Ten years of Salon

From the dot-com madness to our Blackbeard-like refusal to die to making online journalism history, it's been one hell of a ride. A look back at Salon's first decade.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Gary Kamiya, Salon's 10th Anniversary

Illustration by Zach Trenholm

Nov. 14, 2005 | Ten years ago, on Nov. 20, 1995, the first issue of Salon went live. Its Web address was "salon1999.com" because "salon.com" was owned by a hair salon owner in Texas, who stubbornly refused to give it up until one of our founders flew down there and, after frank, open and increasingly Mafia-like negotiations, received the precious salon.com in exchange for a large bushel of Salon stock. (The cunning, not to say Mephistophelean, nature of the hair salon owner, and certain ambiguities in the account our negotiator, Andrew Ross, gave of the transaction, combined with Salon's Blackbeard-like refusal to die even while being simultaneously shot, strangled, drowned, garroted and keelhauled, have given rise to suspicions that some sort of Faustian pact was struck. For the record, I have no recollection of an alleged deal in which Salon was granted eternal life in exchange for George W. Bush becoming president.)

Ten years is a long time in the history of any publication, and when you've been watching the cord that holds the Sword of Damocles unravel over your head for nine-plus of those years, it feels positively eternal. Salon came into existence at the beginning of the Internet Age, a Jurassic swamp swarming with strange and frightening creatures -- "B to B" business models, "stickiness," original art on every 600-word story, a biweekly publishing schedule, $25 million IPOs and other long-vanished pterodactyls. How long ago was it? Two words: O.J. Our first issue featured a round-table on race relations tied to the O.J. Simpson verdict, and if that event doesn't carry your memory back to Old Kentucky, there is no madeleine in existence that will work on you. When Salon started, George W. Bush and Karl Rove were still safely confined in vials in a biochem storage facility in Texas. No one had heard of Osama bin Laden. Bob Dole was running against Bill Clinton. And Petfood.com was about to spring its first, decisive move upon a breathless world.

Salon has surfed -- and sometimes gotten wiped out by -- some pretty big waves in those 10 years. We have gone from a staff of eight to a staff of 148, and back to somewhere in between. We have been showered in massive tulipmania loot, seen our stock go from $15.13 to one cent, and cheated the Grim Reaper who comes to whack failing little rags so many times he finally picked up his scythe in disgust and went home. We have gone from being a little literary-leaning magazine staffed mostly by critics to a robust news organization with a team of full-time reporters. We have grown from two tables in an architect's office in San Francisco to a national publication with offices in San Francisco, New York and Washington (and King Kaufman's Sports Bureau, broadcasting from a secret offshore transmitter somewhere in St. Louis). We have gone from publishing every two weeks to sometimes publishing every two minutes. When we started, the idea of charging people money for anything on the Web except sex was unthinkable; a big part of our income now comes from subscriptions. We've been through layoffs and hiring orgies, we've won awards and been slapped with subpoenas. We have been denounced on the floor of Congress and praised by the president of the United States.

Yet through it all, in some ways we have changed very little. Salon was started by writers and journalists, and our mission was simply to put the best stories we could out there, while having fun and (hopefully) making money along the way. That hasn't changed. The dot-com madness has come and gone, the Clinton bedroom farce has been replaced by the Bush revenge tragedy, but we're still doing the same thing. Seen in that light, the big events, the folly and the glory, the hype and the heartbreak of the last decade, fade away, and the history of Salon shrinks down to the same scene, playing out tens of thousands of times: a writer trying to capture in words what he or she thought, or felt, or witnessed. An editor helping shape those words into a finer form. An artist making it beautiful. And a publication, kept alive by businesspeople and kept running by tech people, that makes the final story available instantly all over the world. Salon is many things, has been many things, and will become many unknown things in the future, but like all publications this is its real history, one that can only be measured in cups of coffee and bleary eyes and whatever molecular or metaphysical traces are left by untold vanished deadlines. There is only one true record of Salon: our archives.

I make no claim to offer anything even remotely resembling a real history of Salon. That is a far larger task than I have time -- or frankly, inclination -- for. Moreover, I am grossly unqualified to write it, for the simple reason that I suffer from Lewis Libby syndrome: I remember nothing. This debilitating condition has worsened as the years have flown past like those torn-off calendar leaves in that old-movie time-is-passing convention: The blizzard of torn-off pages is now so vast and white that it has covered up every landmark.

It is, I suppose, a great honor to be chosen to write this little memoir, when the other founders who are still connected to Salon, David Talbot, Scott Rosenberg, Laura Miller and Mignon Khargie, are equally or more qualified to do so. The warm glow I should feel at being singled out, however, is somewhat diminished by the suspicion that my colleagues do not in fact regard me as a heroic, battle-scarred veteran, but rather as the journalistic equivalent of one of those demented Japanese soldiers who is still hiding in a rat-infested cave on Tarawa 50 years after the end of WWII. Indeed, it seems all too likely that this "great honor" is in fact a desperate attempt to placate me so that I do not suddenly rampage through the office, impaling people on a bayonet. Despite these suspicions, I will do my best.

A caveat in advance. There will be many important staffers, writers, investors, friends and events in our history that I pass over here. This is not a comprehensive history. I scarcely even mention our sales or tech teams, for example, not because I don't appreciate what they do but because I can't cover everything. If you worked here, or wrote a column for us, or you are that guy who drove us all insane playing his electric violin on the corner of 4th and Mission for a year, please don't be hurt if you're not mentioned here. It isn't a dis. I would like nothing better than to write a grand Homeric list of everyone who has ever worked at Salon or written for us, but 1) I ain't no Homer, and 2) even when Homer did it, it could be a little sleep-inducing.

Salon is the creation, in every conceivable way, of David Talbot, my colleague and close friend for 20 years. In 1994 David was Arts and Ideas editor at the San Francisco Examiner, the flagship Hearst newspaper. (It is pleasant, especially for those of us in San Francisco, to think that the rogue journalistic DNA that ran in the veins of maverick Ex writers like Mark Twain, Ambrose "Bitter" Bierce, Jack London and Hunter S. Thompson popped up again in Salon.) For two years we had worked together on the paper's Sunday magazine, Image. David was restless and ambitious and wanted to start his own publication. He nosed around about the possibility of starting a print mag, but the start-up costs were too high and he couldn't find anyone willing to write him a $5 million check. I remember David telling me back in the waning Ex days about a meeting he had with a potential investor. The investor listened to his impassioned spiel about the need for dynamic new journalism to cut through the vacuity of niche publications, the critical importance of a revolution that would sweep across the formulaic media landscape. Then he agreed that, yes, a travel magazine would be a great idea.

About this time, probably late 1994, I remember David mentioning something called the Internet. I don't think he really knew what it was ("Luddite" is an ugly word, but the great and powerful guru of electronic media still moves blocks of text by dragging his exhausted mouse up to the cut and paste functions), but he knew enough to understand that it would cost a lot less to start an Internet magazine than a print magazine. Along with Andrew Ross, the Examiner's veteran foreign-national editor, he started scheming in earnest.

David began talking to Apple, which had plans to launch a Web network called eWorld. He convinced Richard Gingras, an Apple executive, to invest $60,000 in seed money in the as-yet-unnamed Salon, which would be part of eWorld. With that sum in hand, in August 1995 David lured Andrew Ross and the extravagantly talented Mignon Khargie, who designed and illustrated features at the Ex, to quit their jobs to work on the prototype for what would become Salon. "When Richard Gingras heard that not only had I left my job at the Examiner, on the basis of that modest investment, but lured two others with me, he was horrified," David said. "As more people left their jobs to join our fledgling enterprise, Apple -- which was in the throes of its own corporate dramas before Steve Jobs rejoined the company and turned it around -- suddenly pulled the plug on its support for Salon. Adobe Ventures, whom I had sent our business proposal to out of the blue weeks earlier, suddenly came to the rescue, dropping by to see our prototype and stepping in with a $2 million investment, which got Salon launched."

It was probably just as well that none of the people who left their union jobs were aware of this meticulously planned investment scheme, which appears to have been modeled on a failed lottery in American Samoa. The brave and clueless stalwarts whom David lured away from the Ex in the fall of 1995 were Scott Rosenberg, a first-rate film and theater critic who also knew more about the Web and technology than anybody who knew from Samuel Beckett had a right to; Joyce Millman, the Ex's top-drawer TV critic; and me. Rounding out the list was a razor-sharp freelancer named Laura Miller, whom David and I had worked with at Image. With the exception of Laura, we all had years of daily experience, and we all had one ability that proved indispensable: We could write and edit really fast.

This group, along with Salon's first publisher, David Zweig, first met at Talbot's house in Bernal Heights sometime that fall. One of the things we did, besides gawk in confusion at sites like Feed (at least I was confused, since I had never been online before), was kick around various names for the new magazine. I cannot remember any of them except "Limelight," which mercifully ended up in the ashcan of history. David's wife, Camille Peri -- who with my wife, Kate Moses, later launched Salon's groundbreaking Mothers Who Think department -- came up with the name Salon. Vaguely aware that the Internet would allow some kind of communication with our readers, and filled with grandiose dreams of becoming the Madame de Staëls and Dorothy Parkers of the Internet, we settled on Salon.

Next page: Our extremely humble beginnings