Salon: Who is Salon?

<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" link="000088" alink="CC6600" vlink="CC6600"> <center><a href="../../banners/button.map"><img src="../../banners/button.gif" width="461" height="14" border="0" ISMAP></a></center> <p><center><font size="+4">Who is Salon?</font></center> <blockquote> <hr> <font size="+1"> <P><B><a href="mailto:dtalbot@Salon1999.com">David Talbot,</a> Editor,</B> <a name="talbot">was</a> 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. <P>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. <P>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. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:modonnell@salon1999.com">Michael O'Donnell,</a> <a name="odonnell"> Publisher</a> & President,</b> 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. <p>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. <p>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. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:mignon@Salon1999.com">Mignon Khargie,</a> <a name="khargie">Art Director</a>,</B> 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, <a href="http://www.fmdc.calpoly.edu/DesignWebChats/">Thomas Fowler, IV,</a> teaches architecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:ross@batnet.com">Andrew Ross,</a> <a name="ross">Managing Editor,</B></a> 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. <P>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. <P>The current question on Ross' mind: How is it that Joe Eszterhas still gets $2 million per picture? <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <p><B><a href="mailto:kamiya@Salon1999.com">Gary Kamiya,</a> <a name="kamiya">Executive Editor,</a></B> 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. <P>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. <P>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. <P>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. <P>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. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:lauram@well.com">Laura Miller,</a> <a name="miller">Senior Editor</a>,</B> 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. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:scottr@Salon1999.com">Scott Rosenberg,</a> <a name="rosenberg">Senior Editor/Technology,</a></B> 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, <a href="http://www.dmz.com/dmz/">Kludge</a>  but sometimes misses the smell of raw ink. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:jmillman@sirius.com">Joyce Millman,</a> <a name="millman">Senior Editor/Television and Music,</a></B> 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. <P>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. <P>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. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:dgarner@earthlink.net">Dwight Garner,</a> <a name="garner">Book Editor,</a></B> 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." <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:ekairys@salon1999.com">Elizabeth Kairys,</a> <a name="kairys">Associate Art Director</a>,</B> 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 along with her partner in crime, Mignon Khargie. Working at Salon has been more fun than you can imagine. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:dan@salon1999.com">Dan Shafer,</a> <a name="shafer">Director of Technology and Senior Webmaster,</a></B> is enjoying his role as a participant in the creation of the digital world he spent much of his career observing and writing about. Dan's job involves keeping the bits whirring about smoothly and keeping one eye on where the technology is headed. Some of his friends think it's strange that he is one of a small handful of people at the magazine whose primary job is not to write, since he has published more than 40 books on computers and high technology. But Dan enjoys designing and programming every bit as much as he does writing. "They're just different media for communicating ideas," he says. Dan maintains his own <A HREF="http://www.gui.com">Web site</A> where you can learn a lot more about him than you probably want.<P> Dan was once introduced to an audience as a "Renaissance Technoid," but that was offset a few months later by a magazine article describing him as a "rotund gray-hair of the industry." One of his best friends calls him Calvin, of Calvin & Hobbes fame, and Dan thinks that's better than being Dilbert, but he's not always sure. An unabashed fan of the Web, Dan also enjoys sports (he recently picked all 15 NFL games correctly in a single weekend!), chess, all types of jazz and Susan Howatch's Church of England novels. He is a well-known Macintosh writer and developer and multimedia title designer in his copious spare time. He has a wife and four daughters (three of them married) and lives in Redwood (No-Longer-Deadwood) City, Calif. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:marybeth@well.com">Mary Elizabeth Williams,</a> <a name="williams">Table Talk Host,</a></B> 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. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:cjoyce@sirius.com">Cynthia Joyce,</a> <a name="joyce">Associate Editor,</a></B> 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. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><b><a href="mailto:bonni@Salon1999.com">Bonni Hamilton</a>, Manager, Publicity and Promotions</b>, <a name="hamilton">spent</a> 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. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><A HREF="mailto:tyson@salon1999.com">Tyson Vaughan</A>, <a name="vaughan">Assistant Webmaster and Graphic Artist</A>,</B> mysteriously disappeared from <A HREF="http://www.stanford.edu">Stanford University</A> in 1992. An attempt to start a sports magazine for Stanford alums left him destitute, so he sank back into the dank malarial slag of his origin: <A HREF="http://www.nawlins.com">New Orleans</A>. Aided by voodoo, nepotism and a few local vampires, he got a job at <A HREF="mailto:hoffmill@communique.net">Hoffman/Miller Advertising</A>, where he wrote upscale phrases like "panache without pizzazz, flair without flash."<P> His favorite food is sushi, but the best meal of his life was a burger and home-brewed beer savored after six weeks of drinking Ensure in a medical experiment. He lived on the top of Pike's Peak, playing volleyball and watching tourists faint, while scientists extracted and examined various chunks of his body. The researchers ostracized him after he broke their exercise bike. His fellow guinea pigs ostracized him after he jump-served their volleyball off the mountain. His blood oxygen level has since returned to normal.<P> Other noteworthy events of his life include snapping his canoe in half several hundred miles north of Toronto and watching his tent blow away during a storm in Death Valley.<P> When he's not working at Salon or driving his beloved <A HREF="http://www.mr2.com">MR2</A>, Tyson spends his spare time reading <A HREF="http://nic2.hawaii.net/~bueno/HMurakami/welcome.html">Haruki Murakami</A>, basking in the glory of <A HREF="http://www.speakeasy.org/~cbl/msg/">Miranda Sex Garden</A> and baking <A HREF="http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/GIMME/ISAP/incoming/drugs/Fluoxetine.html">Prozac</A> brownies. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:lori@salon1999.com">Lori Leibovich,</a> <a name="leibovich">Assistant Editor,</a></b> worked at U.S. News and World Report and now attends the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. Her work has appeared in the Monterey County Herald, the East Bay Monthly, Seven Days and the California News Service. She lives in Berkeley. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:suzette@salon1999.com">Suzette Lalime,</a> <a name="lalime">Administrative Assistant,</a></b> 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. <p>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. <p>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. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="http://www.well.com/user/futrelle">David Futrelle,</a> <a name="futrelle">Editor, Media Circus.</a></b> Since extricating himself from graduate school several years back, he has made a more-or-less meager living writing essays and reviews for such publications as Newsday, the Nation, Lingua Franca, PlanetOUT and HotWired. He writes about appalling things for In These Times magazine, where once upon a time he was books editor. He subscribes to more magazines than he can afford, spends too much time on the Well, and watches far too much bad TV. His eZine, dimFLASH, debuted even before Salon, and has been lauded by reviewers for its "distracting" graphics. (It's now on hiatus.) He owns more than a hundred novels about nurses. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a href="mailto:shreve@salon1999.com">Jenn Shreve,</a> <a name="shreve">Editorial Assistant,</a></b> 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. <p>Jenn covered the 1996 presidential elections for Family Planet, an online magazine based in Bellevue, Wash., and interned for Reuters in Seattle. <p><hr size="0.5" noshade> <P><B><a name="lloyd">Carol Lloyd</a></b> is a contributing writer to Salon. <br clear="all"> <pre> </pre> </font> </blockquote> <center><a href="../../banners/button.map"><img src="../../banners/button.gif" width="461" height="14" border="0" ISMAP></a></center>