Monday, July 24, 2023

Origin Story (Salon)

(NOTE: The original version of this essay is from July 2021. I’ve made a few edits.)

Over the past weekend, my post-pandemic socializing continued with a lunch at the Bernal home of journalists David Talbot and Camille Peri. David is best-known as the founder of Salon, which from a journalistic perspective was one of the more important startups to emerge in the early days of the web.

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

I'd heard about this from him for some 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.

There wasn't very much funding at all but Talbot somehow 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 Bay Area fundraising world.

While the other journalists, none of whom had a clue about business, developed an editorial plan, I helped Zweig establish a business plan, which proved to be a daunting task. First and foremost, the team needed much more money, 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.

What made all of this complicated is that Salon would be on the web, at that time a nascent, unstable platform that as yet was devoid of any real journalism. 

While I was able to convince a few investors to kick in $25,000 apiece, 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. Like any good journalist, he saw that this might 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. 

Markoff’s article was the key. When the magazine launched, it proved to be an instant sensation, and over the years through many ups and downs it has persisted, though it has never to my knowledge actually turned a profit.

But profits aside, the reason Salon mattered is it was one of the first sites featuring original content, proving that traditional journalism could compete with the free-for-all that characterized the early Web. (Microsoft launched a similar site called Slate the following year. It persists too.)

After Salon launched, I left to join HotWired and return to my first and true love -- journalism. But then I rejoined Salon a few years later as Investigative Editor/Managing Editor and Washington bureau chief and finally SVP 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 of Salon. I was more like what in basketball is known as the Sixth Man during that launch period in the fall of 1995. 

But I did play a key role.

A whole slew of other talented people joined Salon’s team early on. 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 eight names -- one Gary, one Andrew, one Mignon and three Davids -- Talbot, Zweig and Weir. The other two were Laura Miller and Cynthia Joyce.

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

[NOTE: As with all such memories, these are simply mine and others may recall the events portrayed differently. According to my operating philosophy, this is the natural way of things. Our memory is as unique as our DNA.]

LINKS:

 

at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)