Careers

5.1.23

(Note: I first published this retrospective in 2006. My mood hasn’t changed much over the 17 years since then.)

One October day 35 years ago, I drove an old Chevy van up Fell Street to the Fillmore in San Francisco, and resumed my journalism career after a two year hiatus in the Peace Corps. A small group of us started a magazine called SunDance at 1913 Fillmore Street. It was a large-format magazine, with big graphics and long articles on the intersection of post-Sixties politics and culture.

Actually, it was pure-Sixties in its sensibility; we just didn't know yet that that era was finished. SunDance had an impressive list of writers and artists, none more famous than John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who also gave us some money. When they came to visit the office and share stimulants with us, we knew we'd been blessed by the gods.

Alas, none of us knew what a business plan was, and SunDance lasted all of three issues, though glorious issues they were. A few years later, I landed across town at Rolling Stone, at 625 Third Street, where celebrities of every stripe poured through the office, and the stimulation never ended. Not being a music writer, I rarely hung out with musicians, but a small group of us formed an ad-hoc investigative unit on staff there, and we did some good work until the founder, Jann Wenner, decided to move the operation to New York.

Some of us left behind then started a non-profit, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and our first real office was in the Broadway Building in downtown Oakland. Financing ourselves by a combination of foundation grants and contracts with media outlets, we produced newspaper series, magazine articles, books, television and radio documentaries (and eventually, long after I left, articles on the web).

I resumed my magazine career, now as an editor, 12 years later, becoming bureau chief for California magazine. We did some big stories there, too, but our Australian owner shut us down without warning one day; and two days later I was named Investigative Editor at Mother Jones. We did a lot of good stories over the next two years there, but it came time for me to leave, even though I wasn't sure where I would go next.

My old friend Raul Ramirez came to the rescue. He was leaving his post at KQED-FM for six months to go to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, and asked me if I would fill in for him. This was my first taste of public radio news, one of the best venues a journalist could find, and I truly loved it there.

When Raul came back, I was ready to jump to the newspaper business, but the president of KQED made me an offer I couldn't refuse, so I moved "upstairs," bought some suits, and became an instant executive. Another half-year and I was named Executive Vice President for KQED Inc. It was a bit gnarly upstairs, but I enjoyed this new work, including an extremely long, slow negotiation with the union representing the station's technical workforce. It was both the details and the big picture of helping run a company important in our community that attracted me at that point in my life.

This job came to a sudden end, however -- another transition I didn't see coming.

Meanwhile, a group of reporters headed by a friend, David Talbot, had quit the Examiner to try and start a web-based magazine, to be called Salon Magazine. David asked me to join them, mainly as a business consultant, so I did for three months that fall until we had managed to raise enough money and conclude a big marketing deal with Borders Books to be able to launch.

Then, I got a call from HotWired, the online offshoot of Wired magazine, founded by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf. Would I like to become a producer for a new daily political website called The Netizen?

You bet. I was getting a little tired of the business side, which, though fascinating in its own right, can't compete with the thrill of creating content. We launched The Netizen in a few weeks, and for the next six months I presided over a chaotic product that really was the brainchild of Louis Rossetto, though he spent his days editing his magazine, not producing content on the web.

Louis and I clashed over the politics of the site. He's a brilliant iconoclast, a libertarian, a former college Republican. (When I was in college, I was a radical anti-war and civil rights activist, and arrested on occasion.) But somehow we enjoyed the intellectual fight we found ourselves conducting, at least most of the time.

But I didn't know what to think when he called me to his office one day; maybe I'd crossed a line and was going to be fired. Nope. He asked me to become the head of content for HotWired, which meant overseeing multiple websites, and many people on the front edge of what Louis called a digital revolution. This was not hyperbole.

But his vision for his company was seriously inflated. We tried to go public twice and failed. Not long after that, the investors took over the company, and booted most of us, including Louis, out.

This transition turned out to be a bit more difficult. I did some consulting, but nothing really seemed to jell. Then, Talbot called and asked me to come back to Salon, now a daily news website that was finding its voice covering the scandals engulfing the Clinton presidency. He asked me to do several jobs -- news editor, investigative editor, senior executive.

Whatever. Being me, I said yes, though doing so meant I had to turn down two big consulting gigs that had taken months to land. Being at Salon the second time was a lot more fun, at least initially, because I got back to my investigative journalism roots, now as an editor, and was able to hire the best factchecker around, Daryl Lindsay, to join me there.

Our biggest hit was the Henry Hyde story, written by Talbot, edited by a bunch of us, and promoted by all. (Before that story was published, I checked with the deans of prominent journalism programs about the ethics of our decision, and was assured we were on solid ground. This helped later when we were subjected to a barrage of media criticism, as well as death threats, bomb threats, etc.)

Salon aimed to go public, too, and eventually did, thanks to its principal financial backer, Mr. Hambrecht. But, as part of becoming a publicly-traded company (briefly, as it turns out, since the company would be delisted during the dot.bust), my own role there changed. Daryl and I ended up opening a Washington, D.C., office for Salon in summer 1999.

A year later, I was back in the Bay Area, at Excite@Home, where I was managing a large staff of producers, writers, designers, and editors.

Talk about the dot.bust! Excite@Home was doomed, though it took some months before I could allow myself to recognize that sad truth.

After that disaster, a Midwestern couple much after my own taste, Tom and Heather Hartle, moved here from Michigan and asked me to help them launch 7X7, a new city magazine for San Francisco. We launched -- to some fanfare -- a week before the 9/11 attacks. New York's economy was injured; San Francisco's tourist-based economy essentially collapsed. That also ended the minor economic recovery from dot.bust around here, and sent me out in search of a new job, yet again.

But not before we had created some great issues of 7X7. In the spring of 2002, I accepted a one-to-three-year visiting professor position at Stanford, where (until 2005) I kept a close eye on how the collision between journalism and digital technology was unfolding. Nine months ago, I rejoined the private-sector fray, at a start-up, where we are exploring the new lexicon of content surfacing, categorization, and interactivity with user-created content.

Along the way, over the years, there have been too many other projects to list, but recent ones include teaching memoir-writing to boomers; acting as the interim managing editor for the Stanford Social Innovation Review; guest-editing at Business 2.0; working as an investigator for the victim families of 9/11; serving as interim editorial director at CIR; editing some investigative articles post 9/11 for The Nation; guest editing a special issue of BIG magazine on SF (a very special launch party for which I will describe later ); and helping various journalists on special projects, as well as a number of entrepreneurs on start-ups.

In the more distant past was a decade of screenwriting and consulting in Hollywood, plus 14 years of teaching at U-C, Berkeley's journalism school. For many years, I also traveled internationally and spoke at conferences, mostly about global environmental problems. During all this time, I tried to balance the journalistic requirement to remain aloof from direct activism with my penchant to be involved in my communities in every way possible. Not an easy act to master, and I don't think I did it all that well most of the time.

This long, unpredictable voyage has as much been a private search for my writing voice as a "career," i.e., finding ways to support my family, and therefore, to be a productive member of our society, as opposed to what else I might otherwise have turned into.

That same quest continues in this space, unabated. At this point, all I really wish to do is write.

LINKS:

• House GOP Whip Tom Emmer declines to outright guarantee U.S. will not default on its debts (USA Today)

• What is the US debt ceiling and what will happen if it is not raised? (Guardian)

• House majority whip rejects idea that GOP debt bill is doomed (Politico)

• Here’s What Treasury, Fed Might Do in a Debt Ceiling Crisis (WSJ)

• Ron DeSantis’s Orwellian Redefinition of Freedom (Atlantic)

• Ron DeSantis F-cked With the Wrong Fandom (Rolling Stone)

• Tucker Carlson and the Right (New Yorker)

• Report shows just how bad traffic is in SF with Uber, Lyft (SFGate)

• ChatGPT and its ilk are still "fake" intelligence (Salon)

• The next level of AI is approaching. Our democracy isn’t ready. (WP)

• The 'Don't Look Up' Thinking That Could Doom Us With AI (Time)

• Sperm-injecting robot achieves a baby-making breakthrough, 2 girls born (IE)

• Sudan’s Conflict Ignites Fears of Civil War in Darfur (NYT)

• Russia’s Wagner mercenary force boss threatens Bakhmut withdrawal (Al Jazeera)

• Japan's Shrinking Population Faces Point of No Return (Newsweek)

• Islamic State Khorasan Province Is a Growing Threat in Afghanistan and Beyond (Diplomat)

• What do Mormons believe? (CNN)

• Gas leaf blowers and lawn mowers are shockingly bad for the planet. Bans are beginning to spread. (USA Today)

• Could AI save the Amazon rainforest? (Guardian)

• ‘Legendary’: Steph Curry scores record 50 points in Golden State Warriors’ playoff win over Sacramento Kings (CNN)

• In Praise of the Long Movie (New Yorker)

• Lazy Poor Person Has Never Earned Passive Income From Stock Dividends A Day In His Life (The Onion)