Salon.com Debuts Redesigned Site, Offering Advertisers Unmatched Flexibility and New Ways to Engage Readers

SAN FRANCISCO--(Business Wire)--
Salon.com, the award-winning news and culture site, today announced the launch
of its site redesign, giving advertisers an exciting, flexible online platform
whose only limit is the advertiser`s imagination. Salon now offers new, creative
ways for advertisers to engage fully with the audience, including support for
free form ad units, custom interactions and widgets for social media.

"More and more, people are turning away from traditional media and turning
toward online news and culture sites for insight and information," said Richard
Gingras, Salon.com`s CEO. "At the same time, technology and social media tools
are enabling much more granular targeting and engagement with audiences than
ever before possible. We have redesigned the Salon.com site to let advertisers
utilize these unprecedented opportunities to reach a highly desirable
demographic - the readers of Salon.com - in a meaningful way."

Salon.com`s readers - over 5.5 million and growing - are thought leaders who are
active and involved in the world around them. According to Nielsen, Salon ranked
first among websites in the number of readers who attended colleges and
universities and in the top half dozen sites for film enthusiasts, blogging,
environmental friendliness and news readership. "Salon`s readers are also
writers and communicators. They are not just consumers of media but creators of
media," said Gingras.

Among the new features of Salon.com and opportunities for advertisers:

Architectural Flexibility: The site redesign was purposely crafted to provide
advertisers and sponsors with the flexibility to be innovative in creating new
campaigns. "We`re intent on creating experiences beyond standard ad units that
engage the audience in stimulating new ways," said Ben Zagorski, Salon`s vice
president of advertising sales. "We are giving advertisers the ability to
manipulate more parts of Salon than before. HTC has taken advantage of these
capabilities by tuning the color scheme of Salon's navigation to highlight their
`Quietly Brilliant` campaign. We now also support free form ad units where the
only limitation is creativity." Screen shot here.

Open Salon: Salon`s blogging platform offers a compelling array of daily content
from a talented group of writers. With over 35,000 bloggers, innovative
advertisers like Lexus have already begun to engage this audience. Through
conversational marketing with an insightful and participatory audience, they
have crafted custom campaigns that activate the Open Salon audience to create
content around their messaging. These innovative campaign approaches allow
advertisers to forge relationships with potential customers in ways that have
not been available before. Screen shot here.

Floating Ads: With the new site architecture, Salon is also supporting ads that
can float along with the reader as the entire article is read. Salon has
replaced normal article pagination in favor of empowering the user with the
ability to retrieve the entire article with a single click. Then, as the reader
scrolls through the article, the ad, rather than disappearing, "floats" along
with the reader. As Zagorski notes, "With these innovations, Salon has created a
more compelling reading experience and a more impactful advertiser experience."

New Vertical Sections: Salon is creating an array of new vertical sections which
offer targeted new opportunities to engage with readers interested in particular
topics. The first new verticals, coming later this year, will be a Food section
anchored by the prolific former Gourmet.com writer Francis Lam and enhanced
versions of its Books and Film sections. Additional sections will launch in
2010.

Founded in 1995, Salon.com has a reputation for delivering high quality
journalism, covering a range of news, political and cultural topics. Its stable
of talent includes accomplished journalists, authors such as Joan Walsh, Glenn
Greenwald, Camille Paglia and Cary Tennis, cartoonists including Tom Tomorrow,
plus an evolving group of emerging, edgy voices who are regular contributors to
the site. Editor-in-Chief Joan Walsh is a frequent guest on political television
shows, including MSNBC`s Hardballwith Chris Matthews, The Ed Show, the Rachel
Maddow Show and Morning Joe as well as CNN's Reliable Sources.

About Salon Media Group

Salon Media Group (Ticker Symbol:SLNM.OB) is the home of Salon.com, the
pioneering online community The Well, and the innovative blogging community Open
Salon. Salon.com is the trusted, award-winning website that is creating an
entirely new form of journalism: combining the high standards of traditional
media with the commitment to audience participation and engagement that
distinguishes new media. Salon has become the go-to site for informed and
engaged people who care about what really matters. The site combines original
investigative stories, breaking news, provocative personal essays, highly
respected criticism and a stable of popular staff-written blogs about politics,
technology and culture. Salon has offices in San Francisco, New York City and
Washington D.C. More information can be found at Salon.com.

Krause Taylor Associates
Robbi Peele, 415.596.7929
robbi(at)krause-taylor.com
or
Barbara Krause, 650.480.4066
barbara(at)krause-taylor.com

Copyright Business Wire 2009