Talks over a potential merger of online news and opinion pioneer Salon.com with a news aggregation site called Newser.com have foundered. Salon had let it be known in recent months that it was willing to become a target for acquisition. Talks with Newser seemed promising, but broke down over the price of the deal. Now Salon has said that it is not actively seeking a buyer.

The parties had apparently been close enough to a deal on an acquisition to share financial information and begin a discussion at Salon’s board level.

Once the Huffington Post sold itself to AOL for a whopping $315 million, it raised doubts with Salon about whether they were planning to sell for too low a price.

Salon’s chief executive, Richard Gingras, said, “We had a number of interesting offers, but we’ve decided instead to move forward with other plans, including continuing to invest in the business.”

Newser’s founder, Michael Wolff, who is also a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and editorial director of AdweekMedia, confirmed that the two companies were no longer in talks.

The two online companies work quite differently. Salon was established at a time when few news organizations saw any particular value in having their content online. It has a full-time staff that writes on news, politics and culture. Newser, on the other hand, collects news articles online and summarizes them in two paragraphs or less.

San Diego merger and acquisition attorneys note that Salon has been suffering losses, and that Salon is seeing the benefits for other online businesses of being part of a larger organization. In addition to the Huffington Post/AOL deal, the recent merger of the Daily Beast with Newsweek has gotten Salon’s attention.

Source: New York Times Dealb%k “Salon.com Merger Talks Collapse” 3/1/2011