Talbot called us a "smart tabloid." Others called it intellectual talk radio. The key was to mix it up, to keep our readers and ourselves off balance, to stick and move like Muhammad Ali. To be Beltway insiders and merry left-coast pranksters, eggheads and sex fiends. And to somehow do it all while preserving an editorial voice that sounded like Salon.

Of course, it's possible to be so eclectic, so unpredictable that you never establish an identity, or a core readership. The tension between the desire to provoke and the need to have a recognizable editorial stance can never really be resolved. In our case, it played itself out most strikingly over politics, and our political columnists. It's no secret that Salon is a left-leaning publication. But Talbot in particular, and the rest of the top editors, had a horror of churning out predictable lefty screeds. In our earlier years, he favored a big-tent Salon, running conservative columnists like Andrew Sullivan and David Horowitz. But for the last few years, we haven't run many conservative writers. In part this is because we couldn't find conservative writers we liked. But it's also because of our own internal uncertainty about the big-tent philosophy. It's understandable why the New York Times runs David Brooks and John Tierney, but we're not the newspaper of record -- we don't have to be "balanced," just fair. And while it may be an editor's responsibility to challenge his readers -- and himself -- is it also his responsibility to run pieces he doesn't agree with and thinks are poorly argued, simply to "shake things up"? There have definitely been times when we've run a weird and dubious piece and justified it by saying, "It'll be a talker." But that credo comes uncomfortably close to making us freak-show barkers.

In any case, the formula was set and it has never substantially changed, although we have had to adjust it from time to time, sometimes regretfully. Our Wanderlust travel section, edited by Don George, was one of the most unusual and compelling travel departments anywhere -- you don't find articles titled "Machete-wielding cannibals mar my Congo vacation" in Condé Nast -- but it could never develop a big enough readership to sustain it, so we had to let it go. Other departments that have died unfortunate and undeserved deaths were our illustrated noir comics series, the Dark Hotel; People, an unclassifiable grab bag of features edited by Doug Cruickshank; and Ivory Tower, an occasional department about the academic world edited by Carol Lloyd.

In 1998 we ramped up our editorial staff, adding a whole slew of key people: associate managing editor Ruth Henrich, technology writer Andrew Leonard and then-news editor Joan Walsh, now Salon's editor. Critic Andrew O'Hehir's first cover feature for us ran in 1998. Stephanie Zacharek, who had been writing reviews for us since 1996, came on as a staffer in 1999; we put Charles Taylor on contract that same year. Deputy A&E editor and longtime "Fix" writer Amy Reiter joined us, along with copy editor Cary Tennis, who was later to bust out as a unique advice columnist. For the first time, Salon felt positively robust: There was more going on in the circus than you could see at a glance.

Probably the most significant, certainly the most lurid, event in Salon's editorial history was the Henry Hyde story, in which we revealed that the esteemed and respected head of the House Judiciary Committee, who was standing in judgment on Bill Clinton, had had a longtime affair with a married woman. We thought long and hard about whether to run the story, but decided in the end that it was completely legitimate: We decided we had to reveal that the Clinton persecution was a hypocritical farce, driven by right-wing zealots and unopposed by a slack-jawed media. We knew we were going out on a limb -- 57 other news organizations had passed on the story, and we thought we were ready for the ensuing firestorm. But we weren't. Our servers couldn't handle the requests. David went on TV and was ambushed by George Stephanopoulos, who waited until Talbot was off the air to insult him. Somebody called a bomb threat in to our office. There were organized electronic sabotage campaigns against us. And Tom DeLay denounced us on the floor of the U.S. Congress and demanded an investigation into whether Democrats leaked it to us. (For the record, once again: They didn't. It came from the aggrieved husband's friend.)

The Hyde story thrust us into the national limelight, with sometimes dubious consequences. For a time, we got a lot of tips about the sex lives of Republicans. But crawling around in right-wing bedrooms like hacks from some electronic version of Confidential magazine wasn't really what we had in mind when we issued our lofty statement of purpose. (Issuing statements of purpose is always risky: They invite inevitable comparisons to the "statement of principles" issued by Charles Foster "Citizen" Kane, before he began firing his old friends and finishing their columns for them.)

As the Hyde saga was unfolding, we were headliners in an even weirder drama: the dot-com madness. It was a careening Mr. Toad's wild ride like few journalists have ever seen, let alone taken part in. As a San Francisco dot-com during the gold rush, we had a front-row seat at one of the craziest eras in the history of American business. The years 1999 and 2000 were particularly egregious. (Go back and read Ruth Shalit, who did some of the best writing about advertising and branding anywhere for us. Her dissections of the manic, hyped-up corporate stupidity of those years take you straight into a different and a dreadful world.)

During those gloriously dumb years, something strange happened: We had ceased to be a publication. Now we were a DOT-COM. Dot-com! One had only to utter those words and strong-jawed, cologne-doused investment bankers in $3,000 suits would fall on their knees and grovel like Turkish courtiers before the Sublime Porte. (The other great buzzword of those days was "content," as in the expression "content provider," a truly scary phrase right out of Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology.") We kept on putting out the magazine, kept on assigning and editing and writing, kept on pouring "content" into all those empty vessels out there, but we couldn't ignore the prevailing vibe of fast, irrational wealth any more than Mark Twain could ignore gold fever when he was living on Jackass Hill. Sure, some of us had vague premonitions that something was fatally wrong with the whole deal, that if you never made any money it didn't make sense that your company would be worth tens of millions of dollars, that what we really were was a magazine that happened to be online, that publishers never make much money. But as we planned for our IPO it was impossible not to fantasize about Fort Knox-like vaults of money, parking lots full of Jaguars, second homes on every continent. It was too hard to resist the dream that through some lucky roll of the dice, some deeply stoned cunning of Hegelian history, we were going to be the first ordinary, working journalists in history to get filthy rich just for doing our jobs.

It sounds stupid -- and as events were to show, and my tax accountant can attest, it was stupid -- but it wasn't like people weren't getting rich for absurd reasons back then. San Francisco was filled with 25-year-old know-nothings with Auschwitz haircuts who parked their BMWs on the sidewalk at night in my Nob Hill neighborhood, simply factoring in the $100 tickets. I met a number of regular people, both back in the heyday and afterward, who hit the jackpot for the most ridiculous reasons. One staffer's boyfriend, a musician and IT guy, cashed in bigtime -- if memory serves, he bought a house with the swag -- simply because he had had the foresight to acquire and maintain the Web address "big.com," which some corporation bought from him. Another nice 30-ish couple I met had retired because the husband had created some silly Web site -- I think it offered online calendars or something -- that was bought by some monster corporation for gazillions of dollars. He was suitably humble, appreciative, laughed at the craziness of it all -- and no longer worked. Meanwhile, Salon kept losing money.

Join Salon

Special Salon Anniversary offer

Join Salon Premium today and get a subscription to Rolling Stone as well.

But in 1999, money was not something that you "lost." It was a mystical entity, self-generating, not part of the reality-based community -- like love, hope or intelligent design. The money was out there, everywhere, like oil, and you never knew from under which rock it was going to gush out next. We certainly looked for it. Mike O'Donnell made a valiant bid to buy a search engine called Google when it was just two Stanford boys working out of some low-rent motel in Palo Alto, Calif. (If he had succeeded...) He and Talbot were working every angle they could think of. They met with an Internet mogul to propose a traffic-swapping deal to him. The mogul apparently did not like the offer, because he suddenly shouted, "I might as well put a gun in my fucking mouth!" Later in the same meeting, he offered to buy Salon.

Yes, business dealings could be a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty back then, in those glorious days when AOL could merge with mighty Time-Warner on equal terms, like a flea in a miniskirt humping a half-conscious blue whale. The truly weird year was 1999, before and after our IPO. We raised $25 million and immediately set about justifying the public's faith in us by doing what every good dot-com did in those days: spending vast sums of money to "heighten brand visibility" or "increase market share" or "solidify our strategic position" or "acquire key assets" or whatever they called flapping your arms and calling it flying back then. Actually, we exercised great financial prudence compared to most of our dot-com peers, many of whom were doing things like spending a large chunk of their available assets on a single Super Bowl ad. (In 2000 eCompany Now, needing a really large venue to celebrate one of the worst names in the history of American business, held its launch party at San Francisco's brand-new Pac Bell Park.) Still, two years later, when we were on life support, could barely meet payroll and would have sold our souls to the Satanic Shampoo Company for a lousy $250,000, that $25 mil looked different. Like everything in life, it got a lot more real when it was gone.

Recent Stories