Press Bios
Richard Gingras | Chief Executive Officer
Richard Gingras was appointed Chief Executive Officer in May 2009. Prior to joining Salon, he worked as an advisor to various technology startups and also served as an advisor on media product strategy to the executive team at Google from November 2007 through December 2008. From June 2002 through July 2007 he was founder, CEO and Chairman of Goodmail Systems and continued as Chairman through October 2008. From September 2000 through June 2002, he was an advisor to various technology startups including Audiomill (merged into Real Networks, April 2002), technology incubator ChanceTechAV, web applications platform provider Laszlo Systems, custom book publisher MyPublisher, and broadband applications platform developer Sugar Media. From January 1996 through January 1999, he was the founding Vice President, Programming and Editor-in-Chief of @Home Network and following that company's acquisition of Excite became Senior Vice President and General Manager of Excite@Home's consumer portal division through September 2000. In late 1995 he assembled the seed financing for Salon.com and has served as an informal advisor to the company. From September 1993 to January 1996 he was Group Product Manager, Online Services at Apple Computer. From the spring of 1992 through July 1993 he was Group Product Manager at the Peter Norton Computing division of Symantec Corporation. From September 1987 through May 1993 he was Chief Executive Officer of MediaWorks, Inc. Mr. Gingras holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Boston College.
Joan Walsh | Editor in Chief
Joan Walsh is Editor in Chief at Salon.com, the award-winning Web site. Her work has appeared in many national newspapers and magazines, from the Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun to Vogue and the Nation. A columnist for San Francisco Magazine. She won a 2004 Western Magazine Award for her writing about local politics. Before starting at Salon, she worked for many years as a consultant to national and regional foundations, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and California's James Irvine Foundation. She is on the Advisory Board of the University of Maryland's Journalism Fellowships in Child and Family Policy and a member of the board of directors of PolicyLink, an Oakland-based research and advocacy group. An avid baseball fan, she is the author of "Splash Hit: The Pacific Bell Park Story" (Chronicle Books, 2001) as well as "Stories of Renewal: Community Building and the Future of Urban America" (Rockefeller Foundation, 1997). She lives in San Francisco with her daughter, Nora.
Norman Blashka | Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
Norman Blashka brings to Salon over 20 years of CFO experience creating shareholder value with public and private media and technology companies, with expertise in start-ups, turnarounds and fundraising. He joins us from Vizible Corp., a web-based visualization software and social networking company, where he most recently served as chief financial officer. Prior thereto, he served as CFO of Operative Media, a venture-backed online advertising operations and software company. As EVP and CFO of 24/7 Real Media, a publicly-traded global digital media company, Blashka helped guide the company through turbulent post-bubble financial conditions, leading its successful turnaround and managing its renewed growth and profitability. He also served in a variety of senior financial and operating positions with established media companies such as Warner Amex Cable and Cablevision Systems Corp., after starting his career in public accounting with Peat Marwick Mitchell and Co.
Norman is a Certified Public Accountant, earned an MBA in finance and accounting from Columbia University, and holds a BA in economics, summa cum laude, from SUNY New Paltz, where he currently sits on the Board of Trustees and chairs its audit committee.
Gary Kamiya | Writer at Large
Before joining Salon.com, Gary Kamiya was at the San Francisco Examiner for five years, where he worked with David Talbot as senior editor at the paper's Sunday magazine, Image. He also served as the paper's book editor and critic at large, writing critical essays and reviews of books, movies, music, theater, and art. Before that he helped found Frisko magazine, where he was senior writer.
Kamiya's writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, ArtForum, and Sports Illustrated, among many other publications. He holds an M.A. from U.C. Berkeley, which awarded him its top undergraduate award in English literature, the Mark Schorer Citation, in 1983.
Kevin Berger | Features Editor
Kevin Berger was executive editor of San Francisco magazine for six years. During them, the magazine's feature articles -- including one about a sausage plant owner who murdered four meat inspectors, and a Silicon Valley wunderkind who believes he was visited by space aliens -- which he assigned and edited won numerous writing and reporting awards from the City and Regional Magazine Association. For the past two years, he was the senior staff writer at San Francisco magazine, and this year won the Maggie Award (Western Publications Association) for feature writing for his story "What Does It Really Mean to Be Green." He is also the author of "Where the Road and the Sky Collide: America Through the Eyes of Its Drivers," which looks at the environmental impact and more of our beloved cars.
Kerry Lauerman | New Projects Editor
Kerry Lauerman is new projects editor for Salon.com and the Open Salon director. He was Washington Bureau Chief, in charge of Salon's political coverage, from 2000-2002, later moving to New York where he became New York Editorial Director. He oversaw the creation and launch in July 2008 of Open Salon, Salon's social content network, which was nominated for a 2008 National Magazine Award for Best Interactive Feature. He has worked as an editor at Mother Jones magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and the late technology magazine, Forbes ASAP.
Andrew Leonard | Senior Writer, Technology & Business
Andrew Leonard, author of the How the World Works blog, began covering the Internet in the summer of 1993, about six months before cyberspace went mainstream. He is a contributing writer to Wired Magazine, and has been published in Rolling Stone, the New York Times Book Review, the Far Eastern Economic Review, and numerous other publications. His book "Bots: Origin of New Species" was published by HardWired books in August, 1997 -- the New York Times called it "a playful social history of the Internet." In 1997 he began writing for Salon, and was in fact the first full-time reporter hired by Salon. As a reporter for the Salon technology section, he was one of the first writers to cover in depth the open source movement and file-sharing phenomenon, and he specialized in investigating the cultural, political, social, and economic implications of new technology. In September 2000 he began editing the Salon Technology & Business sections.
Katharine Mieszkowski | Senior Writer
Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior writer for Salon.com. In 2004, she reported from India for Salon about the outsourcing of technology jobs. Her commentaries have been featured on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and "Living on Earth." A former senior writer for Fast Company magazine, she has also written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Magazine, MS. Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and High Country News. In 2001 she was named one of the Top 25 Women on the Web by San Francisco Women on the Web.
Laura Miller | Senior Writer, Books
Laura Miller is a journalist and critic living in New York. She is a co-founder of Salon.com, where she is currently a staff writer, and a columnist for the New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly and other publications. She is the editor of the "The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors" (Penguin, 2000).
Andrew O'Hehir | Senior Writer, Arts and Entertainment
Andrew O'Hehir has written for Salon as a critic and reporter since 1996, and joined the staff in 2002. Since then he has served as an editor and writer for Salon's Arts and Entertainment and Books sections. Before coming to Salon, he served as an editor at several other publications, including Spin, Swing, Art & Antiques and the San Francisco Weekly, where he was editor-in-chief from 1993 to 1995. His criticism and feature writing have appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the Sunday Times Magazine (London), the Washington Post, Newsday, the Village Voice, Sight and Sound, New York magazine, Us Weekly and elsewhere. He teaches in New York University's Cultural Reporting and Criticism graduate program and is the author of three plays and the forthcoming novel "The Dead Part of You." He lives in New York with his partner, activist and writer L.A. Kauffman, and their two children.
Cary Tennis | Columnist
Cary Tennis joined Salon in 1999 as a staff copy editor under then copy chief King Kaufman. Tennis became copy chief when Kaufman left the copy desk to write about sports. In 2001, when Garrison Keillor quit his Mr. Blue advice column, Tennis started writing the Since You Asked advice column. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two dogs.
Rebecca Traister | Senior Writer, Life
Rebecca Traister graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in American Studies in 1997. She has lived in New York since 1997, where she was an assistant in the film industry, editorial assistant at Talk magazine, a reporter for the New York Observer for four years, and is now a staff writer at Salon. She has freelanced for Elle, The New York Times, GQ, Allure, and briefly had a column at the now-defunct Mademoiselle. She has written extensively about women in entertainment and politics, and has covered the New York film business beat.