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.
Other than that one year, Salon has been very cautious about the way it spends money. For instance, since last year, we've had virtually no marketing budget. It's just word of mouth. And our circulation continues to grow that way by breaking news stories.
People sort of take it for granted, but the more you see of the media world the more you appreciate a paper like the Times where its family continues to invest in editorial quality and I think it's the truly is the best paper in the world.
The entire American media apparatus bought into the drug war - which is an enormously damaging and costly undertaking for this country - and there wasn't enough critical reporting about it and that's why it's gotten out of hand.
The entire economy, of course, is locked in a down cycle right now. Last time we weathered this was during another Bush presidency in '90. We were locked in it for a year and a half and everyone came out of it.
The only school that let me in was U.C. Santa Cruz, which is where I went. They didn't have a journalism program, so I took sociology, which is the closest thing to journalism.
When you're kept by a patron you don't have to duke it out in the media marketplace for dollars and for readers. In some ways that's a blessing because it takes a lot of pressure off you.
While I'm critical to the Bush presidency, it's been enormously beneficial for Salon because we're seen as kind of an aggressive watchdog on the Bush White House. Particularly since Florida, our readership hit a whole new level, and we held onto those readers.
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.
