According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, 15-year-old news site Salon.com is seriously “exploring opportunities to merge with or be acquired by another media company.” The site has lost about $15 million over the last five years.

A internal Salon memo by CEO Richard Gingras attempted to play down the Journal report, saying that “There isn’t any news here. As I have disclosed in All-Hands meetings I have been aggressively pursuing options for  Salon either additional investment or a possible merger. It is, as we know, very difficult being a mid-sized news property in today’s advertising marketplace. So the only news with this article is that WSJ picked up some scuttlebutt about discussions we’ve been having and ran with it.”

In a separate report for Crain’s, reporter Matthew Flamm quotes Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, who echoed Gingras, highlighting the difficulties of operating as a stand-alone website “at a time of punishing economics for web businesses.”

“They deserve a lot of credit for hanging on all these years without the support of a larger media company… It’s extremely hard to be a standalone company, particularly on the ad sales side. (Weisberg’s Slate, a one-time rival of Salon, is part of the Washington Post Company.)

Salon currently has about 45 staffers and, by its own estimates, gets between 5.5 and 6 million unique visitors a month.