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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