Salon's Spins Paid Content

CNET’s News.com recently reported that webzine Salon.com has now generated 35,000 paying subscribers for its Salon Premium services. Indeed, Salon’s press release announcing that level of paying subscribership received favorable play in trade press for online publishing.

That’s too bad, because some of those journalists have fogotten that context, not content, is ‘king’ in journalism. Dotcom Scoop‘s Deputy Editor Robert Loch didn’t forget that basic journalism lesson. He debunks Salon’s press release and News.com’s fawning coverage of it. “Given the fantastic chance to receive Salon Premium content for as little as $2.50 per month, a staggering 3,770,000 of Salon’s reported 3.8 million readership have decided not to bother.” Loch also notes that a nearly a third of the income from this “hopeless” one-eighth of a percent response rate will be
consumed by Salon Founder David Talbot’s $300K annual salary, nonetheless paying for the rest of his staff or Salon‘s more than $70 million debt.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.