Rumors of our demise...
I know it's easy to read our latest financial filings and assume, as some correspondents have, that Salon's tragic fate is already a done deal.
Here's the situation: We are a public company, I am an executive of the company, and as such there is no way I can sit here and go into detail about all the steps we're taking to secure Salon's future. Our SEC filing, upon which all the coverage has been based, specifically stated that Salon would run into trouble if it fails to raise new funds. Somehow that conditional clause seemed to drop away from most of the press reports. Sure, nothing in business is certain, but Salon also has a long history of raising the money it needs to survive.
This is the quote from our CEO, Mike O'Donnell, in our press release:
"We are in active, continuing discussions with potential investors to complete an equity financing that would give the company financial stability for 2003. Salon has reported the issuance of notes with equity conversion features in recent months and believe these will become part of a significant round."
Unlike the AP, which didn't even bother to call us for comment before running its imminent-death notice, this CBS Marketwatch report tells more of the story from our side.
Those of you with long memories will recall that Salon's imminent death has been predicted with almost clockwork regularity over the past several years, each time we have filed a quarterly statement with the SEC. And yet here we are. When we celebrated our seventh anniversary last fall, David Talbot published an amusing review of some previous -- and inaccurate -- predictions of our doom. It's worth another look as the vultures gather once more.
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