I keep seeing references, as in today’s needlessly snarky San Francisco Chronicle piece about Salon — and even by smart people in the blogosphere who should know better — to Salon’s “$79 million in debt.” So let’s squash this meme one more time before it propagates uncontrollably into the ether, like our old “error message haikus“:
Salon does not have $79 million in debt. Salon has substantially no debt.
Salon’s financials report an accumulated deficit of $79 million for our seven years of operations. If you break this down I think it’s roughly $50 million in cash and the rest is non-cash accounting charges. If you look at the financials over the years you’ll see that our spending for a couple years at the height of the boom (1999 and 2000) accounts for a disproportionate chunk of that.
This money represents losses, not debt. You’d think that’s an important enough distinction for the financial press — and the pundits in the blogging gallery — to get right. Argue all you want about our business strategy, our prospects and the quality of our prose; but let’s keep the facts straight.
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