Proceeds from last night's New York's Funniest Reporter competition, of which I was a judge, went to benefit Operation Uplink, which helps our servicemen and women keep in touch with their families back home. I reminded myself of this many, many times in order to keep from bolting for the door. Pictured above: the lowest point of my life.
Mediabistro, the little $23-million media company that could, is turning 10! So they're throwing themselves a party tonight, with a special extra: The Golden Boa Awards, which recognizes 10 media stars from "from within the 10 verticals that mediabistro.com serves," according to the press release. Mmm, verticals. Each lucky honoree will go home tonight with an actual bronzed feather boa—provided, that is, that they show up—in honor of nutty genius and former owner and for-now senior vice president Laurel Touby. But which of these 10 "media stars" might you see if you crash?
There's been a ton of buzz—much of it envy-laden—about Laurel Touby in media circles since the $23-million sale of MediaBistro to Jupitermedia was announced last week. Writing in New York, Simon Dumenco thinks the jealousy is misplaced: Touby is actually some kind of mercantile Mensan.
Yesterday, we noticed a column by Mediabistro queen and new millionaire Laurel Touby's dad, Frank Touby, from something called The Bulletin, which is up in Torontonia, in Greater Canadia. We called it "a great lunch read"—it's about how gay newspapers are pimping in the flesh trade. Apparently Frank did not appreciate our praise, and has written to let us know how much he does not appreciate it!
A woman with a boa and a dream and a bad laugh has emerged from the hubbub of the internet triumphant. "The kids at Gawker are going to go crazy tomorrow," predicted LA Observed last night. Well, yes. We are. Like, we might have to be put in protective custody. For Mediabistro, everyone's favorite amalgamation of freelancer message boards and half-hearted blogs, which gets 50,000 unique visitors a month, has been acquired for $23 million by Jupitermedia. (That's $38 for each person who came to their website last year!) We don't know what to say except: Wow. Holy hell, wow. There's something really wrong with the economy. I guess we have to say congratulations to Laurel. It seems like if we had any brains at all we would have done that ourselves.
Jupitermedia (owners of photo provider Jupiterimages and a fleet of websites) just bought Mediabistro, a site for media professionals that includes specialized job ads, articles, and insider media news, for $23 million. Mediabistro's a small service — exceedingly small, with some 50,000 unique visitors a month I can't even remember why I made this obvious error; Mediabistro gets six million pageviews a month. — but one well known in the journalist scene. And it's apparently more familiar to those at the Gray Lady than new parent company Jupitermedia. Contrary to the New York Times report, the company hasn't owned JupiterResearch for years. A more ironic divestiture, given the purchase of Mediabistro: Having sold tech jobs board Dice.com in 2005 for $200 million, Jupitermedia is now buying its way back into the recruiting business, adding Mediabistro's media-job listings to its JustTechJobs website.
Not only did they suffer the indignity of actually, you know, applying to do Laurel Touby's dirty work, but then they had to be reminded of it in a mass patronizing e-mail she sent out to rejectees. Oh, the indignity:
A spy at the Web 2.0 conference currently going on in San Francisco reports that Her Boaness Laurel Touby has sent her minions from Mediabistro (publisher Kyle Crafton and CTO Omer Algar) to quietly scope out the possibilities of getting—get this—$25 million for what's basically a glorified classifieds section/Learning Annex knockoff. Of course, this isn't the first time Laurel's put her company on the block. Come to think of it, is Mediabistro ever not on the block?
From: Gupte, Pranay
To: New York Sun Editor
Sent: Tuesday, June 13 2006
Subject: Potential profile?
A "reader" writes:
Because we are all victim to the whims of our masters, Mediabistro's bookish blog Galleycat has given publisher Laurel Touby access to their Movable Type. At first, it seems that she's writing an honest defense of Kaavya Viswanathan: "I, too, suffer from a form of selective memory." Right — she runs a networking company, but never remembers people's names. But then we continued reading and realized that we were actually dealing with Laurel's special brand of humor:
As it turns out, the chemistry isn't so much there. We're guessing that's mostly DZ's fault; he comes off as too sane for Touby when he eschews his "fit is the new rich" greatest hits. The highlights we're left with, then, is Laurel's tough questioning. "What's your title and what do you do at Men's Health?" "How many readers are reading Men's Health all over the country?" "Do you actually sit down with copy at a certain point of the day or night and read through every signle article that goes into Men's Health?"
From the Lens column in today's Metro section:
Actually, it's less horrible than we were led to believe it would be. It's awkward, sure, and uncomfortable, and weirdly fawning and banal, but we'd have expected all that. We don't quite see what made it, as we're told it was, both the start and the end of Laurel's Channel 25 career. Public access is fickle mistresss.
Spotted outside of Ford Field: Mediabisto.com founder and closet Steelers fan Laurel Touby.
