By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 22, 2007; C01

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."

"She can be kind of outrageous," Crafton says. "She's always saying the first thing that comes into her head and not filtering anything out. Sometimes that makes your jaw drop a little bit. Some people find that brashness off-putting or unprofessional, but a lot of people appreciated it because it livened things up."

When Touby arrived in Manhattan in the 1980s, after moving from Miami, she found herself in a "soul-killing" job at a major advertising agency. She wanted to be a writer and gradually began contributing to such magazines as New York, Glamour, Redbook and Business Week.

Touby threw her first party in 1994, viewing such gatherings as "miserable, wretched places to be if you're alone and don't know anybody." She constantly circulated, forcing people to mingle, in part because "I have no small talk. I can't do it. I'm kind of intense."

Touby may be "secretly shy," as she puts it, but after the parties, held at various bars, "I was high. It was magical. I also had a secret agenda, which was to meet guys. I was lonely. I didn't want to meet a banker, they're so boring."

Soon the self-described "no-name girl" had a growing list of media staffers and began an e-mail newsletter that by 1997 morphed into a Web site of job listings and apartment vacancies. Touby heard that a man named Craig Newmark was doing the same thing in San Francisco and they flirted with a partnership that never came to pass. "I could have been Laurel's List, if only I hadn't focused on media. I'm so bummed out," she says.

In 1999 Touby asked her readers to contribute $100, and quickly amassed $4,500. With the dot-com boom in full force, she got $250,000 in backing from Marty Peretz, then the New Republic's owner, and $750,000 from Gotham Partners. When Crafton was hired in 2002, he found her business acumen wanting -- "she never knew how much cash she had in the bank" -- but felt she was a creative force.

(Touby also met her future husband, Business Week writer Jon Fine, that year --at a business conference, naturally.)

Cash flow, as it turned out, was not a problem. The site turned profitable in 2003 and began adding blogs.

In recent days, Bistro blogs have reported that the ex-roommate of New York Observer writer Michael Calderone streaked nude across Manhattan; that Slate and Salon advice columnists received the same fake letter; that blogger Jeff Jarvis has been having an e-mail feud with New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney; that CosmoGIRL was having readers interview Tina Fey; and that Dan Abrams had hired a new producer for his MSNBC show.

"It's a very cliquey community; it really is a club, that Gang of 500," says Patrick Gavin, who writes Fishbowl DC. "You want to know the stories behind these people and the gossip behind them." And with 15 to 20 updates a day, he says, "blogs are a huge boredom-killer for people."

But blogs are not necessarily moneymakers. As Touby says, Web-surfers often "go to a site with a lot of widgets and gadgets and after awhile they drift away to the next hot thing." That's why the pushy party-giver sees her site as a Facebook-style social network. Journalists, she proclaims, "are part of my extended family."

It took 17 months, but the New York Times Magazine has finally admitted that one of its columnists was unfair to Tim Russert.

As reported in this space last year, the NBC Washington bureau chief complained about a Q&A interview conducted by Deborah Solomon for Mother's Day. Russert said he talked at length about his late mother but that Solomon ran two questions together and left out a long answer, making it look like he was dodging queries about his mom. Solomon said at the time she was surprised that Russert "would feel so wounded" by a "gentle" interview.

Now, after similar complaints by two other Solomon subjects, Times Magazine Editor Gerald Marzorati says Russert's complaint was "more or less justified." And Solomon now says: "I made a mistake not putting in what he said about his mother."

Both made the admissions to Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt, who wrote that editors erred by not acknowledging the mistake. Marzorati and Solomon did not respond to requests for comment. Says Russert: "As my mom would say, better late than never."

Marzorati was quoted as saying that the Q&A feature "is an entertainment, not a newsmaker interview on 'Meet the Press.' " But Hoyt reported that the order of each interview is sometimes altered and the wording of questions changed. Worse, Solomon acknowledged that early in her tenure she sometimes inserted questions retroactively, but says she has dropped the practice.

Inserting questions that were never asked into what is presented as a verbatim conversation? At some news organizations, that would be a firing offense.