BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Long before the army of online citizen journalists known as bloggers became the talk of media circles, there were online magazines. Namely, there was Salon.com. Ten years ago, when David Talbot started Salon, it was a brand new animal - a publication that had good writing and good thinking, but existed only on the internet - no paper version at all. It seemed revolutionary, not to mention a little implausible. But that was ten years ago. Today, it's not only still going, but we hardly even consider it a fringe source. It is legit. Maybe that's why it was time for David Talbot to move on. He's stepping down from his major Salon responsibilities, and he joins me now from San Francisco. David, welcome to OTM.

DAVID TALBOT: Thanks, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Take me back ten years to you trying this quixotic startup. What was the pitch, and, and how was it received?

DAVID TALBOT: [LAUGHS] Well, it was hard. A lot of people hadn't even heard of the web at that point, so when I was out raising money, I had to explain not only is this a new magazine, and we were going to be based in San Francisco, not New York, where all publishing is based, but it was going to be on something called the internet, which was definitely a tough sell to most people.

BOB GARFIELD: You wrote that part of the reason you can now leave Salon is that the magazine's survival is no longer in doubt. Let's talk about the business side. How profitable is the magazine, and how has the model changed over the years?

DAVID TALBOT: Well, Salon has had many, many near death experiences, and I'm just as stunned as most people to be at this point where Salon has turned its first profit last quarter. We made 400,000 dollars, a delightful figure. We've been written off so many times now, that I, I feel like I've come back from the dead. The key thing, I think, for Salon was when we were able to start charging subscriptions about three years ago, and when we did that, we showed that, lo and behold, internet publishing could be just like traditional publishing and get revenue not only from advertisers, but from our readers.

BOB GARFIELD: Let's talk about some of your near death experiences. They're always fascinating. Was there one that was particularly terrifying or, or maybe particularly heroic? I mean do you have a PT-109?

DAVID TALBOT: [LAUGHS] One of Salon's, I think, scariest near death experiences came about halfway into our existence, when a person who the investors had put on our board, to kind of babysit us, he took me and my business partner, Michael O'Donnell, out for breakfast at a very lovely hotel here in downtown San Francisco, surrounded by tourists enjoying their breakfast with their children, and this fellow cut right to the chase and said "I'm going to shut you down." But I jumped to my feet and said "No. We're going to shut you down," and proceeded to tell him exactly what I thought about him, and lo and behold, it seemed to work, because he backed off, and shortly thereafter he helped us, actually, so that was an important turning point. Another, I think, rocky moment for Salon occurred during the Clinton impeachment wars, which is when I think Salon really came of age journalistically, while the rest of the media bandwagon was out for Clinton's scalp, we were more interested in reporting on Ken Starr - what was motivating this strange inquisition, and so on. And this antagonized a lot of critics of President Clinton. We were inundated with hate mail, hate email, death threats. Our building had to be emptied one day, because of a bomb threat. Again, we came of age through the fires of these various crucibles and fought on.

BOB GARFIELD: There is another on-line magazine called Slate.com, but only one. Now Macy's built next to Gimbel's but it's been ten years. Where are Bloomingdale's, where's Nordstrom, where are the rest of the magazines that you would have thought would have sprung up along the path that you've blazed?

DAVID TALBOT: Yes. Well, that's one of the startling and, and puzzling questions I still have. When we launched Salon, we thought it was going to be one flower in an abundant garden. And that was the case for the first few years, of course. But unfortunately, most websites weren't able to develop a business model and quickly disappeared, despite the high quality of many of them. Slate, one of our competitors, had the advantage of being backed by a little company called Microsoft, so they were able to battle on. We're now entering the era of the blog, instead, but as great as many of these blogs are, they're not professional newsrooms, and there's only so much that a, a lone blog voice can do in the pursuit of truth and justice in American media, and I think it's hard to replace the kind of critical mass and collective energy that a newsroom has, where journalists, reporters, editors - bouncing ideas off of each other, working the phones, burning shoe leather to track down stories - to me that's journalism at its best.

BOB GARFIELD: And as revolutionary as your magazine must have seemed a decade ago, really the only thing new-media about it is the way it's distributed over the internet. Is there a chance that, because of the growth of the blogosphere that Salon and Slate themselves will be rendered obsolete by the geometric growth of the blogosphere?

DAVID TALBOT: No, I don't see blogs replacing publications like Salon, any more than Salon replaced the newspaper industry or the magazine industry. You know, we need new ways for new talent to bubble up, so I welcome the blogs. I welcome their energy, and I think Salon will thrive because of this new energy that's being brought into journalism. But the main thing is, I think it's important for Salon to, to stay independent. It's one of the few national publications, at this point, in conglomerate media America, that stands on its own feet. The only people we had to answer to here at Salon over the last ten years was ourselves and our readers, and there are not many journalists that can say that.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, David best of luck with Salon and to you.

DAVID TALBOT: Thanks so much, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: David Talbot is moving on after starting Salon.com ten years ago. He's setting out to write a book about the Kennedys called Brothers. [MUSIC]