When the new Salon layout first appeared on my screen, the first thing I noticed is that it can get no narrower than 800 pixels. In these days of the Web on tablets, PDAs, and mobile phones, many people will see Salon on smaller screens. I'm very disappointed that the redesign didn't see fit to take these readers into account. A constant need for horizontal scrolling is a quick way to drive off visitors to a site.

I also miss the attractive customized front page for each section, now replaced by a boring list of articles that can seemingly get no wider than a few hundred pixels. How can I further my reading by browsing the most interesting or classic items in a section if the layout gives no clue as to what they might be?

A redesign should not promote inflexibility and reduce feature availability. I love Salon's content, but having to access it in this new inflexible and unhelpful format makes me much less inclined to explore it.

As a longtime reader who shares the bafflement and frustration many other readers have expressed in response to Salon's recent makeover, I am glad to see Ms. Walsh outlining at last the strategic intent behind these changes. At least now she has provided a context that does have its own internal logic.

The one aspect of Salon's recent redesign experiments I've found to be interesting and fruitful has been the real-time, wholly visible letters publication. I like the idea of an actual electronic salon: a place of active, lively, intelligent participation, rather than passive receipt of content. I also appreciate the experimental potential of Broadsheet as a new mode of feminist thought: more conversational, less dependent on the sort of high-minded seriousness that can appear old-fashioned, over-earnest and overly intellectualized. I've noted the enthusiasm and the intensity of reader responses, my own included, and I've enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, however, the experiment fails in several crucial respects. The main failure, to my mind, is that execution has been both awkward and shortsighted. The decision to shift Salon from the 'old media' style of one-way reporting to the 'new media' style of two-way participation, and simultaneously its editorial tone from traditional informed explanation to increasingly first-person, subjective commentary, was made without consulting the readers themselves.

Consequently, the first swell of reader partipation that I've seen has been wave after wave of outrage on Table Talk. The next result was that the smattering of thoughtful commentary available on the newly-open Letters to the Editor feature was nearly obliterated, again and again, with post after post of the same sort of repetitive, argumentative, knee-jerk, thoughtless, hostile, semi-literate screed that can be found anywhere else on the Net.

It seems to me that plans to increase reader partipation should have included readers from the outset, so that Salon's editorial board might better know what readers actually wanted, and readers might have more readily felt their actual interests were being served.

Moreover, as others have already pointed out, many of us are paying subscribers. What we are paying for is quality--'old media' style quality of thought and quality of writing. Salon remains one of the very few publications of this kind that remains to the Left. If blogs and the participatory model they represent have indeed become the 'new media' standard, that's because partipation is free--which is as it should be. Why should we pay for content that we ourselves are now largely responsible for generating? For the privilege of seeing our writing appear on a site like Salon, that built its reputation by offering content whose quality consistently met or exceeded the traditional journalistic standards it is now abandoning?

I am a professional writer and scholar. When I publish, either I receive payment for my work, or I receive prestige in the venues in which I have built my reputation. Salon is not one of those venues. Therefore, I have no reason to continue to pay Salon a subscription fee for the type and quality of writing that it is now phasing out, or for the privilege of using the site as an outlet for my own writing. And as much as I do enjoy partipating in an intelligent, engaged community of other writers, there are other venues for that. Although admittedly more intelligent than most, such a community is hardly unique.

I do support experiment, and I have enjoyed seeing the initial results. It's very likely that I will continue reading Salon. But I will no longer pay for it.

I do, however, wish you the very best.

I love Salon, and thought the new design was OK, but the changes I see today -- that big gray box with the Yahoo! search -- are just plain ugly! Please rethink this; it makes the front page look cluttered and uninviting.

As for the Broadsheet hate, I suspect that an online magazine like Salon keeps very close tabs on which features generate lots of hits and which don't. If you don't like a recurring blog or feature, don't click on it. Unlike print publications, Salon can get up to the minute data on which articles actually get read, and which ones have the highest readership among paying subscribers. The fact is, a lot of people (myself included) enjoy Salon's "fluffier" features, like Heather Havrilevsky's TV column, the much maligned Steve Almond piece, Rebecca Traister's articles, etc. We are probably just less vocal than the readers who loathe them. If Broadsheet catches on with enough readers, it'll stay; if it's ignored, it'll go.