Party Girl Makes It Big

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 22, 2007 10:41 AM

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 Media Bistro, where the moneymaking 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 Jupiter Media 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 Media Bistro," 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 tight-fisted 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, the 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 clique-y 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."

Creative Writing

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 that 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.

All right -- how did the Republicans fare in last night's debate?

"Bashing each other's conservative credentials," says the Miami Herald, "eight Republican presidential candidates met for the first time on a Florida stage in a prime-time Sunday debate that gave them a launching pad for crowd-pleasing shots at Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton . . .

" 'Gov. Romney, you've been spending the last year trying to fool people about your record,' said McCain, referring to Romney's changed positions on abortion and gay rights. 'I don't want you to start fooling them about mine.'

"The Arizona senator got the only standing ovation of the night when he referred to his Vietnam War imprisonment, quipping that he was 'tied up' during Woodstock.

"Giuliani hit Thompson, a former Tennessee senator, calling him 'the single biggest obstacle' to legislation that would make it harder to sue businesses and doctors.

"Thompson came back at Giuliani, ticking off liberal stances he took as New York City mayor to promote gun control and keep city officials from reporting illegal immigrants seeking social services. 'He simply sides with Hillary Clinton on each of these issues I mentioned,' Thompson said."

USA Today's take: "Republican presidential candidates seeking support in the pivotal state of Florida clashed Sunday over one of their party's most basic questions: Who is the most conservative?

"Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee cited their conservative executive experience, while John McCain and Fred Thompson touted conservative Senate voting records -- and all took shots at the presumed Democratic frontrunner.

" 'We're not going to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House by acting like Hillary Clinton,' Romney said during a 90-minute debate at a golf resort near Disney World."

I bet the Red Sox drew more viewers in beating the Indians to return to the World Series.

The New York Times says Hillary is cooperating with Matt Drudge -- and makes it sound like a character flaw:

"As Senator Barack Obama prepared to give a major speech on Iraq one morning a few weeks ago, a flashing red-siren alert went up on the Drudge Report Web site. It read, 'Queen of the Quarter: Hillary Crushes Obama in Surprise Fund-Raising Surge,' and, '$27 Million, Sources Tell Drudge Report.'

"Within minutes, the Drudge site had injected Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's fund-raising success into the day's political news on the Internet and cable television. It did not halt coverage of Mr. Obama's speech or his criticism of her vote to authorize the war in 2002, but along the front lines of the campaign -- the hourly, intensely fought effort to capture the news cycle or deny ownership of it to the other side -- it was a telling assault.

"Mrs. Clinton's aides declined to discuss how the Drudge Report got access to her latest fund-raising figures nearly 20 minutes before the official announcement went to supporters. But it was a prime example of a development that has surprised much of the political world: Mrs. Clinton is learning to play nice with the Drudge Report and the powerful, elusive and conservative-leaning man behind it.

"That man, Matt Drudge, came to national prominence a decade ago as a nemesis of the Clintons who used the Web to peddle, gleefully, the latest news and rumor generated by the Monica Lewinsky scandal."

Here's yet another piece on how Hillary was shaped by the sixties:

"If elected," says the Boston Globe, "Clinton would be the first president from the great postwar middle class who grew up around large cities -- a background so unlike the multigenerational wealth of the Bush family or the struggling small-town Southern world of the young Bill Clinton . . .

"Now, as she campaigns around the country, Clinton is speaking more often about her upbringing in Park Ridge, the suburban Chicago enclave to which her conservative parents moved when she was 3. . . . Both liberal supporters and conservative critics have questioned the notion of Clinton as a paragon of Midwestern values. Some conservatives see it as an election-year conversion to woo moderates. Some liberals see it as a betrayal of their ideals, especially on national-security issues."

But can she win?

"The question of electability is often tied up in a candidate's likability," says the Chicago Tribune, "and in Clinton's case, it could also be an alternative way of asking whether a woman can be elected president. It is a loosely defined but fundamentally important part of the formula for a winning candidate.

" 'I think there's no doubt that she carries some significant baggage,' said David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, adding that her high negative ratings would only get worse in a general election. 'I guess water sometimes runs upstream, but the history of presidential politics is not that people go in and reduce their unfavorables. That's not the way it works.'

"David Bonior, Edwards' campaign manager, said Republicans will 'unload on her' in a general election, dredging up 'the personal stuff.' . . .

"However, Clinton campaign officials say Obama and Edwards are losing the so-called electability argument, as poll after poll shows the New York senator beating not just them, but each of the Republican candidates."

There's been a whole spate of stories slamming Obama as too timid, but few as harsh as this American Spectator piece by Quin Hillyer:

"If Barack Obama really wants to be president, then he's acting like a gutless wonder. The same goes for John Edwards and Joe Biden and Bill Richardson and everybody else in the Democratic field. If they really wanted to be president, then when they look at the polls and realize that Hillary Clinton is leaving them in her dust, they would vow to stop her with every fair and accurate tool at their disposal -- and the beauty is, they would legitimately be able to tell themselves they are doing it to save the United States from somebody so corrupt that she is 'unfit for elective office.'

"Those are the words of the (very) liberal New York Observer in a 2001 editorial. Ultra-liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert added that Hillary's husband Bill Clinton 'is so thoroughly corrupt it is frightening.' It is, of course, almost impossible to separate Bill from Hillary in this regard, because their careers are so intertwined and because so many of the corruptions in Clinton's past specifically involved projects on which Hillary was actively involved."

Hillary obviously has some baggage, but I doubt that dredging up Bill scandals is going to work. I mean, it's not exactly new information.

Do media companies try to buy good press? Check out what the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Rob Owen calls the "Indecent Proposal of the Week":

" ABC is broadcasting 'The 41st Annual CMA Awards' Nov. 7 live from the Sommet Center in Nashville and we have some extra tickets we'd love to give away to your readers! We can offer 2-4 tickets at great viewing seating, retail value $350. It'd be great for a posting on your publication or online Web site. Requirement: a feature about the CMA Awards that mentions the giveaway and tune in to the 'The 41st Annual CMA Awards' on ABC Nov. 7 (8-11 p.m.)--ABC Media Relations

"My editor and I both received this blatant attempt at quid pro quo product placement. Needless to say, we did not respond, but, boy, the TV folks will do anything for some ink."

In case you missed it yesterday, here's Marvin Kalb's review of my book "Reality Show."

And the very Web site you are reading is now No. 2 among newspaper sites, edging out USA Today.