Last year, I announced a Salon contest on Workbench:
I will buy a Salon subscription for one of the vultures who has circled the magazine for years in premature anticipation of its demise. The winner will be someone whose criticism of the publication is weirdly personal, unnaturally angry, outstandingly venomous, or ideally a combination of all three.
Catching up today, I awarded the prize to the fetchingly bilious weblogger Brian Carnell. No one combines his passionate loathing for the liberal online magazine with encyclopedic dedication to the subject. He has lamented the publication's low ethical standards, lax math skills, and freewheeling accounting practices, among other offenses.
If Salon ever folds, Carnell will be the first to post a hearty "I told you so," a realized prediction that would be more impressive if he hadn't been making it for years.
But I don't want to rob him of this achievement, and it is a matter of public record that he'll cherish this gift for the next 12 months, or the closure of Salon, whichever comes first:
I have to confess that I'm a regular Salon reader, and while I'll miss the site when it dies (and it is going to die), I've only got two words for David Talbot: good riddance.
