__ In David Talbot's Web dream, his tweedy zine is a full-service scandal sheet for the global village. __
"Lauch went down!"
It was election night 1998 in the San Francisco offices of Salon, and David Talbot - onetime far-out free-love dude and socialist agitator, now Salon's 47-year-old editor and CEO - was shouting the news to his intrepid troupe of baby-boomer Web journalists that Lauch Faircloth, the Republican senator from North Carolina, had lost to a Democrat.
"Wooooo-hooooo!" someone hollered from behind a little beige cubicle.
Talbot was dressed in a style that might be called start-up casual - a cobalt suit over a darker indigo broadcloth, no tie, with black rubber-soled Rockports - and he was darting back and forth amidst the haute-Best Western décor of Salon's offices. He had been there most of the evening trying to coax election returns and a clear picture out of his television set, heading what staff members call a "react": Without the resources to break spot news, Talbot boosts traffic to www.salonmagazine.com by quickly posting essays, commentary - anything - pegged to the latest headlines.
So tonight, over Sierra Nevadas and greasy piles of ordered-in Thai food, the react squad was busy calling a team of pundits, ideologues, and ironists to get their reactions to the elections -
"D'Amato lost!"
"We got Al Franken!"
"Who's calling Camille Paglia?"
- and posting comments almost directly to the site. The process might not win any journalism prizes, but it would generate hits, and hits, the theory goes, attract advertisers.
As Democrats continued to win -
"Barbara Boxer!"
- and as the online bon mots accumulated, Talbot and company began to walk the cocksure walk of victors. For months, Salon had been attacking Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's probe of President Clinton - a crusade that culminated in Talbot's decision to run the story of Republican representative Henry Hyde's 30-year-old extramarital affair - and the webzine had been widely ridiculed as a White House shill, not only by the GOP but also by what Talbot refers to alternately as "the East Coast media élite" and "the Harvard mafia." With the surprise Democratic victories, Salon's staff had evidence of what they'd felt all along; they were ahead of the "punditocracy" and with "the People."
"Complete vindication of Salon's supposedly kinky worldview!" Talbot crowed.
Being with "the People" is key to Talbot's plan, which in general terms is to make Salon the absolute biggest thing in the world. Launched in 1995 as an online literary club for the NPR crowd, Salon still has at its core book reviews, political and cultural commentary from writers like Garrison Keillor and Camille Paglia, candid articles about sex, and a reader's feedback forum called "Table Talk." The site has grown significantly, adding sections on academia ("Ivory Tower"), parenting ("Mothers Who Think," edited by Talbot's wife, Camille Peri), travel ("Wanderlust"), personal finance ("Money"), and technology ("21st"), and expanding sex coverage in an area called "Urge" under headlines like "Women readers eat up erotic novels about gay black men."
Yet while this diversity has built Salon's audience, the most dramatic spikes in readership have come when the site posts a big scoop. The Hyde story - which Talbot justified in a now-notorious editorial declaring that "ugly times call for ugly tactics" - may have damaged the magazine's standing among the East Coast media, but it did wonders for business. Salon's traffic jumped 50 percent in a single day. Overall, pageviews have risen from 1.3 million per month in 1996 to 15 million per month, generated, Talbot claims, by roughly 700,000 unique viewers. Meanwhile "Table Talk" - which now features Salon-bashing flames as often as egghead talk - has become the second most popular discussion area on the Web, according to Forum One Communications, a company that tracks online forums.
The whiff of success has inspired Talbot to turn little Salon into a global media giant. He wants to go public; to partner with any of a number of European media companies to start a Salon UK, a Salon Germany; he wants a Salon television show, and to forge partnerships with Internet retailers to make Salon an ecommerce behemoth.
His strategy for this global expansion, he's happy to tell you, is something so wonderfully simple it has a nursery school name: "the Three C's - content, community, and commerce." It works like this: Salon and its international satellite publications produce the content; the content establishes a community; advertisers target that community - and the community buys online. Barnesandnoble.com already pays to place a clickthrough button alongside Salon's book reviews. Add Salon's own ecommerce operation - readers can buy Salon T-shirts, tote bags, even ecofriendly "shade-grown" coffee - and Talbot hopes that in three years 25 percent of his revenue will come from online sales.
He argues his plan will work because it's scalable (he's going global, after all, without the burdensome costs of print), the demographic is right (the average reader is a 34-year-old man), and his sales model is sound (a mix of advertising, corporate sponsorships, transaction fees, and syndication deals).
"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to have figured it out," Talbot says in an easy Southern California cadence. "I'm puzzled as to why people are so confused by the Web. To me, it's a fundamental business plan.
"Once we get to profitability, which we're projecting to be a year from now," he adds, "we will be a good candidate for an IPO." He says the three syllables Eye-Pee-Oh with a kind of naughty relish, the way you can imagine Humbert Humbert saying Lo-Lee-Tah.
If Talbot's deceptively simple three C's work their magic, it will surprise no one more than his online cohorts. While the Web-publishing boom that began in 1994 produced a number of name brands - alternative zines like Suck and Feed, multichannel hubs like CNET and Pathfinder, and, eventually, Microsoft-backed Slate - it has never made much money. The costs of producing original content are high, advertisers have proved skittish, and the public has been slow to embrace long articles - and even slower to want to pay for them. While many print publications have "shoveled" content to the Web, no original online magazines besides Salon and Slate have made their way onto the mainstream media radar. The rare content-driven concern that has gone public - such as SportsLine USA - capitalizes on niche strengths, as do the successful financial sites. So for a company like Salon, there are no successful precedents, only cautionary tales. (The scuttled 1996 IPO of Wired Ventures, this magazine's former parent company is one.)
While Talbot speaks of his plan as a sure thing, as any crusading new media mogul must, even fellow shareholders are skeptical. Salon's senior editor Scott Rosenberg, who has covered the grandiose public offering strategies of any number of overhyped Internet companies, says, "There is a 20 percent chance these stock options will be valuable someday - up from zero."
Talbot's crusade has transformed him into much more of a CEO than an editor; he spends more of his time talking business models, branding, and finance with venture capitalists than talking lit-crit with authors and reviewers. Salon, as a result, has become a confusion of impulses - a high-minded tabloid that wants respect but needs buzz. And while Talbot frequently casts his operation as an enemy of the East Coast media élite, he increasingly finds himself emulating their model, as when he says, "I want Salon to be the best of brand in various categories, just like The New York Times developed a brand in news and arts coverage."
Salon started out as an excuse for Talbot to ditch a crummy job. In the early '90s he was an editor at the San Francisco Examiner, then under the leadership of Will Hearst, the grandson of William Randolph Hearst who had helped found Outside magazine. Hearst had been trying for several years to implement an ambitious scheme to revive the tired Examiner by making it a showcase of characters and rogues. He brought in Hunter S. Thompson, promoted macho man (and later husband of Sharon Stone) Phil Bronstein, and tapped Talbot to take charge of Image, the paper's Sunday magazine.
Talbot brought his own showbiz sensibility to the mix. He grew up in Hollywood; his father, Lyle Talbot, was a well-known character actor, who played Ozzie and Harriet's next-door neighbor and roles in Ed Wood pictures like Glen or Glenda. Talbot's brother, Steve, had a career as a child actor in the '60s, playing occasional parts on The Twilight Zone and a steady role as Beaver's buddy Gilbert on Leave It to Beaver. David Talbot never acted, but according to his brother, in backyard circuses the Talbot kids put on for friends, David would emulate the authoritarian flair of directors he'd seen on the sets.
"In that sense he's been an impresario for a long time," Steve says.
Talbot was also an activist and provocateur. As a teenager in the '60s, he'd been forced out of Harvard Preparatory School - the élite and then staunchly conservative Episcopalian military academy in Studio City attended by Ronald Reagan Jr. and Charlton Heston's sons - for agitating against the Vietnam War. He campaigned to shut down Harvard Prep's ROTC program and turned the school's literary magazine, which he edited, into an antiwar pamphlet. The headmaster, Talbot says, deemed him a "disciplinary risk," and despite good grades, he was accepted at only one college, the hippie mecca UC Santa Cruz.
There, Talbot says, he joined socialist groups, devoted himself to the antiwar and prisoners rights movement, ran with a guerrilla theater troupe called the United Bozo Front, and spent time in jail in connection with his antiwar activities. He was also an outspoken champion and campus guru of the "free love" movement. His parents had always been open about sex - "Sex and politics were always part of my family," Talbot says - and he did them one better by joining both a notorious swingers commune and a lesbian collective called Chestnut House. Talbot is almost pathologically candid about his sexual experimentation - he coauthored a 1989 book on the topic called Burning Desires: Sex in America - A Report from the Field; he now describes his exploits as "youthful, but not indiscreet," a mocking reference to Henry Hyde's admission of "youthful indiscretions."
After school Talbot rebelled against what he calls "the doctrinaire and totalitarian impulses of the organized left." As an editor in the '80s at the San Francisco-based Mother Jones, he fought to publish pieces that ran counter to leftist orthodoxy - attacking the Sandinistas; extolling the virtues of Silicon Valley capitalism - an m.o. that got him pegged by some as a grandstander.
Talbot brought that contrarian sensibility to Hearst's Examiner as well. He was one of the first mainstream editors to champion Camille Paglia, and he ran a now-famous photo spread of the author dressed in chains and bondage gear, in a porn shop. He caused an outcry running pieces on white men's fetishization of Asian women, and an attack on multiculturalism by Gary Kamiya, now Salon's executive editor. Talbot constantly pressed his bosses to let him be more provocative. "People understood it was David promoting himself," says Bronstein, now executive editor of the Examiner.
Talbot's detractors also dubbed him a sensationalist, which Talbot says is "a conventional and predictable way of viewing me that doesn't get to the truth."
A bitter two-week strike in 1994 ended Will Hearst's dream of resuscitating the Examiner. Talbot, the former lefty, found himself on the management side and was miserable. The strike, though, provided him with the seed of his next big idea. A group of reporters and editors including Scott Rosenberg, then the Examiner's tech reporter and film critic, began publishing an online version of the strike paper, The San Francisco Free Press. The online daily appeared before the Web had received much media attention and became a sidebar in coverage of the labor dispute. Talbot had earlier pitched a print magazine on "the future and change" to the Hearst Corporation in New York, to no avail. The new medium seemed like a cheap way to put out the magazine he wanted, and, as important, to get out of the poisoned atmosphere of the Examiner.
HOME'S PROGRAMMING VP AND EDITOR IN CHIEF OF
Eventually Talbot interested Standish O'Grady, a Hambrecht & Quist investment banker who oversees an Adobe Systems development fund. In exchange for $2 million, the firm took a 50 percent share of Salon. (Currently Salon's founders and employees retain 40 percent of the company's shares; the remaining 60 percent are divided among investors - primarily H&Q, Adobe, and the Japanese firm ASCII.)
Talbot immediately began recruiting former Examiner colleagues. The exodus of a group of mostly middle-aged newshounds into new media was seen as an epochal event in San Francisco. Salon's first publisher, David Zweig, compares Talbot to Moses: "He led the people out of the Examiner across the river of unemployment and to the promised land of Web journalism." But the exodus fostered resentments that still exist today. "There are a lot of people here who don't like him at all," Bronstein says.
Talbot says he has little contact with his old Examiner colleagues. "It's like going back to high school again for me - I don't."
Salon launched in November '95, featuring strident voices - like lefty Christopher Hitchens, conservative David Horowitz, and Paglia - who Talbot hoped could cut through the din of the Web. Susie Bright and Courtney Weaver wrote columns on sex and dating. Pols like James Carville and authors like Anne Lamott became regular contributors. Salon's baby-boomer earnestness made it an easy target for younger and angrier zines - Suck, for example, dismissed Salon as "second-rate Sunday paper fare."
From the beginning, Talbot was in a bind. Salon couldn't get advertisers without traffic, and it couldn't get traffic without some kind of marketing program, which it couldn't afford. To make matters worse, Microsoft's Slate, which débuted in June '96, seemed to be getting all the attention. Editor Michael Kinsley was written about constantly; The New Yorker, for example, covered his move to the Web in confounded and awestruck terms one might use to describe a man getting ready to circumnavigate the globe in a cardboard raft. Salon editor Rosenberg recalls that the ballyhooing of Slate "really pissed us off."
It was up to Talbot to generate buzz - and hits. He began to monitor closely the traffic at his site, to see precisely what readers were interested in, a method news sites like MSNBC had already been using to tailor coverage. What his research confirmed was something every Internet pornographer could have told him from the get-go: sex sells.
"It's not a cynical show business ploy on my part to include sex on the site - I do it because I care about it," Talbot says. "It's not like I live in a lesbian commune anymore, but Salon's not disavowing that, either."
Talbot also tried other tricks. He encouraged his columnists to draw readers in by using blunt language and stark, tabloidy contrasts. And he began to evaluate his writers based on the number of hits they generated - a kind of Nielsen ratings system for copy. The method grated on many Salon contributors, and more than one complains of being doomed by the math. Talbot says the traffic tally "is never the only reason, but it can be one reason" he fires a columnist.
Salon's traffic grew steadily, perhaps a result as much of the Web's growing popularity as of Talbot's strategy. At the end of 1996, Salon - not Slate - was singled out as Time's site of the year and Advertising Age's online magazine of the year.
Talbot's plans for Salon changed further in 1997, when Princess Diana died. He rounded up editors and writers who quickly posted reactions to her death - and noticed an immediate spike in traffic. Continually freshened news, he concluded, would draw readers back to the site. He discarded the weekly print magazine cycle, shifting Salon to a constantly updated stream of information.
Perhaps the biggest boon to Salon, at least from a public relations perspective, was Slate's decision in February 1998 to start charging $19.95 for an annual subscription - a move that practically froze Kinsley's circulation at a verifiable, if grim, 20,000. Talbot sees this as pure arrogance on the part of - you guessed it - the godforsaken "East Coast media élite" who think their brilliant opinions are worth charging for. Populists' opinions are free.
(For all his bluster about being a media outsider, Talbot practically possesses a media gene. His brother Steve is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentary filmmaker, and his sister Margaret is an editor at The New Republic and a contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine.)
"Mike Kinsley says the world's awash in information and what people need now is to have it explained to them," Talbot says. "My feeling is we're awash in babble and punditry, and that what is really necessary is people to sort through all the hot air to dig up facts that haven't been revealed before."
Kinsley, when told of Talbot's comments, practically howls, "Does he read Salon?"
Talbot pours it on. "Their editorial mission, I think, is narrower - it's more policy driven. Because of that, you have to be kept by an angel, whether it's [New Republic owner Marty] Peretz or Bill Gates. Mike Kinsley is used to that. I'd rather take my chances with the market and build a product that enough people and enough advertisers support, so that you're not totally dependent on some fat cat and his bizarre whims."
Talbot goads Kinsley with the benefit of hindsight - at the time, with no viable profit strategy in sight for either Slate or Salon, the subscription model certainly had its supporters. Nonetheless, the Slate experiment taught Talbot a valuable lesson he couldn't have afforded to learn himself: To make money, Web publications could not rely strictly on a print magazine business model. They had to become even more explicit marketing tools, a way of better linking readers (read: consumers) to advertisers. And to do that, they needed to give readers a compelling reason to go online.
That problem was solved in January 1998 with the Lewinsky scandal, whose slowly accruing salacious detail was particularly suited to a constantly refreshed Web tabloid. Salon was preternaturally attuned to the story, having always championed sexual candor, and the inquisition quality of the investigation neatly dovetailed with all the things Talbot found politically and personally offensive. It was the perfect opportunity, he recognized, to digitize the old Hearst brand of journalism, "where you build your paper around colorful bylines and columnists, and where you take a crusade and hammer that theme home again and again and again, and build your circulation around that."
In April, Talbot hired longtime contributor Jonathan Broder, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, to cover Washington, and linked up with Murray Waas, an eccentric Beltway reporter who had amassed a houseful of files on Whitewater. Together Waas and Broder had already uncovered what turned out to be a significant story: An Arkansas woman claimed that David Hale, Ken Starr's lead witness in the Whitewater case, was paid by Clinton opponents in exchange for damaging testimony. That story got Salon in the East Coast dailies, and Talbot and company received an invitation, thanks to Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal, to a White House party where he met the president. This was getting fun!
Salon devoted no end of attention to the scandal as it ground on through the summer and fall. Clinton stalwart Joe Conason was hired as a columnist, and conservative David Horowitz condemned Clinton in bilious terms usually reserved for traitors.
Then, in the beginning of September, Talbot heard from a Florida man named Norm Sommer, who was peddling the story that Henry Hyde - the snowy-haired chair of the House Judiciary Committee who wielded, in the short term at least, the most influence over the fate of Bill Clinton - had had an affair with a married woman beginning in the mid-'60s. Sommer had been trying to sell the story everywhere for months, but reporters had rebuffed him, apparently out of adherence to the tenuously held belief that certain private matters shouldn't be reported unless they have some relevance to the public interest - and out of concern that such a scurrilous piece of journalism would inevitably generate a backlash.
Talbot asked his DC bureau chief to look into the story, but Broder wanted nothing to do with it. He'd already been embarrassed by more than one sophomoric article in Salon - a story about the penis of Buddy, the presidential dog, had particularly galled him.
Talbot forged ahead anyway. Though he spurned Sommer's request for an informant's bounty, he paid $1,500 for a couple of pictures showing a woman lounging lustily in Henry Hyde's lap. Hyde admitted to those "youthful indiscretions," and Talbot had his story, which he posted, before sending 250 faxes to alert the old media of Salon's scoop.
What followed was a wave of attention no Madison Avenue publicist could have conjured. The national dailies ran with the story - though the Times attributed it simply to "an Internet magazine" - Salon was denounced by name on the House floor, the magazine's San Francisco office faced a bomb threat and hacks into its computer system, and The Wall Street Journal editorialized that Ken Starr should investigate Salon. Talbot of course had to go on television to defend his honor - including a stop on Good Morning America - and the story grew so big even the cranks at the Examiner had to write about it.
The furor played out for more than one news cycle when Broder told The Washington Post that he'd argued against the Hyde piece. Talbot went ballistic, Broder was forced to resign, and the East Coast élite jumped on that story as well. This time the Times mentioned Salon by name, and Talbot was portrayed as something between a nincompoop and a Stalinist.
Broder, who then publicly refused an $11,000 severance package he characterized as an "exchange for silence," has emerged as one of Talbot's loudest critics. His former boss, he says, "saw these stories as a way to maximize the buzz and extend the brand name. It was no different than [sex columnist] Susie Bright doing a story about blowjobs."
But it was probably more complex than that. The Hyde story seemed to go against Talbot's core beliefs - that sexual inquisitions were wrong, that tolerance was the right response to human foible. But it had an irresistible quality as well; it tied together everything that got him riled up. It was certainly about sex and politics, and it would get under the skin of those snotty East Coast élites. The story had a showbiz flavor that would be great for Salon. Finally, the story had a kind of prankish quality, not unlike something the United Bozo Front might have come up with during Talbot's Santa Cruz days.
Talbot argues the story was no gimmick. "There was a strong reaction against Salon in the political and media worlds," he says, "and there was a concerted effort to destroy our advertising base. We have a business to maintain. We're not running a circus."
It may have been a lot of unpleasantness to endure, but in the end, the daily tally sheets proved it was worthwhile: The monster increase in pageviews was certainly evidence of enough readers to put advertisers and potential investors at ease. The timing couldn't have been better. As of this writing, Talbot is in the middle of trying to secure a fourth round of financing, one that he quite optimistically hopes will generate as much funding - $5.5 million - as the previous three rounds combined. His original investors - Adobe, Hambrecht & Quist, and ASCII - have all anted up, and he's in talks with European media companies for the remainder of the money and, he hopes, staffing and infrastructure support for his planned foreign bureaus.
"I want to make Salon the leading brand for Web journalism," he says. "If I complete this round as I want, it's like, 'Look out world.'"
No sooner has Talbot uttered this mogulspeak than he changes the topic to Salon's lofty editorial aims. "There's a culture war and Salon is part of it!" he declares. Left hanging is the question of whether the very things that make Salon unique - its mix of high and low, of crusading journalism and earnest rants, its quirky flavor of West Coast baby-boomer liberalism - might ultimately prove the chief obstacles to its success. A few large news organizations have managed to incorporate ideology - The Wall Street Journal, for example, and several Rupert Murdoch-owned properties like the New York Post - but on the whole, the business of partisanship works better on the scale of alternative urban weeklies like The Village Voice and the San Francisco Bay Guardian than on a global stage. National magazines engaged in the "culture war" - from The Nation to National Review - are infinitely more likely to be listed as 501(c)(3) nonprofits than as tickers on Nasdaq. Salon, in fact, recently began emulating one tactic used by foundations - the magazine has started selling $25 premium "memberships" on what its business department refers to as the "NPR-PBS model" - a dubious comparison for a company planning an IPO.
Still, Talbot sees the way clearly. Back in June, he told the LA Times, "I don't dream of IPO day. Money is not my measure of success." But now, a few months after the Hyde story, it's easy to goad him into a discussion of how he'll spend the spoils of a public offering - "if Salon ever becomes wildly successful and we cash in." He and his wife now live in the modest Bernal Heights section of San Francisco, drive Toyotas, and send their kids to public school, but already they're arguing over where to buy their second home. "Her dream is a Coppola-like place up in the Wine Country and a flat in North Beach, sort of commuting between the two," he says. "I like the ocean. So that's just one of those tensions."
