Journalism Morsels Make for Profitable Dish at This Bistro

The Manhattan soirees that Laurel Touby began throwing in the mid-1990s, where she would frantically introduce media people while sporting a feather boa, had some tangible results, she says:

"Five marriages, three babies -- one out of wedlock -- and countless one-night stands."

Oh, and a business that recently brought her a $12 million payday.

Touby is the founder of Mediabistro.com, and she credits its success to the "navel-gazing" nature of the news business: "We make celebrities out of media people. You take regular Joes and turn them into celebrities by writing about them. Once you've made someone's colleague in the next cubicle into a rock star, they want to be a rock star. It's the mediocritization of the media."

The Web site's blogs -- TV Newser, Fishbowl DC (and NY and LA), Galley Cat (about the publishing industry) -- offer a mix of real-time scooplets, gossip, interviews, snark and itty-bitty items of conceivable interest only to those who work at a particular company or are related to someone who does.

But they are the fudge desserts of Mediabistro, where the money-making main course consists of workshops and seminars, offered in cities from New York and Washington to Los Angeles and San Francisco. These, along with job listings and such features as "How to Pitch Geek Monthly," have attracted 13,000 subscribers at $49 a year. And the site draws 949,000 visitors a month, according to Nielsen Net Ratings.

The jerry-built contraption became a cash machine, and Jupitermedia Corp. bought the site in July for $20 million in cash, 62 percent of which went to Touby as the principal owner.

What accounts for its success in an online marketplace bursting with media gossip and criticism? True, some of its bloggers, who operate without editors, occasionally allow unnamed tipsters to take potshots at their rivals. But there is none of the razor-sharp slashing and merciless mocking that define other sites. "Our tone is one of warmth and camaraderie and not nasty backbiting," Touby says. "We can be arch, but we're not making fun of people."

Touby, 44, who calls strangers "honey," clearly has an eye for talent. "I owe my career to Mediabistro," says Rachel Sklar, now media editor of the Huffington Post. "Nobody knew who the hell I was." A Canadian lawyer who moved to Manhattan for a career change, Sklar took a course called "Boot Camp for Journalists," got an item published in the New York Times and became the Fishbowl NY columnist.

Touby, a diminutive woman in plum-colored glasses, can also be a grating and tightfisted boss, and her contributors have sometimes been refused reimbursement even for $10 taxi rides. Jesse Oxfeld, now with New York magazine, says Touby once told him he wasn't licking envelopes correctly.

"I found her incredibly difficult to work for," Oxfeld says. "All the things that are exactly what's needed to build a successful business made her difficult. She's so focused on doing what she wants to do, even if it looks overbearing to other people."

Kyle Crafton, Touby's former chief financial officer, says she was "this tornado of new ideas," some of them good but most "really crazy."