Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
Salon's first office was a humble affair. We rented out a small portion of an open-floor-design architects' office on Main Street in downtown San Francisco. We sat at two long tables, our 28-baud modems beeping and clicking. It was a homey and intimate atmosphere -- at times a bit too intimate. Occupying the large area closest to us was a middle-aged architect of choleric mien who was manifestly not pleased at the sudden appearance of a bunch of journalists who spent their time talking loudly on the phone and crawling under their tables trying to hook up their computers. One day, this architect, whose name was Art, suddenly yelled in a piercing voice that echoed across the office, "YOU HO! GET OVER HERE!"
We were somewhat taken aback by this. None of us were familiar with what sort of behavior is customary in architects' offices, but it seemed a bit beyond the pale to summon a colleague by screaming "You ho!" We soon realized that Yuho was actually the name of Art's unfortunate subordinate. Thereafter, whenever Art screamed out, "YUHO, GET OVER HERE!" as he seemed to do at least three times a day, it was only with great effort that we were able to suppress unseemly outbursts of hysterical laughter. I believe Art observed this, and it did not contribute to the bonhomie of the office. Neither did his habit of loudly farting as he moved about in his domain.
Soon after we arrived at Main Street several other people came onboard, including artist and designer Elizabeth Kairys, Cynthia Joyce, who was our first Arts & Entertainment editor, Table Talk host Mary Elizabeth Williams, and consultant David Weir, a longtime fixture on the Bay Area journalism scene. Lori Leibovich, now our Life editor, was our first intern. We also briefly employed a young tech consultant named Paul Vachier. Vachier just had a cup of coffee with us, as the baseball saying goes for a player who passes through so quickly he never even moves out of his hotel, but David nonetheless insisted on putting him in our first staff photo because he was young, handsome and looked cool. He made up for the rest of us who, although much younger than we are now, utterly failed to conform to even the most generous interpretation of what Hip Web Pioneers should look like. This was an early indication of Talbot's cheesy cunning -- a quality that more than any other probably ensured our existence. We also hired our first books editor, the estimable Dwight Garner, who left a few years later to go to the New York Times Book Review.
We started as a biweekly, and we thought we were cranking it out. I remember looking at the stats for the first issue. It was thrilling, coming from print where the only measure of readership was letters to the editor, to be able to know exactly how many people had read your story. It was fascinating to see what subjects drew the most eyeballs. And it was deeply depressing to realize that no matter what you wrote, half of your readers would bail after the first page. Stats are the great dirty-little-secret revealers, not just for what they tell writers and editors but for what they reveal about readers. To this day, whenever we run some lower-chakras, sexy, gossip-ridden story, one of those penis-enlargement, lifelike doll, Brazilian-bikini-wax, are-big-breasts-making-a-comeback kinda things, readers send in angry letters denouncing our lowbrow, vulgar sensibility and threatening to cancel their subscriptions. Meanwhile, our servers melt under the demand and the page views soar into the stratosphere. Strangely, no one ever writes in to say how much they liked that big-breasts-are-making-a-comeback story. In fact, not a single one of the 50,000 people who eagerly read every page of that story, as compared to the 1,000 people who read the big essay about Iraq, has ever admitted having read it. But the server, like a gentleman's valet, knows all. When Leonard Cohen wrote, "There's a meter on your bed that will disclose/ What everybody knows," he was talking about page views.
We paid an inordinate amount of attention to page views not just because of the novelty but because we believed our financial future depended on them. We dimly believed that if we reached some magic but unknown number, gold coins would cascade down from the great slot machine of the Internet. In those antediluvian days, getting more than 500 page views was grounds for vaunting pride. For good reason: I have no idea how anyone even found our site, with its meaningless salon1999 address. But we had enough investment to keep going for a while, and like cartoon characters happily walking above a void, none of us looked down. Well, the people on the business side probably did, which might explain the gaunt, Edvard Munch-like expressions I would sometimes see flitting across their faces. Mercifully, I had nothing to do with that side of Salon.
We had very few ads. The biggest, which Zweig brought in, was a sponsorship by Border's Books. We published a mix of book and movie reviews, short news items in a section called "Newsreel," interviews and features, mostly on cultural subjects.
Our statement of purpose in Issue No. 1 is an interesting archaeological artifact. In it, Talbot proclaims that Salon stands for a "militant centrism" -- the term borrowed from an expression the writer Jim Sleeper used in our roundtable about race relations. That positioning made sense in an era when black-white acrimony seemed like the biggest issue facing the country, but it hasn't aged well. Today, the idea that Salon would describe itself as "militantly centrist" is laughable -- when you think of Salon, you don't think of a fired-up Joe Lieberman. And our utopian rhetoric about Salon becoming an interactive, Whitmanesque choir of varied American voices was about to have a rude encounter with reality. The Whitmanesque choir sometimes sang in harmony with us, but really it wanted to warble its own tunes -- some good, some bad, some inspired by Yoko Ono's Janovian Screaming period. We quickly discovered that trying to bring Table Talk readers into Salon in any kind of organized fashion was like trying to herd cats.
As we slogged along that first year, the media began to pay a little attention to the oddball little "e-zine" staffed by refugees from the newspaper world. There was a novelty factor at work that helped us. (Ultimately, it saved us. If we were a print magazine of the same quality, we would have been dead, buried and forgotten long ago.) I seem to recall being probed by an inordinate number of European reporters, most of whom were obviously working some kind of "electronic media revolutionaries" angle.
We were frequently asked if there were any inherent differences between online and print journalism. We didn't, and still don't, all give the same answer to that question. Talbot thought that online journalism was a different breed: faster, more irreverent, less controlled by the increasingly zombified gatekeepers of traditional media. He was also always pushing for our stories to be punchier and shorter, arguing that people didn't want to read New Yorker-length stories on their computer. I agreed with him that we were doing something different than most print news media, but I wasn't convinced that was because of anything unique about online journalism. Editing and writing is pretty much the same whether you're working with cuneiform tablets or a DSL line. As for length, I wasn't convinced readers couldn't be trained to read long stories online. (There was some self-interest involved here; I realized that if we stopped running long pieces, I'd be out of a job.)
The reviews began to come in. Some were decent, some were mixed. One memorable piece chided our lumbering, print-journalism ways by comparing us to a "stately flying boat."
Stung by this weird metaphor, after five months, in April 1996, we decided to trade in the mahogany-appointed Pan Am Clipper for a slightly zippier model. We went weekly. I confess I can no longer remember what that change felt like: We've all been boiled in the daily pot for so long that any slower pace is simply inconceivable. Toward the end of 1996 we parted ways with David Zweig and hired a new publisher, a big, amiable former University of California at Berkeley quarterback named Michael O'Donnell. Michael stayed with Salon for seven years, through the mad euphoria of the dot-com bubble, the great bust of 2001, the layoffs, the jolly Christmas party when we had just announced to the staff that we might be closed down in two months, and eventually into somewhat less shark-infested waters. Salon would not have survived without Mike. Like most natural salesmen, he was an eternal optimist -- and during the post-crash years he needed that optimism.
We quickly realized that weekly wasn't good enough in this finger-in-the-socket medium. So in 1997 we took the next step and went daily. King Kaufman had joined the week before as our copy chief, his terse call-out "You've got Blue Glow" to the art department adding a professional tone to the proceedings.
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In September of 1997 an unlikely event changed the way we thought about our editorial direction. Racing drunkenly through a Paris tunnel, a chauffeur lost control of his car, and Princess Diana died. It was one of those events that hit people hard in funny ways they couldn't explain. The mainstream media was not satisfying readers' desires for a more intimate response. We were all over the story, running everything from news pieces to criticism to personal essays in the new Mothers Who Think section. We got unprecedented reader response. For the first time, we understood that Salon could play an important role in the media world as a kind of news vulture, not so much reporting on the big events as feasting on their remains. Fast, smart, opinionated stories making sense of events, or simply offering cathartic responses, were in demand, and we discovered we were good at them.
Over the next year, this second-day-story approach increasingly led us to do more actual reporting. With hard news playing an increasingly larger role, the final piece of Salon's editorial puzzle fell into place. Our formula was an eclectic mixture of intellectual essays, opinionated news analysis, reviews, media criticism (I was the first editor of our daily Media Circus column; the second was an unknown young writer named Dave Eggers), reporting, personal pieces, idiosyncratic columnists (Camille Paglia, Cintra Wilson and Anne Lamott, those sibyls staring down from opposite corners of Salon's Sistine Chapel ceiling, helped gain us early followers and attention), occasional humor and, of course, a greater than usual infusion of bawdiness. Early readers of Salon may recall a sex column called "Unzipped," which led our traffic most of the time.
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