In a perversely exciting turn this week, the tireless water-carriers of Fox News turned their sights on Salon, placing us on a short list of “once popular sites” that are “dead or dying.” It’s an odd list that lumps user platforms (Bebo, MySpace, Blogger), communities (Digg, Slashdot), Chatroulette, and two content sites: Salon and Gawker. Hey, it’s the Internet: Everything is a “site,” I suppose.

The story’s art clumsily, hilariously, seems to include Fox News in its loser lineup (I like to imagine it as the subversive handiwork of a pissed-off graphic designer):

The write-up has Salon shedding readers like scales from Roger Ailes’ backside — “losing about 1 million regular visitors over the past year, a 37 percent decline.” The fizzling started “almost immediately last November when the main editor, Joan Walsh, took a back-seat to write a new book.” Fox reports that we’re “ad-heavy” (not actually a bad thing for a site relying on ad revenue, by the way) and that we have a hard time competing with the “classier” New Yorker. 

I’m going to come clean. He’s right — the New Yorker is definitely “classier”! And I’ll confess to missing Joan’s regular presence in our daily meeting. Other than that, that blurb is pure bunk. Unique visitors (as opposed to recurring readers who come to the site all the time) to Salon this year are up 16.31 percent from 2010, as you can see from the chart below, which comes from Google Analytics (click chart for a larger image):

We’re consistently topping 5 million unique visitors a month (a first for Salon) and hit an all-time high of 6.5 million in March. It took real effort for this intrepid Fox reporter to find the (notoriously unreliable) Compete.com data to prove his counter-thesis; Quantcast, a more reliable traffic monitoring site for us, shows no such traffic drop. (Oddly, Fox has prevented Quantcast from even measuring its data.)

But Fox didn’t stop there; today, it unleashed its dead-eyed morning charmer Steve Doocy on the story, which seems to exist purely as an attack on Joan, and a way to promote Andrew Breitbart’s network of paranoid news sites (the jabs at Salon begin at around the 2:35 mark): 

So why would Fox . . . wait, do I need to even finish that question? Being attacked by Fox means that you’ve been identified as an enemy (Gawker — the prime target of the “F&F” spot — tracks the attention to a Fox investigation they have brewing). But what could we have done?

Here are 10 good reasons from this year alone.

Steve Doocy: Roger Ailes’ Attack Poodle

Fox nation shocker: Obama invited black guys to his birthday party

News Corp.-owned media outlets say people are overreacting to News Corp. scandal

The mystery of the Japanese “poop burger” story

Fox confuses Tina Fey for Sarah Palin

J. Crew ad may be transgender baby propaganda, warns Fox

Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon says he was just being “mischievous” when calling Obama a socialist in 2008:

Fox News chief again caught demanding conservative spin (Bill Sammon again)

Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck arguing that that whole Japan radiation thing wasn’t that serious:

Glenn Beck accuses Planned Parenthood of assisting in sex trafficking

Salon broke new ground nearly two decades ago when we launched one of the first “online magazines.” At the time, nobody knew what to make of this scrappy new site — and most predicted it wouldn’t last long. Salon has not only lasted, but thrived. Today, we’re embarking on another experiment with our first-ever video platform.

We want to capture the spirit of risk and exploration that permeated Salon back in those “Wild West” days of the mid-1990s. Salon Studio will feature original and curated videos ranging from political satire to musical performances to explorations of sexuality. Some of the productions will be highly polished, some of them will be raw and gritty — but we don’t want any of it to be predictable.

Salon has always believed in not just truth, but beauty. Our original design back in 1995 – a clean, art deco look created by Salon’s first art director, Mignon Khargie – immediately set Salon apart. Now Salon is once again separating itself from the cookie-cutter digital clutter that defines too much of the Web with a bold and striking new design.

We asked designer Kelly Frankeny to create a news tabloid as imagined by Coco Chanel. Frankeny — a globetrotting designer who is often dropping into beleaguered democracies in Africa and Latin America to work her wonders for embattled newspapers – responded to our challenge with a sophisticated and dynamic design. A brilliant and sassy blond Texan, she has created a new Salon as big as her personality. And yes, while invoking the brassy urgency of a news tabloid, the new design also conveys the elegance of the House of Chanel. Both Frankeny and the new Salon know how to use red lipstick and a simple black dress for maximum effect.

As winter thaws, the hot spots of the Occupy movement are seeing the first ripples of resurgence. From New York to Oakland, Calif., crowds are returning to the streets, but will the plan for a May 1 General Strike spark an American Spring or will the movement splinter and fade into Tea Party-like irrelevance? Watch the Salon webcast with Occupy correspondent Natasha Lennard to hear her thoughts on these issues:

To participate in upcoming Salon webcasts with staff and friends, join the Salon Core community.

Salon has covered the Trayvon Martin killing relentlessly, but none of our coverage has struck a nerve like the article “Is My Son the Next Trayvon?” by the chief operating officer of Salon Studio, Quincy McCoy. As a black man who escaped the rough neighborhoods of his youth to provide a better life for his child, Quincy’s article conveyed the constant anxiety suffered by all black parents — regardless of class.

Quincy recently hosted an online conversation on the epidemic of violence against young black men. Here is the full video of that discussion:

To participate in Salon’s webcasts with staff and friends, join the Salon Core community.