Sometimes when a company implodes you feel sorry for the people who are losing their jobs. Sometimes, however, it is very, very difficult to do so. This week, the New York Post reported on one of those instances where a company fails and you have an urge to send “Learn to Code” memes to every single one of their employees.

Salon Media Group, a one-time digital darling, has fallen on hard times. It lost its CEO of the past three years last week and appears to be on the brink of a deal to sell itself for a fire sale price of $5 million.

The struggling company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on May 8 that it reached a deal to sell itself to a company called Salon.com LLC.

The filing contained no further info on the mystery buyer or buyers but said the deal would only require a $550,000 payment at closing. It said $100,000 would go to an escrow account and $500,000 was already paid as a deposit.

The remaining $3.85 million would be a promissory note payable in two installments over two years.

Even with those favorable terms, Salon issued a dire warning in the filing: “There can be no guarantee that the asset sale will be completed and, if not completed, we may have to file for bankruptcy and liquidation.”

Keep in mind that it went public in 1999 with a valuation of $107 million.

Apparently they are being bought by the same couple of guys, Chris Richmond and Drew Schoentrup, who made a run at buying Snopes.com in 2015 and nearly put it out of business. Salon, now a penny stock, is about to be delisted by the SEC because they haven’t filed any disclosure statements in over a year.

“We think we can turn a profit in year one,” Richmond said.

Yep. We’ll continue to loose a little bit on each transaction but we’ll make it up with volume.

The advertising market for political websites is tight and Salon had lost money nearly every quarter since it was founded. It was only kept afloat by gifts from a couple of wealthy leftists. If you take a look at it now, it carries very little advertising and the content is utter crap. Bottom line: it was never intended as more than a welfare system for otherwise unemployable progressive writers.

Whatever its value in its early years…and that was marginal…has been erased by hatemongers like Amanda Marcotte and by its relentless campaign to normalize pedophilia, for instance:

Meet Pedophiles Who Mean Well
I’m a pedophile, but not a monster
I’m a pedophile, you’re the monsters: My week inside the vile right-wing hate machine
“I’m not a monster”: A pedophile on attraction, love and a life of loneliness

This is how it was described by The Daily Beast:

[H]onorary mention must collectively go to the once-interesting Salon.com, which now reads like the Evergreen College student newspaper. At a loss for what to write about? How about undergraduate analyses of popular culture through the prism of race, class, and gender? Is Breaking Bad sending coded messages of white supremacism? Is liberal comedian Patton Oswalt a racist? How about a helpful analysis of The Legend of Zelda, a video game celebrating its 15th anniversary, which concludes that “the ways it deals with class, race, gender and animal rights are all deeply problematic.” (The same writer followed up with an apparently serious column on the best “video game for vegans”).

Odds are that Salon will not survive. And that, alone, helps convince even the hardest heart that there is a sense of cosmic justice.
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