David Talbot, Editor, was born under the HOLLYWOOD sign. His father, Lyle, was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild, star of Warner Bros. melodramas (and Ed Wood classics) and a familiar face in '60s sitcoms like "Ozzie and Harriet." His mother, Paula, was a 20th Century Fox chorus girl and his brother, Steve, played Gilbert on "Leave It To Beaver," an early chapter in his career he would sooner forget now that he makes documentaries for PBS's esteemed "Frontline" series.
Talbot is the former arts and features editor of the San Francisco Examiner, a madcap news operation then presided over by maverick publisher Will Hearst. Talbot also edited the paper's Sunday magazine, Image, which critic Greil Marcus called "the most consistently high-quality, surprising, challenging arts and politics magazine the Bay Area has had in my memory." Prior to that, Talbot worked as a senior editor of Mother Jones magazine and co-authored "Burning Desires: Sex in America" and "Creative Differences," a history of the Hollywood Left.
Talbot lives with his wife, Camille Peri, and their two young sons in the ramshackle Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco (Robert De Niro's painter-father called it, with considerable artistic license, the "Montmartre of the West"), where middle-aged bohemians, Salvadoran immigrants, lesbian mothers, first-time homeowners and street gangsters all commingle at the local playground in the frantic union of parenthood.
Michael O'Donnell, Publisher & President, brings 10 years of successful sales, marketing and business development experience in the competitive computer software industry. Working with both technology and consumer products companies, he has established sales and merchandising organizations and infrastructures in four separate companies and introduced and published over 150 titles with the nation's leading retailers, including Toys R Us, Walmart, CompUSA, Sears, Target, Egghead and Ingram, as well as establishing distribution networks in Europe, Australia and the Asia/Pacific region.
From May 1995 to November 1996 O'Donnell was Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Rocket Science Games, a San Francisco-based entertainment software company that was recently acquired by SegaSoft. Prior to that he worked for Mindscape Inc., Softkey International and Geoworks.
O'Donnell is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley (B.A. in political science). As a member of the Bears football team (he played quarterback and wide receiver), O'Donnell was on the field for the most famous play in college football history, the infamous "tuba touchdown," when Cal players weaved their way through the prematurely celebrating Stanford Band to defeat the Cardinal on the last play of the Big Game. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two children.
Mignon Khargie, Design Director, grew up in Guyana and migrated north in her early 20s, settling in California after a nine-year stopover in Washington, D.C. She came to Salon from a background aggressively rooted in print and has since been spending time happily playing with hypertext markup language. Mignon lives in San Francisco. Her husband, Thomas Fowler, IV, teaches architecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
Andrew Ross, Managing Editor, was the foreign and national editor of the San Francisco Examiner, and reported for the Examiner from the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Central America. He was assignment editor for KPIX-TV, the CBS affiliate in San Francisco, and news director for public television station KQED. He has also reported for National Public Radio and written for the London Times, Manchester Guardian, Redbook and Good Housekeeping.
Raised in Brighton, U.K., Ross' love of music (and food) once drove him to sneak backstage at the Hippodrome, where he incurred John Lennon's wrath by nicking a sandwich from the Beatles' refreshments platter.
The current question on Ross' mind: How is it that Joe Eszterhas still gets $2 million per picture?
Gary Kamiya, Executive Editor, spent his early childhood in Chicago, where his scientist father, Joe Kamiya, was a pioneer in biofeedback research. After moving to California, he attended Berkeley High, where the student government was run by a dadaist cabal; put in a brief, LSD-riddled stint at Yale; and some aimless years later washed up in the UC-Berkeley English Department, where he won the Mark Schorer Citation in English Literature before earning an M.A.
After struggling for years as a starving theater critic, ex-graduate student and disgruntled former postal employee, Kamiya sold a story about an enormous motorized croquet game to Sports Illustrated and decided to quit his job as a taxi driver.
It was a poor career move. Pigeonholed by editors as a motorized giant-sport correspondent, Kamiya floundered. He helped launch Frisko, a short-lived San Francisco glossy, wrote occasional pieces for Art Forum and other high-prestige, low-pay journals and experimented with different recipes for boiled potatoes.
He had just entered the formulaic stage at which consumptive writers begin waving their crumpled manuscripts at "respectable citizens" in cafes when his friend and former editor David Talbot, who had just been hired to edit the San Francisco Examiner's Image magazine, took pity on him. After three years as a senior editor at the magazine, Kamiya moved to the paper's Style section, where he served as book editor, movie critic and media columnist.
Kamiya lives on a street with cable cars with his wife, Kate Moses, and her son Zachary. He likes big cities, '50s paperbacks with gratuitous cleavage on their covers, Steve Young, backpacking, Italy and people who like to talk.
Laura Miller, Senior Editor, wrote a letter one day to a magazine edited by David Talbot in response to an article written by Gary Kamiya, and the next thing she knew she was working with both of them on the most exciting Web site around. Actually, in between those momentous events, she kept busy — writing about movies, books, theater, digital culture and social issues for newspapers and national magazines, including the New York Times, the San Francisco Examiner, Harper's Bazaar and Wired; and spending a lot of time online. One day she hopes to be sitting on a balcony overlooking a canal in Venice, Italy, reading the entire works of Henry James, but this'll do for now.
Scott Rosenberg, Senior Editor/Technology, grew up in Queens, N.Y., on a mixed diet of Tolkien, Heinlein, Shakespeare and Monty Python. His publishing career began in his teens with a mimeograph in the basement, and continued at the Harvard Crimson, where his skills at changing the ribbons on old Royal typewriters came in handy. He wrote for the Boston Phoenix for three years and then joined the San Francisco Examiner, where he spent 10 years as a theater, movie and multimedia critic and won the George Jean Nathan Prize for theater criticism in 1989. His writing has appeared in Wired, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and elsewhere. He loves the Web — he helped edit the San Francisco Free Press during the 1994 newspaper strike and subsequently launched his own site, Kludge — but sometimes misses the smell of raw ink.
Joyce Millman, Senior Editor/Television, began her career as a pop music critic for the weekly newspaper the Boston Phoenix. Eventually, she also became the paper's TV critic. In 1987, she moved to the Bay Area and became the TV critic for the San Francisco Examiner. During her eight years at the Examiner, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism twice, in 1989 and 1991. She dares you to name the writers who actually won.
Millman has an idea for a cable channel called "The Loser Network" that would air nothing but reruns of "The Ben Stiller Show," "My So-Called Life," "Cop Rock," "Get a Life" and "Shannon's Deal,'' all shows for which she professed her love in print, but which nevertheless bombed.
Millman has always had an affinity for disasters. Her hometown almost completely burned down when she was 14. She was listening to Kate Bush's "The Sensual World" (on vinyl) when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. Her son was born on Oct. 20, 1991, the day of the Oakland Hills firestorm. Hopefully, this doesn't bode ill for Salon.
Don George, Editor of Salon Wanderlust, was raised in Connecticut, schooled at Taft and Princeton, and intent on becoming a tweedy English professor until he went away to Paris for the summer between his junior and senior years -- and suddenly everything changed: The seeds of Wanderlust were planted. After graduation he moved to Paris for another summer, then to Athens, Greece, for a year -- during which time he traveled throughout Europe and on to Egypt and East Africa. He returned to the U.S. to get a master's degree in creative writing at Hollins College, then ventured off again, this time to Japan for two years, where he taught English, hosted an English-language talk show on national TV and managed to get in near-trouble throughout Asia.
He settled in Northern California -- a midway point between Japan and Connecticut -- in 1979, and serendipitously landed a job as travel writer with the San Francisco Examiner in 1980. He was a senior editor at the Examiner's Sunday magazine from 1982 to 1986, then was the Examiner's Travel Editor from 1987 to 1995. In 1995 he leaped foolishly -- that is, courageously -- into cyberspace to become editor in chief of GNN, America Online's suite of Internet-based magazines. At GNN he also created and produced "The Don George Show," a weekly program of interviews, essays and dispatches.
In February 1997 he exhilaratedly joined Salon to pursue the online version of a longtime dream: creating a literary travel magazine. Wanderlust launched on March 25.
In all, Don has wandered through some 50 countries and published some 500 articles in newspapers and magazines around the world. He now lives blissfully in the Bay Area with his wife, Kuniko, and two children, Jenny and Jeremy. If you come across someone ensconced at a sunny seaside cafe, scribbling in a notebook and smiling crazily, it's probably Don.
Camille Peri, Editor of Mothers Who Think: After graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from the University of California at Berkeley, Camille Peri landed a job as a cocktail waitress at San Francisco's prestigious "Beach Blanket Babylon." She also worked as a VISTA volunteer representing children in juvenile court before stumbling into an editing job at San Francisco Magazine. After working as an editor at Women's Sports magazine and the Sunday magazine of the San Francisco Examiner, she became a freelance magazine writer. Her work has ranged from an investigative article on notorious Argentine war criminal Carlos Suarez Mason and a profile of Margaret Atwood to an interview with Attorney General Janet Reno on children's legal issues and an in-depth look at a nationally innovative program that helps troubled youth go from gangs to college. Her articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Parenting, California Lawyer, Lear's and Savvy, and she was a contributing editor to Hippocrates magazine.
With two children to feed while her husband, David Talbot, began a shaky Internet enterprise, she developed and wrote a health-care newsletter for the University of California at San Francisco and the San Francisco General Hospital annual report before creating the idea for Mothers Who Think and joining Salon. She has two sons who adore her, Joey, 7, and Nat, 3.
Kate Moses, Senior Editor: According to her 8-year-old son, Zachary, Kate Moses' eyes are like "glisening dimons." Her hair is like a flag in the wind. Her heartbeat is like a tom-tom.
According to Salon's executive editor, Gary Kamiya, Kate Moses is a shrieking, foul-mouthed harridan.
Eight-month-old baby Celeste declined comment.
Before she knew these people, Kate Moses was an editor for five years at Berkeley's renowned North Point Press, where she acquired and edited critically acclaimed fiction, poetry and literary nonfiction. From 1991 until 1994 she was the literary director at Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco's oldest independent literary center. Since 1992 she has been literary advisor to the Lannan Foundation, one of the foremost funders of literature in the United States. She is a fifth-generation San Franciscan and lives there still.
Marc Wernick, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, was born in New York City -- but fled the Big Apple before there was any audible damage. His loving parents raised him and his wonderful sister in the Washington, D.C., area.
Not realizing that when one goes to school in the Midwest, one's first job is in the Midwest, Marc began his migration west and went to school at the University of Michigan. He then proceeded to spend five hard years post graduation in the Midwest, working for Procter & Gamble in Brand Management.
Marc then moved to Los Angeles, based on inspiration from the Boss (Bruce Springsteen, "Dancing in the Dark": "going to change my clothes, my hair, my face"). Then things started to get interesting. Oops, this is where the publisher said, "Too much information, don't go there." Back to the basics. In LA LA land, Marc toiled for the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, trotted the globe for Grey Entertainment Inc. on behalf of Warner Bros. Films, became wired at Ogilvy & Mather on the IBM account and got connected to direct response marketing on the Pacific Bell business.
Marc moved to San Francisco to join Salon. When he isn't scheming up ideas to build Salon's circulation or trying to get the newest business deal cooking, Marc enjoys urban exploration, travel, being a major foodie, biking and just plain hanging out with friends.
Dwight Garner, Book Editor, has been an editor with Harper's Bazaar and with Vermont Times, an alternative weekly in Burlington, Vt. He has reviewed books and profiled authors for the Village Voice, The Nation, the New York Times, Vanity Fair and other journals. He lives with his wife, Cree LeFavour, and their dog in a tiny, book-crammed apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village, where he worries about avoiding the fate of one Ms. Elinor Barry, who, according to her obituary in the Times, died after "a giant pile of books, newspapers and press clippings" collapsed on her and "muffled her cries for help."
Elizabeth Kairys, Art Director, was born in Baltimore in 1968. She has one of the coolest families around. Since leaving the nest in 1986, she has earned a film degree from Northwestern University, was the art director of the Lookingglass theater company in Chicago, received over a dozen design and illustration awards and most recently was voted Cool Web Designer of the Year with design director Mignon Khargie. Working at Salon has been more fun than you can imagine.
Karen Templer, Associate Art Director, was working as a freelance print designer in Austin, Texas, (the second coolest city in the country) when she got a call from Compuserve, which offered to pay her good money and teach her HTML if she would move to Columbus, Ohio. Though she spent months creating a service the world would never see, Web design renewed her enthusiasm for her chosen profession. Ten months later, when the project was axed, she proved to Salon that she could wield a Web wand and wound up in Everyone's Favorite City.
Steve Michel, Webmaster, has been working and playing with Macintoshes since 1984. For years, he wrote the Script Manager column for MacWEEK magazine, and is the author of seven books. Prior to coming to Salon, Steve was at NetGuide Live, where he was Program Manager for Internal Tools and Technical Editor. Steve's other interests include amateur astronomy and the music of Bob Dylan. He lives in Albany, Calif., with his wife and three children, and is a registered voter.
Gary Kaufman, Copy Chief, worked as an editor on every desk in his six years at the San Francisco Examiner, where he also covered boxing and wrote feature stories. He was more recently an editor and the author of The List Guy column at NetGuide Live, and long ago wrote a humor column for a chain of neighborhood newspapers in Oakland and Berkeley, Calif. It was funny. Ha. He also plays in a band called The Smokejumpers, who are, you know, whatever.
Mary Elizabeth Williams, Table Talk Host, also co-hosts the byline and popcult conferences on the Well and was the first forum host at C/Net. She writes for magazines like Wired, the Nation and the San Francisco Review of Books. When her computer is turned off she enjoys Hong Kong action movies, Jane Austen novels and the quest for life's meaning and a perfect burrito.
Cynthia Joyce, Music Editor, was a researcher for Mother Jones magazine. She covered NAFTA for the Mexico City News and still doesn't get it. She has written for Rolling Stone Online and as a musician does her part to make violins the next nerdy-turned-cool instrument in rock 'n' roll.
Bonni Hamilton, Manager, Publicity and Promotions, spent her lifetime, and then some, enduring cold weather in the attitude capital of the world, Boston, a place where enthusiasm is bred out of you. She arrived in San Francisco in 1994 and found enthusiasm that provoked her to swear on a stack of Joseph Campbell works never to return to East Coast living. She has over 10 years' experience in marketing and general management and spends most of her leisure time dabbling in theatrical and other artistic pursuits. Her real passion is basking in the California sunshine with a paintbrush in one hand and a novel in the other. She lives in Marin County with her husband, Gus, and their Westie, Eddie.
Susan Lehman, New York Editor, has written for the New York Observer, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Mirabella, Harper's Bazaar, Premiere, Spy, the great, late, Wig Wag and other publications. She's worked as a TV producer too, most recently at Court TV. A graduate student at Berkeley at the same time Gary Kamiya and Michel Foucault were there, Lehman is also a lawyer -- a more or less meaningless distinction that nonetheless seems to add mysterious heft to a thumbnail bio. She lives in New York with her husband and their adorable child, Zachary Zane.
Lori Leibovich, Associate Editor, worked at U.S. News and World Report and recently graduated from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. Her work has appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, Monterey County Herald, the East Bay Monthly, Seven Days and the California News Service. She lives in Berkeley.
Suzette Lalime, Editorial Assistant, was raised in Maine. She is a cousin of Charles Starrett, the Durango Kid. At the University of Maine, she was in an experimental music group called Sonically Sound, in which she once donned roller skates to perform a composition for the vacuum cleaner.
She moved to the Bay Area in 1986 and has since worked with food, books, computers and people. At a reading by her favorite author, Ursula K. LeGuin, she heard about the Flight of the Mind writing workshop for women in Oregon, which she attended in 1989. Her writing has appeared in the Maine state educator's newsletter, the East Bay Express, Ruah, a poetry anthology, and Friendly Woman, a journal by Quaker women.
In 1994, she graduated from Mills College, where she completed a narrative study of her great-grandmother's diaries from World War II. She is a co-founder of the Mills College Oral History Project and a member of the Attenders, a folk music trio. Suzette lives in Berkeley with her partner, Lawrence Davidson.
Jenn Shreve, Assistant Editor, spent the majority of her growing up years in "The Lettuce Capitol of the World" also known as Salinas, Calif. She received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Washington, where she also worked as a columnist, reporter and Opinion Page editor for the college publication The Daily. Her weekly rants won her a first place award in column writing by the Society of Professional Journalists and the title "Most Controversial Student" upon graduation.
Jenn covered the 1996 presidential elections for Family Planet, an online magazine based in Bellevue, Wash., and interned for Reuters in Seattle.
Dawn MacKeen, Assistant Editor: after floating across Greece in search of cheap hotels and deserted beaches for Fodor's Berkeley Guides, Dawn developed the habit of quitting her job every summer so she could travel. Now that she has roamed through Asia, the Middle East, South America and Europe, she's ready to try staying in one place -- trading in her worldly wanderlust for a desk-bound Wanderlust. Before joining Salon, she was a one-person bureau for the Metropolitan News Company's Escondido, Calif., paper and a Washington correspondent for WISC-TV in Madison, Wisc.
Michelle Goldberg, Assistant Editor, was born in the rust-belt city of Buffalo, N.Y. A hater of football, chicken wings and Camaros, she fled to New York City at age 16, where she landed a scholarship to SUNY Purchase and an internship at Spin magazine. At 20, she got another scholarship, this one to UC-Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, where she is currently in her second year. Her work has appeared in Wired, Bust, the Buffalo News, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and other alternative weeklies. She lives in San Francisco with her boyfriend, Matt Ipcar.
c o n t r i b u t o r s
Andrew Leonard is a freelance writer based in Berkeley, Calif. He is a contributing writer for Wired Magazine. His work has also appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Nation, British Esquire, the New York Times Book Review, the Columbia Journalism Review, Asia Inc., the San Francisco Bay Guardian and numerous other publications. He has been technology editor for the online magazine Web Review, Packet culture columnist for HotWired, and was the writer of the ill-fated "Secret Files of Bill Gates" for America Online. His first book, "Bots: Origin of New Species," is scheduled for publication in June from HardWired.
Catherine Seipp who writes the Hollywoodland column every Friday for Media Circus, did not always live a life of semi-glamour. She was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and grew up in Los Alamitos, Calif., where the 605 and the 405 freeways meet. Because her mother did not believe in 12th grade (or so she said!), at age 16 Seipp was sent up the 405 to UCLA, where she worked on the Daily Bruin, wrote book reviews for the Los Angeles Times (still her favorite newspaper, at least west of the Rockies) and graduated with a B.A. in English.
Although you would not think it to look at her, Seipp was once a fashion editor -- for the Daily News of Los Angeles, where she also wrote a popular seven-days-a-week column called Miss Hot Tips in the early '80s. She has freelanced for many magazines for many years and these days is particularly fond of Worth.
Before joining Salon, Seipp contributed perverse media and Hollywood coverage to the old Buzz magazine from 1992 to 1997. Her former monthly column there dissecting the Los Angeles Times means that, sadly, she is still unwelcome at the Times cafeteria, one of her favorite places. But now and then the cranky retired Timesmen known as the Old Farts Society break their no women rule and invite her to lunch.
Carol Lloyd is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and a theater critic for the S.F. Weekly. She has worked as a performer, playwright and director of experimental theatre, touring her works to Los Angeles, New York and Prague. After years of teaching career workshops for creative people, she wrote "Life Worth Living: Career Counseling for the Creatively Inclined," to be published by HarperCollins this fall. The director of the Writing Parlor, a writing workshop, she lives in San Francisco with her husband, Hank Hyena, and her cat, Pigger.
Zach Trenholm, cyber-caricaturist and a one-time staffer of the San Francisco Examiner (is there a theme here?), works entirely in the digital realm with Adobe Illustrator, modeming his illustrations to this magazine. He greatly admires the jazz-age caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias and the minimalism of painters Stuart Davis and Ben Shahn, suggestions of which are easily found in his illustrations. As for subjects, Andy Warhol and Matt Dillon are examples of the few that he has actually had the opportunity to sketch from life, rather than photo reference. Working out of laziness, loyalty and the fact that it keeps him busy, Zach is mostly found only on the electronically pulsating pages of Salon. He lives in San Francisco with his fully employed and semi-accepting wife and two of his three sons.