Thursday, September 03, 2026

Origin Story: Salon.5


 On Jan. 17,1998 an obscure link aggregation site called the Drudge Report revealed that Newsweek magazine was sitting on a story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff about an affair between President Bill Clinton and a 22-year-old White House intern.

Because we’d published some of Drudge’s stuff at HotWired, I knew he needed careful fact-checking but also that when it came to gossip circulating in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. he was more often right than wrong.

Four days after Drudge, the Washington Post published the story, thereby breaking an unspoken taboo in mainstream media against reporting on the private lives of public figures. 

This development was one of the reasons David Talbot wanted me back at Salon — to help manage the coverage going forward of what was clearly going to be a major sex scandal.

It felt like “deja vu all over again” for me, a flashback to the early days of the Patty Hearst saga at Rolling Stone. As much as I disliked these types of stories personally, I would benefited from covering them professionally.

When confronted by reporters, Clinton had uttered his infamous statement: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”

But it turned out that the intern, Monica Lewinsky, had confided about the affair to a colleague, Linda Tripp, who had secretly taped their conversations. 

When Tripp discovered that Lewinsky had denied the relationship with Clinton in an affidavit for another sex scandal, the Paula Jones case, she delivered her tapes to Ken Starr. 

During his grand jury testimony that followed, Clinton minced words again, saying "it depends on what the meaning of the word is is.” Finally, in August 1998, he admitted to the affair.

This set up the first impeachment of a president since the 1868. It was at this moment, as the House prepared to begin proceedings that Salon published a bombshell. 

Under Talbot’s byline, we ported that:

Henry Hyde, the Republican Representative from Illinois who was going to chair the impeachment trial, had had a five-year extramarital affair years earlier with a woman named Cherie Snodgrass. We published a photo of the two with our report.

We had received a tip about Hyde’s affair over the previous months but it was a phone call to David Talbot from a 72-year-old retiree named Fred Sommer that finally got our attention. Sommer claimed that the woman’s ex-husband, Fred Snodgrass, had told him about the affair during a game of tennis, saying it had ruined his marriage.

We were able to confirm Sommer’s account by contacting various sources including Cherie Snodgrass, who gave us the photo.

As we prepared to go to press, we contacted Hyde’s office about the affair and surprisingly he confirmed that it was true, though dismissing it as a “youthful indiscretion.”

Now we knew we had a story that would guarantee Salon’s notoriety as a muckraking force to be reckoned with. In the furor that ensued, Talbot handled most of the media queries, but I made several television appearances as well.

Unlike 23 years earlier, I was no longer an inexperienced youth writing for Rolling Stone. Now I was a middle-aged editor with graying hair well-versed in the ways of media, and I easily brushed aside questions about the ethics of running our story, citing the editorial we had run along with Talbot’s story:

“In the brave new world that has been created by the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the private lives of public figures are no longer off-limits.” We didn’t like it but it was true.

Today, 30 years later, with the MeToo movement behind us and political sex scandals almost commonplace, that appears to have been a turning point in journalism history. 

That story put Salon on the map. It now occupied center stage on the national media landscape. 

For me, it was an opportunity to move to the belly of the beast, Washington,D.C.

(To be continued.)

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Wednesday, September 02, 2026

Origin Story: Salon.4

When I rejoined Salon as an investigative editor in early 1998, it had been almost a decade since I had left the Center for Investigative Reporting.

During that period, I had added radio, TV and the web to my print journalism experience and I was beginning to appreciate the unique strengths and weaknesses of those various forms of media.

What was exciting about the Salon job was the opportunity to do investigative reporting on the web. With the ability to link to our source material, we now could be much more transparent with our audiences about our methods and our documentation.

We also could potentially involve our audiences in the investigation by issuing call-outs for tips, sources and leads.

At Salon we did all of this, which led to dozens of promising tips, one of which would lead us to Salon’s biggest story as well as a remarkable moment in U.S. political history. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; first there was much work to do.

I had almost (but not quite) forgotten that investigative reporters could be difficult to manage. There was the usual stuff — big egos, fights over wording, the density of fact-laden stories — but also the gnarly business of exposing powerful figures at the risk of massive lawsuits that could tie you up for years.

It was high-stress work but for some reason people thought I was good at it.

Salon’s corps of muckrakers included a freelancer named Murray Waas, who was almost single-handedly countering the Republican-led effort to undermine President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary with what was broadly known as the Whitewater Scandal.

This involved some real estate purchases by the Clintons in Arkansas. The scandal deepened when early in the Clinton presidency, Vincent W. Foster Jr., a close friend of the Clintons and a deputy White House counsel, was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in a Civil War park maintained by the National Park Service just outside the District of Columbia.

As outlandish theories about Whitewater and Foster’s suicide proliferated on the right, Waas and Salon responded by systematically rebutting all the allegations dogging the Clintons and documenting what Hillary called a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to undermine her husband’s presidency. 

The first lady was widely mocked in the mainstream media for this claim, but at Salon we documented that conspiracy piece by piece.

Leading the charge against the Clintons was special prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr, a former federal appeals court judge and a harsh critic of Bill Clinton.

In addition , the Republican-controlled Senate appointed a Special Whitewater Committee to conduct a wide-ranging probe that merged with Starr’s and eventually morphed into an investigation of allegations that Bill Clinton had engaged in various sexual improprieties and infidelities.

That would become the biggest sex scandal in American political history, and we at Salon found ourselves smack dab in the middle of it.

(To be continued.)

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Tuesday, September 01, 2026

Origin Story: Salon.3

When it launched late in 1995, Salon became an instant sensation. Founder David Talbot had hired some more talent, including Scott Rosenberg (technology), and Laura Miller (books) to round out his creative team and the content they produced was superb.

From the start, Salon presented an intriguing mixture of entertainment, politics and culture viewed through a liberal political lens. The content was often provocative in a way most traditional newspapers and magazines were not.

“Is Salon more tabloid-like?” Talbot said in answer to one query. “Yeah, we've made no secret of that.”

Over the next decade, Salon would play a key role in the culture wars disrupting American society by embodying and epitomizing what came to be known as “San Francisco values,” i.e., diversity, equity, LBGTQ inclusion, sexual freedom, and liberal political positions.

“We swim in the soup of San Francisco,” Talbot explained. “There are a lot of odd fish we've plucked out of the bay here and it gives us some of that Left Coast, Weird Coast style."

I was not one of his odd fish. After my initial three-month stint helping Salon launch, I had departed to join Wired magazine’s web play, HotWired. (I’ve already detailed my Wired years in the six-part series, “Getting Wired,” in June.)

Salon was by far the best site on the web for book lovers and cultural coverage generally, but many early adopters were geeks, and HotWired served that audience better. 

Politically, Salon was liberal, whereas HotWired was libertarian.

Differences aside, what both sites lacked a functional business plan. The content they served up was free, so how would they generate enough revenue to keep going once the initial thrill for investors was, to quote B.B. King, gone? 

Salon had some advertising and sponsorships but it was increasingly dependent on its two big investors, Bill Hambrecht and John Warnock. Both poured millions into the venture because they believed in its political slant. Talbot was quick to spend the money on writers and artists.

Meanwhile, my adventure at Wired contained lots of thrills of a different kind before it all came to an unhappy end late in 1997 when the company was sold and broken into pieces. 

By now, I was one of the relatively few experienced journalists with web expertise, so by early 1998 I was entertaining some potential offers when Talbot called.

He said that he wanted me to come back to Salon. The site was making a name for itself with some political muckraking and he wanted me to return to my roots as an investigative journalist.

That was an offer I could not refuse.

(To be continued,)

HEADLINES:

  • Whistleblower claims USPS plan for Trump’s mail voting order could ‘derail’ midterms (NPR)

  • Army Secretary Resigns After Ouster of Leaders (NYT)

  • Nepal flood death toll crosses 1,000, rescuers reach remote areas (Reuters)

  • What we know about deadly Nepal-Tibet floods (BBC)

  • U.S. strikes Iran to prevent Hormuz mine threat (Axios)

  • Iran’s economy in crisis as US launches new sanctions campaign (Guardian)

  • Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video clip that he said showed Iran’s oil hub Kharg Island being blown to smithereens. An Iranian official dismissed it as “laughable.” (Reuters)

  • United Arab Emirates intercepts an Iranian drone (AP)

  • Trump pushes Apple to change ‘Lake Ontario’ to ‘Lake America’ on its maps (BBC)

  • The world may have less time than it thinks on climate change (Economist)

  • Ex-Congressman George Santos Receives Kalshi’s First-Ever Lifetime Ban (WSJ)

  • James Clyburn says supporting Clarence Thomas for supreme court ‘was mistake’ (Guardian)

  • Trump says he will report NBC host to FCC for ‘rebuke or punishment’ (WP)

  • White House Ballroom Construction Can Proceed, Supreme Court Says (NYT)

  • Trump still teases a third presidential run, but he’s talking more and more about life after 2028 (AP)

  • Death Toll Rises in Grand Canyon Flood as Search Efforts Continue (NYT)

  • Lionel Messi retires from Argentina international duty: ‘A decision that hurts my soul’ (The Athletic)

  • Employers are begging colleges to help Zoomers learn how to talk (BI)

  • It’s One of Our Greatest and Most Controversial Novels. How Should It Be Taught? (NYT)

  • Meta whistleblower says $17B settlement doesn’t do enough to save kids’ lives (Politico)

  • F.T.C. and 22 States Claim in Lawsuit That Amazon Secretly Inflated Ad Prices (NYT)

  • AI Burnout Hits the People Charged With Defending Hospitals and Banks From Hackers (Bloomberg)

  • We tested how AI chatbots would handle foreign propaganda. They did surprisingly well (NPR)

  • People Who Obviously Used ChatGPT Almost Always Use 14 Dead-Giveaway Phrases (YourTango)

  • Help Wanted: ‘Forward-Deployed’ Humans for the A.I. Era (NYT)

  • Dept. Of Interior Sets Aside 2.3 Million Acres For Future Trumps To Enjoy (Onion)

 

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Monday, August 31, 2026

Origin Story: Salon.2

What David Talbot and the small group of us who gathered around him to help launch “Salon Magazine” in the fall of 1995 didn’t know was that the publishing industry we all depended on was about to undergo a complete transformation.

And in the process, the world of print that had dominated communication since Gutenberg would be supplanted by a new digital universe rooted in the Internet.

The money that allowed Talbot and three colleagues — editors Gary Kamiya and Andrew Ross and designer Mignon Khargie — to leave their jobs at the San Francisco Examiner came from an executive in the tech industry, Richard Gingras at Apple.

It was only $50,000 but it allowed Talbot to try and implement his dream.

Neither Talbot nor his friends had any business experience, so they were soon joined by David Zweig, the company’s first publisher. Talbot then asked me to help out and I said yes.

I was just coming off a roller-coaster ride at KQED where in the space of a year and a half I went from being interim radio news director to special assistant to the president to executive vice-president of the public broadcasting company.

It was in the last role, as EVP, that I had learned the ropes of running a medium-sized company with hundreds of employees in a kind of crash-course-on-the-job kind of way.

It was this scant business experience, not really my journalism background, that Talbot hoped to tap into initially. And it proved to be a good fit, since I had honed my fundraising skill at KQED, including how to attract money from corporations, which is known as underwriting in public media lingo.

And a startup called HotWired had caught my attention for its ability to raise corporate funds for what looked like a web-based magazine.

This was relevant because Salon was going to be based on the web, at least initially, although none of us really knew what that meant, or that we would be pioneers in figuring that out.

The key figure during this period was Richard Gingras, the Apple exec who had come up with the funding. Gingras and I formed a close bond as we helped the editorial team navigate the hazardous path to launch.

Armed with a Mac laptop, I approached friends seeking $25,000 investments in the nascent company with some success. But much more significantly, I told an old friend and former writing partner, New York Times tech reporter John Markoff, what Talbot & crew were up to and he saw that this could make a good story.

Meanwhile, we were able to find two major investors -- investment banker Bill Hambrecht and Adobe co-founder John Warnock. They both agreed to get involved, more because they shared the magazine’s progressive political vision than any hope they would recoup their multi-million dollar investments.

But Markoff’s article was the key. One line in particular heralded the coming of the new order. “While start-up ventures like Salon may not immediately attract much notice from the more traditional publishing world, they are a real threat in the long term to existing publishers…”

(To be continued.)

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Sunday, August 30, 2026

Origin Story: Salon

When I was a kid, older people would sometimes say “I’ve known you since you were only a gleam in your father's eye."

That puzzled me at the time, but later on the phrase came to mind in quite another context. Let me explain.

In the early 1990s, I worked part-time as part of the editorial team at the old San Francisco Examiner. The “monarch of the dailies,” as it called itself, was the flagship of Media tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s empire.

Between researching and writing editorials for the newspaper’s afternoon editions, I would wander around the newsroom, chatting with people I knew, mostly reporters and editors but also “Will” — William Randolph Hearst III, who was at that time the newspaper’s publisher.

(I’d known Will since my days at Rolling Stone in the 1970s. He’d been a source for the explosive Patty Hearst/SLA stories I’d co-authored with Howard Kohn.)

But the most memorable conversations I had were with David Talbot, the editor of the Examiner’s award-winning Sunday magazine. Talbot strained against the budgetary limits inside a newspaper and dreamed of having his own independent magazine someday, 

It was when he was describing his vision that I saw the “gleam in his eye” I mentioned up top.

These conversations spanned several years. Finally, in the fall of 1995 I got a call from Talbot. His dream was on the verge of coming true.

(To be continued.)

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Saturday, August 29, 2026

Only in Whispers

(The following is a new, edited version of an essay from five years ago, just as the restrictions of the Covid pandemic were lifted.)

If we’ve entered a new reality, as per today’s top link from the Times*, I for one welcome it. Yes the coronavirus is horrible, the political/economic/culture wars are dispiriting, and all of it fades into insignificance as we stare global climate change in the face.

I accept all that. But we’ve been long overdue to make fundamental changes in the way we live anyway and maybe now is our chance. It’s time to take that less-traveled path in the woods and see where it leads.

Forests are one of the best places to think and feel. Trees communicate with each other through their roots, which connect far below the surface. They seek each other out, offer comfort and warn of danger.

When you’re in a forest, the trees may talk to you, but only in whispers.

The same is true of other wild places. I’ve hiked beaches all over the world and the more remote the beach the more it has to say. Every beach is connected to some distant shore by the tides that wash back and forth, carrying gifts in the form of driftwood, stones, shells, seaglass and the occasional message in a bottle from one land mass to another.

If all of this sounds silly, consider your dreams. We classify them into good ones and nightmares, but they persist either way and there’s no real escaping from them. Even waking up doesn’t help.

But we also have our rational side, that wonderful ability to apply logic and collect evidence before we make decisions. Most of us try to make sense of what we do, if only so we can explain it to each another.

There are all sorts of economic theories suggesting that the sum of many irrational choices by individuals add up to a collective rationality. I may not be getting that exactly right but isn’t that partly how economists explain the movements of the futures markets?

Quantum physics takes all of this out to the furthest place we’ve been able to venture intellectually, where time, space and consciousness all become moot. Starting with Einstein, physicists have been either getting clearer or cloudier as time passes. Take your pick.

Somewhere beyond the rational is the instinctive, where we know what we can trust when we hear it from the trees or the ocean or our dreams -- or our hearts. They propel us forward to explore.

This may be the path to a future where everything changes. We may be living with wave after wave of pandemics, natural disasters, and other disruptions. Our first instinct may be to huddle down in place, become more conservative, seek what is safe and familiar.

Or we may venture out, try to embrace the unknown and learn from it.

Everyone alive now is engaged in this struggle whether we acknowledge it or not. We have a will to survive but at times we get overwhelmed and want to give up. 

Don’t give up. The best part is yet to come.

* What if the Coronavirus Crisis Is Just a Trial Run? -- The year 2020 gave us a glimpse of something radically new: tensions in politics, finance and geopolitics intersecting with a natural shock on a global scale. (Adam Tooze/NYT)

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Friday, August 28, 2026

Lost Loves, AI and the Lake

Several stories in today’s mix call out for attention. There’s a new neurological study from Rice University that suggests that our memories are not fixed but flexible, i.e., retrieving a memory may change it in ways that alter it the next time we access it. 

Maybe that’s why some of us can’t tell the same old story the same way twice in a row?

Then there is the site “A Map of Us,” that contains lost love letters, which reminds me of the charming romcom, “Letters to Juliet.” It was a lost love that first motivated me to become a blogger.

On the more troubling side of the news, Bill Gates is suggesting that we need both national and international regimes to contain AI before it causes some serious harm. Others have warned us, but maybe this one will get some response from those who must act in Congress and elsewhere.

Finally, the sheer pettiness of Trump, trying to rename Lake Ontario to the absurd “Lake America” will not outlive his time in office.

As a proud Canadian, it will always be Lake Ontario to me.

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