David Talbot

David Talbot, born and raised in Los Angeles, California, is an American journalist, author, activist and independent historian. Talbot is from a media and entertainment family. Talbot attended the Harvard School for Boys 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, the only university that would accept him, he returned to Los Angeles, where he co-wrote a history of the Hollywood Left, *Creative Differences*, with Barbara Zheutlin, and freelanced for *Crawdaddy*, *Rolling Stone*, and other magazines. He was later hired by Environmental Action Foundation in Washington, D.C. to write *Power and Light*, a book about the politics of energy.

After returning to California, he worked as an editor at *Mother Jones* magazine before *San Francisco Examiner* publisher William Randolph Hearst hired him to edit the newspaper's Sunday magazine, *Image*. It was at the *Examiner* that Talbot developed the idea for *Salon*, a web magazine, and convinced several of his newspaper colleagues to join him. In 1995, Talbot founded *Salon* in San Francisco. The magazine gained a large following and broke several major national stories. Originally created to cover books and popular culture, the website became increasingly politicized during the Clinton impeachment drama in the late 1990s.