You can crash on one set of rocks or the other set of rocks, and they crashed on the other set of rocks, which was probably being too little to be commercially viable.

That's the reason support for the National Endowment of the Arts is so important. It enables those ventures that aren't viable commercially to be done.

GETTING your rocks off

In the 1980s, things became much more commercially oriented.

On the other hand, we raised $25 million by going public. It's that money that we used to build this company, to build the circulation, to build a high profile and to hire staff that made Salon what it is today.

There are not that many new media brands you can say that about nowadays.