By Chris Ryan

It’s February 2006 and Joan Walsh is on national television enduring a litany of questions about the release of new photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. The young-faced Tucker Carlson is pressing her hard, insisting the photos lack news value and will only incite violence.

Walsh defends her decision and holds her ground to the end. Carlson: “All right. Joan Walsh of Salon.com, thanks for coming on.”

Walsh serves as Editor in Chief of the online news and culture magazine. Born in the heady, tech-crazed mid-1990’s, Salon survived the dot-com bust and – perhaps even more remarkably – reported a profit early last year.

Confronting the powers that be over the prison scandal, though, seems less about business for Walsh than justice and accountability, concerns that run deeply through her past.

“I grew up with a very strong sense of social justice that came from my parents and my perception of being Irish Catholic. Being a child and seeing the civil rights movement, there was a sense that some social changes had been put in place by the election of John F. Kennedy, and that to be Irish Catholic was to stand for the underdog and support these movements for social justice.”

Walsh’s Irish heritage extends to both sides of her family. Her mother’s grandmother was Irish and her father’s parents were born in Cork. They settled in the Bronx and lived in various places around Yankee Stadium.

It may have been this proximity to baseball that first drew out Walsh’s desire to fight for the underdog. She thought it out of character for her father, who always supported the underdog, to root for the Yankees. Walsh recalls, “We’d have these philosophical arguments when I was four or five about how could an Irish Catholic root for the Yankees; it seemed wrong. We had a lot of baseball/religion discussions at my house, at a very early age.”

In a 1988 trip to Cork, Walsh finally experienced the culture that ran so strongly through her family and household. “I just fell in love with it. It felt like home.”

Walsh visited again a few years later – this time with her daughter – for her great-aunt’s 100th birthday. She later wrote about the trip for the San Francisco Examiner magazine, Image (now defunct).

“I always knew I wanted to be a writer. It was just what I loved.” Walsh has penned stories on such topics as politics, feminism, Catholicism, poverty, and baseball for magazines and newspapers such as Vogue, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Los Angeles Times, and of course, Salon.com.

Beyond writing and setting the website’s editorial direction, Walsh’s job demands a keen sense of the media as a business, particularly since online news providers are still struggling to find a profitable business model – one earning actual profits in the virtual reality world of the Internet.

Walsh credits Salon’s longevity (a mature 11 years, in terms of the Web) with “seeing the [dot-com] downturn early, having built an audience that would pay, and then being nimble enough to change course by evolving that model to stay receptive to the currents that are coming along.”

Salon also owes its survival to some well-timed infusions of cash from two loyal investor-readers who wanted the site to soldier on. Whether politics or business drove these investments, Salon demonstrated its potential to investors when it announced its first profit in early 2005.

Since then it has struggled to repeat that profit, but Walsh is optimistic. “Internet advertising is back. We have a great product and an amazing demographic that [advertisers] will pay an amazing amount of money to reach.”

Since taking over as Editor in Chief, Walsh has made some changes to increase Salon’s competitiveness and appeal. She added five new blogs, including one for video, one for women’s news, and one on “how the world works.” She beefed up its Washington bureau for the upcoming elections (and beyond) which she says has led to more breaking news and the Associated Press picking up their stories. She has also empowered Salon’s readers to post letters to the site automatically and invested in covering cultural issues.

The result, Walsh says, is that Salon has carved out a niche publishing traditional, fact-checked journalism while exploiting the potential and immediacy of the web.

Prior to Salon, Walsh consulted for foundations and non-profits on such issues as urban poverty, school reform, and women’s employment. “I liked having some stake in really getting it right and caring about what I was writing about.”

Although her concern for others began early in life, her more recent experiences seem to have reaffirmed this characteristic. “I would still argue that our failure to pay attention to poverty and try to ameliorate or eradicate it, haunts us in the U.S. today, and is a problem globally. You can’t fight terror without [looking at] the great disparities between wealth and poverty all over the world.”

For Walsh, it’s about morals. “The struggle to get this [social justice] right,” she argues, “is at the heart of what kind of country we are.”

Throughout her tenure at Salon, Walsh has contributed more to the site’s written content than just the opinion-analysis common to many political websites. “I’ve been blessed with a forum where I can say what I want, and I avail myself of it when I must,” she admits.

Many of her pieces bring her own personal experience to bear on news about public figures, revealing human dimensions and broader meaning that might otherwise stay hidden.

When JFK, Jr. died in 1999, for example, many other outlets covered the event as (non-fiction) drama. But Walsh explored the dynamic of grief in families – in the Kennedys, and her own.

“As I got older, I realized my family had more in common with the Kennedys than roots in Ireland and Democratic politics. I saw a dysfunctional Irish stoicism in the Kennedy way of grief that I would experience late in my childhood, when tragedy hit my family, and my mother, youngest cousin, favorite uncle, grandmother and grandfather got sick and died within a seven-year span, in what felt like our own not-for-television version of the Kennedy curse.” Her article offered readers another way to reflect on the death than just another tragedy in the saga of Camelot.

Though she has less time these days, Walsh still contributes thoughtful, introspective pieces when she can.

After John Paul II’s death last year she wrote a piece entitled, “Why I Can’t Mourn the Pope.” No anti-Vatican rant, it nevertheless stirred controversy. Walsh applauded the Pope’s commitment to certain causes while lamenting

his legacy on the Church itself. With remarkable candor she explored her mother’s difficult relationship with the Church in the last months of her life and her own struggle to come to terms with her Catholicism.

For many people the high hopes for the Internet – that it would change the way we learn, share, and interact – went pffft along with the stock prices of tech companies. But because of the low cost of delivering content online, Salon and its brethren can easily run longer, more reflective pieces like Walsh’s, thereby delivering on some of the potential the Web has always promised.

At the same time, many online news magazines and blogs are widely perceived as slanted. And whether Salon is “highly critical of the present administration” or simply “holding the President accountable,” it is widely thought of as liberal.

However, a closer look reveals that Salon isn’t afraid to disappoint some of its liberal fans. “Our reporting on Ohio cost us subscribers, because there’s an element of the left that is invested in believing that Bush ‘stole’ Ohio” in 2004. Salon investigated the accusations and reported that while some Republican tactics effectively depressed Democratic turnout, the election could not reasonably be called stolen.

“I’m a stickler about the truth and a stickler about language,” Walsh reflects.

Walsh resists the polarization of American opinion in other ways, too, having recently started a new series on Salon dedicated to balanced conversations on science and faith.

“It’s hard not to take part in the culture war right now,” she admits. But “I’m a voice for some sort of middle ground, a voice for both sides grappling with each other and coexisting.”

The month after Joan Walsh appeared on Tucker Carlson, the Pentagon agreed to release the full archive of Abu Ghraib photos requested by the ACLU – affirming, Walsh believes, Salon original decision, for which she was so heavily criticized six weeks earlier.

And looking ahead?

“I don’t think about life after Salon, I really don’t,” Walsh laughs. “I have a big sense of urgency about making a difference, both in terms of the news business and also the world we’re in. So it just seems like the perfect place to be!”