I noticed that Interns’ Diary (“Two medical interns examine their roles as healers while learning to be doctors”) was high on the Salon blog rankings charts last week with a huge traffic spike coming in the form of referrals from a Slate weeklong diary featuring Ingrid Katz and Alexi Wright, the two interns in question.
It’s sort of funny that Salon blogs were once viewed as a potential “farm team” operation for highlighting new writing talent for Salon and have instead led to a publication in rival Slate.
I know some Salon writers have started Salon blogs. Has anyone made the reverse jump from Salon blogger to Salon writer?
Slate diary based on Salon blog
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4 responses to “Slate diary based on Salon blog”
i’ve had one story published by salon and have submitted others which were deferred by “i love it but we don’t have the money for free-lance writers now”. not the most original line but… therefore i went ahead and just posted it on SRO where i could get an immediate and (fortunately) positive response. i never got the feeling that salon was mining the blogs for writers. why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free??
It’s less a matter of “why buy the cow” than of how we try to spend our extremely limited budgets. Our freelance money goes disproportionately to original reporting — investigative journalism, on the scene reporting, and so on. Why? That’s what our subscribers tell us they want. We tend to think that the Web is now awash in “free” commentary — much of it quite good. Original reporting of stories that the “big media” are neglecting is in much shorter supply. So that’s where we’re putting our dollars. We’re always open to pitches and submissions, and certainly if you have a Salon blog (or, for that matter, another kind of blog) that will be a useful way for us to get a sense of who you are as a writer. But we’ve never positioned Salon blogs as a “farm team.” That approach strikes me as a little condescending to the blogs…
Yeah, I never got the “farm team” vibe either. Last thing I want is to be some old mule called in to pull all the heavy stuff.
That was probably too flippant. I think I got that image from some of Dave Winer’s ideas around when the experiment started – that it was a way for Salon to develop another realm of more interactive web writing, not necessarily a lower “tier” and I think Dave specifically hoped that some writers would be discovered that way, although I should find a cite, as I don’t want to be misquoting anyone.
For sure, Scott never characterized it as anything but a blog-hosting experiment.