, so check back often.
Today you're also seeing the fruits of a months-long redesign effort at
Salon. We've set out to preserve the elegance and fast downloads that have
always been our priority while making our sites easier to navigate and
offering some new features you've been clamoring for -- like a
printer-friendly version of every story we publish and an "e-mail a friend
about this article" button. To offer these new features we've completely
rebuilt Salon's technology platform around the Linux operating system and
the industry-leading Apache Web server.
We know that keeping up with all the changes here might be a challenge (it
has been for us!). Take some time in the next days and weeks to explore our
new sites, and be sure to let us
know what you like and don't like about our efforts. With all these
innovations and transformations, we want to assure all of you -- whether
you've been with us from the beginning or are only now finding out about
us -- that some things about Salon will never change: We'll always try to
surprise you. We'll always try to listen to you. And we'll always aim to
make you think.
-- DAVID TALBOT Salon.com | April 5, 1999
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