Explained: Online magazine Salon, an early staple of internet discourse, announces it will shut down

Salon announced Thursday it would shut down after 31 years of publication

Online magazine

A publication delivered via the internet rather than print, as Salon was initially styled

Editor-in-chief

The top editorial leader of a publication, a role held by both David Talbot and Joan Walsh at Salon

Newsweeklies

Weekly print news magazines, like Time or Newsweek, that were dominant before Salon's rise

World Wide Web

The internet-based system of interlinked documents, written out fully in the mid-1990s when Salon launched