Kerry Lauerman's Open Salon Blog

Introducing . . . Salon's new TV critic

Tue, 6 Mar 2012 17:03:02 -0500

Word seems to be getting out that we filled our main TV writer slot, so thought I'd quickly post the news here: Willa Paskin (at left) will be joining Salon fulltime next week to write, review and report on all things TV.

It's a homecoming of sorts: Willa was a star intern about five years back, and went on to build an impressive and meaningful writing career, most recently at New York Magazine, and especially at its vibrant culture site, Vulture. I hesitate to call her a critic -- she's a multitalented force we expect to wear many hats. But TV criticism is an area Salon pioneered -- nay, exploded! -- online, beginning with Joyce Millman in the 1990s, through Carina Chocano, Heather Havrilesky and most recently, Matt Zoller Seitz. Fabulous writers and thinkers all -- Willa's a perfect successor.

Small side note: The (also terrific, and sometime Salon contributor) Alyssa Rosenberg of ThinkProgress responded to the abysmal percentage of women bylines appearing in major publications by naming "Ten women major magazines should be commissioning." Willa -- along with Salon's Irin Carmon and Tracy Clark-Flory -- made her very estimable list (something Joan Walsh pointed out to me, and wanted to include in her pitch for Salon Core, but held off at my request -- thanks Joan!). And while Salon's small but mighty editorial staff can and should grow to be even more diverse, I'm pretty proud of that.

An Open piece goes viral; a Salon scoop's backstory

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:02:04 -0500

Wanted to commend Sarah Fister Gale on her powerful piece, "Why Rick Santorum would have killed my daughter." You should read it if you haven't already. It's the type of story I love, a response to big news that's uniquely personal, but also, broadly impactful. I love featuring those stories in Salon; I love even more when they show up on Open Salon. The personal is political -- and vice versa. (Also, awww, Andy Richter tweeted it, too.)

Also, Glenn Greenwald's great, probing look into Mitt Romney finance co-chair Frank VanderSloot, and his history of going after journalistic critics, gets a nice response at Jim Romenesko's indispensible site, here, where I also gave some background on our story planning. It's a post I'm very proud to have published.

Introducing: Salon -- After Dark

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:02:36 -0500

We're unveiling a bit of a programming experiment later tonight (at 11:59 p.m., ET, to be precise) on Salon. And, I must warn you, it involves the most tedious of subjects, the spinach of story ideas, the NyQuil of news, and I'll forgive you if you stop reading about all this right now. Yes, that's right: I'm talking about sex.

Or, precisely, coverage of sex on Salon. We've had a long tradition of writing about sex with more zest and rigor than our starchier peers, precisely because we've always felt that a subject that consumes so much of our mental energy deserves real attention. A year ago, I sprang Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory to cover the subject as a regular beat, and her fascinating reporting and deeply researched weekly advice column, Am I Normal?, has garnered a smart, devoted audience. We also, frankly, get more great submissions about sex than we know what to do with -- people seem as eager to write about it as they are to read it.

But over the course of a typical day, it's often tough to give adequate real estate to the subject, when urgent news takes over. So we're turning our late-night site over to libidinal curiosities. The content will pop up around midnight, and drop down the cover before sunrise. We begin tonight, with a revealing personal essay and an amusing interview and slideshow, and will continue every night, Monday through Friday, with one or two stories. This pop-up, mini-section, will be assigned and edited by Thomas Rogers.

I'm looking forward to the reactions -- so let me know what you think.

Hit record

Tue, 7 Feb 2012 10:02:10 -0500

There's a terrible stereotype about Web editors, that we just care about traffic. Page views, unique visitors, clicks, hits, eyeballs, drivebys, furtive peeks, longing glances and everything in between.

And it's true!

Except I'm here to tell you that there's no easy trick, no gimmick, to draw people to read your Website. Trust me, we've tried.

A few years ago, as Salon (like all publications), tried to right our ship in deeply troubled recessionary waters, we followed the familiar script of other sites -- we laid off terrific staffers to lower our costs; we brutally pared down our expenses; we revamped staff priorities so that writers could simply produce more; we experimented in a fair amount of low-calorie aggregation. And yes, there's that word: Aggregation, the most inflammatory (and sometimes, hilarious) in our industry. So let me explain exactly what I mean by it: Short (a few hundred words) summaries or explainers about a major news event covered more in depth by somebody else. In its best form, we wrote short little decoders of a big story, and tried to link generously to the original source. At its worst, we monitored Twitter and Google for trending topics, and dispatched an intern to cobble together our own summary, posted it quickly, then prayed to the Google gods that the effort would win, if only briefly, their favor.

I'm not proud of that last approach, a mandate from above, which we were able to quietly scuttle after it was proven to have absolutely zero impact. But a terrible, pernicious thing has happened to journalists in the past decade, that's had us second-guess everything we know. Sometimes that's led to brilliant new reinventions of the form. Other times, it's just led to self-doubt, something I see in the sea of job applications of fine mid-career journalists every time we post for a new position.We've been trained to rethink everything, even if it leads to producing useless information at the behest of people whose only contribution to the marketplace of ideas has been to sneer at it, shrink it, and dumb it down.

But a funny, delightful thing has come out of it all. We ended 2011 on a remarkable high note, with over 7 million unique visitors for the first time, without any giant, viral hits that could be outliers. And now we've finished January in similar fashion, at 7.23 million.

There are concrete reasons for this. First, as I think I've mentioned before, our founder, David Talbot, returned as CEO, and having the person who founded the whole shebang suddenly come back holding the purse strings has been enormously liberating -- he's encouraged me to run an editorial team that unambiguously pursues a progressive vision of Salon at a time of populist upheavel and party alienation. We've also -- completely against the trend -- slowed down our process. We've tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We're actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January). So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic.

It sounds simple, maybe obvious, but: We've gone back to our primary mission and have been focusing on originality. And it's working.

We'll be doing more of the same, as the year continues, and we sharpen our campaign coverage (more on that in a future post), and have carved out a bigger budget for high-impact, important stories from freelancers -- experienced and brand-spanking new, who have important information to share. (And if you're one of them, I hope you'll pitch us here.) The state of our union is strong!

The business side of things? We're still, like most of our peers, trying to figure that out, especially post-recession. But we have a ton of confidence that our team -- including our whiz sales team and our renewed Salon Core membership program -- will develop big things.

Open Salon? Ah, that's another story entirely. After a painful year migrating the backend of Salon's technology (which did free up server space for Open, and make it much faster) we have plans for a bigger revamp to Open in the months ahead, with an improved registration program, better social tools and improved integration within Salon (and hopefully a few other ideas generated on Open) high on the priority list. I founded Open, so it's my great blue hope, and I'm still consistently dazzled by the writing and thinking here. So much so that I'm going to start blogging here weekly, just to keep you posted on Salon events, and OS news, as I have it. If you like it, I hope you'll give me thumbs up -- and if not, take me to task in the Comments!

Quick survey . . .

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:12:32 -0500

We tried a little experiment to cut down on the spam this week, and from my vantage point -- catching up on my Open reading, including many pioneers who seem to have returned (Hi K.M., Sandra!) -- it seems much better. Others? Or have they managed to find their way into other areas of the site I'm missing?

Merry, happy, etc.