I was born in 1970 in Oakland, California, and grew up in the small town of Sonora, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada about 100 miles due east of San Francisco. A tiny former mining town in the "Gold Country," a place once swarming with gold prospectors. I graduated from Sonora High School in 1988 and left for college.
I attended Revelle College at the University of California, San Diego (an excellent university more famous for its giant fiberglass chicken, the Sun God) from 1988 through 1992, and was editor in chief of the UCSD Guardian newspaper. (I also wrote a lot of fiction.) I graduated with a B.A. in Communication, and then spent a summer writing daily news stories for Sonora's Union Democrat newspaper. Then I headed off to attend the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley from 1992 through 1994, where I earned a Master's degree.
During the summer between my first and second year at Cal, I was an intern at MacUser magazine. That fall I started freelancing for MacUser, and was hired on full-time in January of '94. When MacUser merged with Macworld in 1997, I made the move to the new magazine. Through a series of accidents and horrible errors in managerial judgment, I became editor in chief and later editorial director.
Jason Snell
Jason Snell is editorial director at Mac Publishing, publishers of Macworld magazine and numerous tech-related web sites. His projects outside of work include TeeVee, a well-reviewed television site; Idiots Write About Sports, a sports weblog; and the now-mothballed InterText, one of the first online fiction magazines, which published from 1991 to 2004. He lives in Mill Valley, California, with his wife and two children.
Photo (right): Jason, Julian, Lauren, and Jamie aboard the ms Westerdam in St. Petersburg, Russia, July 4, 2005.
Photo (below): Jason and Julian, February 2005.
