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' 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.
David Zweig, Publisher, has spent his career careening between artistic and business pursuits. After a stint at Time Inc. in Manhattan, putting together integrated marketing deals, he moved to San Francisco in August 1994, sleeping at the Chinatown YMCA and a quirky boarding house on Embassy Row, until he found work at Ikonic Interactive, an interactive software company.
In 1987 he co-founded an award-winning community newspaper with backing from Dow Jones in Seacoast, New Hampshire, where he picked newspaper confetti out of subscribers' snowblowers late at night on his hands and knees, praying for the arrival of the digital age.
Zweig got his journalistic start at Yale, filing a page-one story in the New York Times, after which it was suggested he pursue a business career. He claims to have the highest bowling average of any Harvard M.B.A.
Mignon Khargie, Art Director, grew up in South America, migrating to the U.S. in her early twenties and 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 CalPoly. He lives in San Luis Obispo with their miata.
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 San Francisco newspapers and national magazines, including the San Francisco Examiner, Harper's Bazaar and Wired; working as a part-time spokesperson for the worker-owned feminist erotica company Good Vibrations; and spending a lot of time online. One day she hopes to find herself 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, New York 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 ten 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 magazine, 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, TV/Music Editor, 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 October 20, 1991, the day of the Oakland hills firestorm. Hopefully, this doesn't bode ill for Salon.
Dwight Garner, Book Editor was an editor with Harper's Bazaar and has reviewed books and profiled authors for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Village Voice, The Nation, and other journals. He lives with his wife 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, Associate Art Director arrived in San Francisco in 1991 after four years of tooling around the Chicago theater and art scene. Graduating from Northwestern University in film, directionless, she decided to head west to the mecca of aimless early 20ers. Since then she has completely matured and found her niche (with great relief) in the world of publishing. Like almost everyone else she knows in San Francisco, she began her career at Mother Jones, working under the wing of Art Czar Kerry Tremain. She then became the Art Director of California Lawyer magazine, where she discovered that attorneys were easily shocked by Annie Sprinkle's aureole. At this point, Elizabeth would like to thank her mom and dad for being so damned cool.
Dan Shafer, WebMaster 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 Web site where you can learn a lot more about him than you probably want.
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, California.
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, Associate Editor was a researcher for Mother Jones magazine. She covered NAFTA for the Mexico City News and still doesn't get it. She reviews music for Rolling Stone Online and as a musician does her part to make violins the next nerdy-turned-cool instrument in rock and roll.
Susan Fassberg, PR and Marketing Director is still having fun connecting the dots. ("Linking people with ideas with people with ideas..."). This process has led to sleeping one year at a dream research lab in Brooklyn NY, excavating a Gallo-Roman temple to Apollo in a tiny French village, traversing thigh-high in snow in the Himalyas, and a long stay at the Max Planck Institute in the Black Forest of Germany. Since confining herself to the boundaries of California, she has started an environmental gift basket company, and promoted and marketed books, magazines, and non-profits. Susan is also researcher and production coordinator for several foreign television networks in the fields of science and technology, social change and psychology. A multilingual cybersprite, when not online she grows edible flowers, attempts to perfect risotto, hikes and collects dice. Though thrilled that her 80-year-old dad sends e-mail daily, she still advocates orange-juice-cans-and-string on occasion.
