Origin Story: Salon.6

After spending the first three decades of my career in San Francisco, in the summer of 1999 I agreed to become the Washington bureau chief for Salon. The company had just gone public in June that year, so the coffers were full of investors’ money, and CEO David Talbot offered me incentives to move my family across the country.

I had just one condition before accepting Talbot’s offer — that I could take my crackerjack fact-checker, Daryl Lindsey, with me to the nation’s capital. If I was going to help direct our national political coverage, Daryl would be a key asset in that work.

My small staff included two young reporters — Jake Tapper and Alicia Montgomery, who would go on to make names for themselves at CNN and NPR, respectively. I also edited a fascinating debate-style series of columns between David Horowitz on the right and Joe Conason on the left.

Working as a journalist in the nation’s capital was a revelation. Whereas back in the Bay Area, everyone in the media community seemed to know who I was, here in the center of government I was a small fish swimming in a very large pond.

The yawning gap between the two political parties was almost absurdly stark to see up close. I remember watching Sen. Ted Kennedy and his Democratic colleagues stand up and sit down in lockstep as they listened to fellow Democrats or rival Republicans speak on a panel.

It was a scene right out of Saturday Night Live or The Onion.

I eventually met Ted Kennedy at a reception at his house for another left-wing publication, American Prospect, as it was opening its Washington office. Among the perks of being with Salon was people like Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton’s close aide, would return my calls.

Something unexpected that surprised and intrigued me was the quality of some of the writing in conservative publications, like the Weekly Standard and the American Spectator. I thought that the logic of the arguments advanced by some of the younger conservative writers was worthy of Salon’s consideration.

But when I expressed these ideas in the weekly staff meetings I attended by telephone, they were met by silence back at the home office. The culture wars were forcing people to take sides, and the core group of Salonistas knew firmly which side they were on.

My views were less predictable, for example I sometimes agreed with Horowitz rather than Conason in their weekly exchanges. In a sense, this was the journalist in me coming out, always willing to weigh both sides of an argument.

In the end, I knew I would always side with the progressives, but I found their certainty about complicated issues almost as unsettling as that on the right.

In addition, it was alienating to try and operate in a remote office far from headquarters. There was political infighting back in San Francisco that eventually affected my place in the pecking order.

And I didn’t appreciate that.

So when family reasons made a move back to San Francisco desirable I made a phone call to an old friend, Salon’s original benefactor, Richard Gingras. He offered me a lucrative position at an Internet giant, Excite@Home in Redwood City on the peninsula.

With that, my run with the Salonistas came to an abrupt end. I never regretted my time with the organization, and I loved the people there so I continued to support them from the outside. On occasion, I still wrote articles for them.

But much like that song about San Francisco, I knew that I’d left a big part of my heart behind at Salon.

(End of the series.)

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