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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