Back in November, I mentioned that Salon Magazine was seeking a buy-out or merger. The magazine was subsequently involved in talks with Michael Wolff of Newser.com, but the New York Times’s DealBook section reports that the talks have collapsed in the wake of the Huffington Post sale. Apparently the high $315 million selling price of the Post caused Salon’s board members to wonder whether they were pricing the magazine too low.

Salon Magazine was one of the first magazines to recognize the potential of e-reading, strongly influencing me to take my first step into e-reading technology with the purchase of a Palm Pilot. It was also one of the first magazines I read on AvantGo, one of the early precursors to RSS and read-it-later e-reading apps, on that Palm Pilot. It’s still out there on the web, features at least three RSS feeds, and the @Salon twitter feed makes a great candidate for importing into Flipboard for magazine-style browsing.

But as others have pointed out, it seems to have lost something over the years. Many of its best editors and columnists have drifted away, and what remains seems a little tawdry. Glancing over the front page at the moment, I see headlines like “Why I left my children”, “The twisted world of ‘ex-girlfriend porn’”, and my favorite, “Assassin can’t remember shooting RFK, wants parole.” Ah, Salon of my youth, hard-hitting political and insightful technological chronicler, what became of you?

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