Talbot, David 1951-

PERSONAL:

Born 1951, in Los Angeles, CA; son of Lyle Talbot (an actor); married to Camille Peri (a journalist); children: two sons. Education: Graduated from University of California, Santa Cruz.

ADDRESSES:

Home—San Francisco, CA.

CAREER:

Writer, editor, and publisher. Environmental Action Foundation, writer, 1979-81; Mother Jones, San Francisco, CA, senior editor; San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco, 1985-94, became senior editor and editor-in-chief; Salon.com, San Francisco, founder and editor-in-chief, and chairman and chief executive officer of Salon Media Group, Inc., 1995-2005; Fenton Communications, San Francisco, senior vice president, 2007—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Salon.com has garnered numerous awards, including Online Journalism Association award for general excellence and investigative reporting, 2000.

WRITINGS:

(With Barbara Zheutlin) Creative Differences: Profiles of Hollywood Dissidents, South End Press (Cambridge, MA), 1978.

(With Steve Chapple) Burning Desires: Sex in America, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1989.

(Editor, with others) Afterwords: Stories and Reports from 9/11 and Beyond, Washington Square Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, Free Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including Time, Interview, Playboy, New Yorker, and Rolling Stone.

SIDELIGHTS:

Journalist David Talbot is the founder of Salon.com, one of the first successful Internet magazines. "In the beginning, Salon staked a claim on cultural coverage, publishing as much as a book review a day, tart media reporting and a sex column by Courtney Weaver that was followed breathlessly by thousands," remarked New York Times contributor David Carr. "At the end of the 1990's, the site began to add political news to its mix, some of which opened eyes at other, significantly larger news organizations." In an interview with Terry Gross of National Public Radio, Talbot stated: "My whole challenge with Salon is to create … what I've been calling a ‘smart tabloid.’ That's tough, hard-hitting journalism, investigative journalism, a kind of political coverage you can't get anywhere else." He noted that Salon "was built early on … around critics who had strong voices: book critics, movie critics, TV critics and columnists," such as Camille Paglia, Garrison Keillor, and Annie Lamott. "I did want to create a virtual drawing room, a salon," Talbot added.

In 2005, after ten years as editor-in-chief, Talbot left Salon. Two years later he published the critically acclaimed work Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, an account of Attorney General Robert Kennedy's investigation into the assassination of his brother, U.S. President John F. Kennedy. "As soon as he heard the news from Dallas," Talbot remarked to Library Journal interviewer Karl Helicher," Robert "suspected that his brother was the victim of a plot that he immediately concluded had grown out of the CIA's shadowy war on Castro. This anti-Castro operation brought together some of the Kennedys' most violent enemies, all of whom believed the Kennedys had betrayed their cause." According to New York Times Book Review contributor Alan Brinkley: "Brothers is a fearless, passionate, often angry book that both summarizes much of the vast conspiracy literature and attempts to add new evidence that Talbot himself amassed through dogged interviews with many people connected—directly or indirectly—with the Kennedy years."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2007, David Pitt, review of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, p. 24.

Library Journal, June 15, 2007, Karl Helicher, "The Kennedy Brotherhood," p. 82.

MacWeek, November 27, 1995, "Virtual Salon Opens on Web," p. 4.

Nation, October 30, 1989, Michael S. Kimmel, review of Burning Desires: Sex in America, p. 503.

New York Times, February 10, 2005, David Carr, "The Founder of Salon Is Passing the Mouse," p. E1.

New York Times Book Review, May 20, 2007, Alan Brinkley, "Conspiracy?," review of Brothers.

People, August 11, 1997, Samantha Miller, "A Thinking Person's Web site," p. 41; May 21, 2007, Jonathan Durbin, review of Brothers, p. 55.

ONLINE

Discover The Networks.org,http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/ (August 20, 2007), "David Talbot."

Ibiblio,http://www.ibiblio.org/ (June 14, 2000), "Fresh Air: Terry Gross Interviews Salon Editor David Talbot."

Journalism Jobs.com,http://www.journalismjobs.com/ (June, 2001), "Interview with Salon.com's David Talbot."

Tavis Smiley Show,http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/ (May 23, 2007), "David Talbot."