David Talbot

David Talbot (born September 22, 1951) is an American progressive journalist, author and media entrepreneur. He is the founder and former CEO and editor-in-chief[ of one of the first web magazines, Salon.com. Talbot founded Salon in 1995, when the web was still in its infancy, and is considered one of the pioneers of online journalism. Under Talbot’s leadership, the magazine gained a large following and broke several major national stories. It was described by Entertainment Weekly as one of the Net’s “few genuine must-reads”. Since leaving Salon, Talbot has established a reputation as a historian, working on the Kennedy assassination and other areas of “hidden history.” Talbot has worked as a senior editor for Mother Jones magazine and a features editor for The San Francisco Examiner, and has written for Time magazine, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and other publications. Talbot was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He attended Harvard Boys School, but did not graduate after falling afoul of the school’s headmaster and ROTC program during the Vietnam War. After graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz, he returned to Los Angeles, where he wrote a history of the Hollywood Left, “Creative Differences”, and freelanced for Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone, and other magazines. He later was hired by Environmental Action Foundation in Washington, D.C. to write “Power and Light,” a book about the politics of energy. After he returned to California, he was hired as an editor at Mother Jones magazine, and later, by San Francisco Examiner publisher Will Hearst to edit the newspaper’s Sunday magazine, Image. It was at the Examiner where Talbot developed the idea for Salon, convincing several of his newspaper colleagues to join him and jump ship into the brave new world of web publishing. Talbot is from a prominent media and entertainment family. He’s the son of longtime character actor and founding member of the Screen Actors Guild, Lyle Talbot. He is also the brother of documentary producer and former child actor Stephen Talbot, doctor Cynthia Talbot of Portland, Oregon, and journalist Margaret Talbot, a staff writer at The New Yorker. Talbot is married to writer Camille Peri, co-editor of the national bestseller Mothers Who Think, with whom he has two children. His eldest son, Joe Talbot, is an aspiring musician and filmmaker. His youngest son, Nathaniel, is a recent graduate of the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, a San Francisco public high school devoted to arts education. Talbot lives with his family in San Francisco.