Why is SALON free?
The enthusiastic response that has greeted the debut of SALON proves that there's an audience hungry for first-rate writing and design on the Web. But what is the future of Internet publishing? There's a lively discussion of this question in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk.
Like almost everything on the Web, SALON is free of charge. Still, like all publishers dedicated to producing high-quality content, we spend money to hire the talented contributors who make SALON worth visiting. So how do we make the numbers work? Seeking advertising, rather than charging our readers subscription fees, is our preferred solution and we are grateful to Saturn, Working Assets, Apple, Adobe and Borders Books & Music for their support.
Now we'd like to ask you to help keep SALON free by, in turn, supporting our advertisers. You can check out their products by clicking on the ads you come across as you scroll through SALON. A click on one of these ads is a click for the future of free and compelling Web journalism.
Speaking of that, we think you'll find this issue particularly engrossing. In "Burning Down the House," Gary Kamiya examines a damning new PBS profile of Newt Gingrich, the peculiar politician who has seized control of the national moment. And in the SALON Roundtable, a range of commentators -- from Arianna Huffington to Rep. Barney Frank -- debate the GOP revolution's chances for success. How far do Americans really want to go in the dismantling of the federal government?
Elsewhere in SALON, Laura Miller looks deeply into our culture's current vampire mania and argues that the obsession with the toothy undead is propelled by a longing for blood ties much fiercer than that of any family values advocate.
And in the SALON Interview, novelist Jamaica Kincaid, a former member of The New Yorker's royal family, explains with bracing candor why she recently resigned from the magazine. Editor Tina Brown, Kincaid tells our correspondent Dwight Garner, "can't help but be attracted to the coarse and vulgar. I wish there was a vaccine -- I would sneak it up on her."
These and other stories should get the conversation flowing. I'll see you in Table Talk.
--David Talbot
Editor
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