Sunday, July 24, 2022

Origin Story (Salon)

 (Note: An earlier version of this column first appeared a year ago on my personal blog & on Facebook.)

By the 1990s, David Talbot had been a successful editor at Mother Jones and the San Francisco Examiner, where he ran the popular Sunday magazine, but he had a bigger dream -- to start his own publication.

I'd talked with him about this for several years until finally in 1995 he got his chance. Richard Gingras, then an executive at Apple, staked him with a small pot of money and with that, David gave notice at the Examiner in order to carry out his dream.

There wasn't very much funding at all but Talbot  convinced three colleagues -- editors Gary Kamiya and Andrew Ross and designer Mignon Khargie -- to give up their steady jobs and join him in his quest.

The group was rounded out by publisher David Zweig, bringing the staff to five and they settled pro-bono into an architect's office down on the waterfront.

At Talbot's invitation, I joined them too, not on the creative side but on the business side. That made sense because I was just coming off a stint as EVP of KQED, the large public broadcasting company in Northern California, and I knew my way around the world of corporate media.

While the Salon journalists developed an editorial plan, I helped Zweig establish a business plan, which proved to be a challenge. The content would be free, since this was the web, so we had to find advertising, sponsorship or subscription models for revenue. 

But first and foremost, the team needed operating funds, so I set about meeting with potential investors in San Francisco bars with a Mac laptop furnished by Gingras. It was loaded with a prototype of the magazine.

While I was able to convince a few small investors to kick in $25,000 each, I also told an old friend, New York Times tech reporter John Markoff, about what Talbot & crew were up to.

Meanwhile, we were able to identify two potential major investors -- investment banker Bill Hambrecht and Adobe co-founder John Warnock. The project became real when they both agreed to get involved, which was at least as much because they shared the magazine's progressive political vision as the hope they would recoup their multi-million dollar investments. 

When Markoff's article appeared, and the magazine launched, it proved to be an instant sensation, and ever since, through many ups and downs it has persisted, though it has never actually turned much in the way of a profit.

Profits aside, the reason Salon mattered is it was the first site featuring high quality original content, proving that traditional journalism could compete with the free-for-all that characterized the early Web. (Microsoft launched a similar magazine-style site called Slate the following year.)

After Salon launched, I left to join HotWired, where I could return to practicing journalism. But then I rejoined Salon a few years later as investigative editor and Washington bureau chief during its heyday of the Clinton impeachment drama.

Over the 25 years since Salon launched, several people have mistakenly referred to me as one of the founders. I was more like what in basketball is known as the Sixth Man during that launch period in the fall of 1995. 

A whole slew of other talented people would soon join the team. But last year as I was cleaning out my apartment I discovered a relic from the earliest days of Salon. It was what must have been one of its first phone directories, a plain piece of paper with the staff's phone extensions in the architect's office down by the Bay.

On it were six names -- one Gary, one Andrew, one Mignon and three Davids -- Talbot, Zweig and Weir. 

Oh, and there was also a printer called Gingras, but that is another story...

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