Bloggy Dylan Stableford is leaving Mediabistro's Fishbowl NY after a year and a half. Sniff! He's going back to his old company in Connecticut to do all sorts of secret Folio web things. His replacements are former Gridskipper contributor Neal Ungerleider and Corsair blogger Ron Mwangaguhunga, who, at least according to his highly-regular Facebook status updates, has been really wanting the job for some time now! Well congrats, big guy! In other MB musical chairs, new TV Newser Chris Ariens got stuck with Dylan's other responsibility as managing editor of the entire site. It's worth noting that this is Mediabistro's fifth staff departure (that we know of!) since March. Does the boa have fleas? The full text of Dylan's farewell email follows. We'd like to see that uneven tan, please!

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What do you get for $23 million? If you spent it on Mediabistro, you got delightful videos like this, in which a freelancer named Joel Silverstein pitches a story to Esquire articles editor David Katz. Young Joel, a recent New York transplant, has a new girlfriend, and is anxious about having to get tested for HIV with her— you know, dealing with his generation's "shared fear of contracting HIV/AIDS." And he would write a story about it!

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.

"Meet the new TVNewser: Chris Ariens, a 37 year-old former MSNBC producer who currently lives in Hoboken with his dog Nibbles** and enjoys long walks on the Jersey shore. **Okay. Fine. We made up the part about Nibbles in an effort to make him seem more wholesome and family-oriented." [Jossip]

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.

Mediabistro's offering Yoga for Writers. "Give your writing practice a jump-start by reconnecting with your creative muscles." Hmm, are those the ones between the anus and scrotum or the ones in the back of the throat? We always get confused.

Philadelphia Inquirer TV writer Gail Shister reportedly applied to be write the TVNewser blog on Mediabistro, but "several bloggers yesterday doubted Media Bistro [sic] would be able to come close to Shister's current six-figure salary." Welcome to the internets. Also, Laurel Touby might not want to be pimping her job applicants. Discretion much? [Philadelphia Daily News]

Now that 21-year-old Brian Stelter has gone off to become a thorn in Bill Carter's side at the New York Times, Mediabistro's looking for a new blogger to take his place on TVNewser. (Bonus: You get to work from "Soho, Baby, NY"!) What type of person are they looking for? Well, let's just say that if Mediabistro media blogger Dylan Stableford thinks he's getting someone from the Wall Street Journal to take the gig, then things at the WSJ must be worse than we thought.

Dorian Benkoil, the former editorial director of Mediabistro, is serving out his last month on the job, whatever that job is. Hey, he lasted like 7 or 8 months longer than the 6 months we predicted! So we thought we'd take a look at his resume and see what he has to offer this beautiful world of new media.

• Wal-Mart is really, really sorry that they taped a Times reporter's calls. They don't want you to think they're Hewlett-Packard or anything. [NYT]
  

Mediabistro is looking for a last-minute sub for Greg Lichtenberg's class tonight, if you're not doing anything. Greg's an Iowa grad who's had his writing published in the Times magazine, Fence, and Dragonfire, so you'll have some big shoes to fill.

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:

At a gathering for 49 Nobel Prize winners in 1962, President Kennedy remarked that "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." All well and good, but this January 29th will see the greatest assemblage of magazine genius ever gathered together in the same room - with the possible exception of when Art Cooper had that fatal meal with Dave Zinczenko. That's right, it's MediaBistro's "Editors on Truth Serum — The New Rules of Success Now," a panel discussion at Chinatown Brasserie, starring such luminaries as Tom Foster (Men's Journal), Brandon Holley (Jane), Stacy Morrison (Redbook), Susie Schulz (CosmoGirl!), Richard Story (Departures), and Jake "Shake 'n Bake" Weisberg (Slate). As 'bistro Boa-in-Chief Laurel Touby puts it,

A couple of items of bad news today for various imprints of Simon and Schuster. The more important one is that Valerie Plame's book probably won't contain much of anything interesting after the CIA Publication Review Board gets through with it; possibly endangering her big fat book deal, which had already fallen through once elsewhere before S&S scooped it up. And Galleycat reports that at Touchstone, another S&S imprint, the Sobol Awards book will be scuttled after bad word of mouth (like ours, for example) soured everyone on the idea of the pay-to-play literary contest. S&S, we know that recent publishing firings have left some big cloven hooves to fill. But let's let this stuff be a lesson, shall we? Okay, now we're getting down off our high horse and going back to scouring the internet for celebrity crotch shots.

Writer's Block: Valerie Plame Vs. The CIA [Newsweek]
Bad Word of Mouth Kills Sobol Prize [Galleycat]
Earlier: Literary Contest Winners to Be Published, Screwed

The enormous scandale of media/actual whore Jessica Cutler's refusal to appear as scheduled at a Mediabistro panel next Monday made it to Page Six today. The mature professionals at Mediabistro, possibly upset at losing the only real blog-to-book success story on their panel (sorry, overhyped Julie/Julia) reacted to Cutler's cancellation by reminding the public that she is "someone known for exchanging sex for money," thus saving possible panel attendants the $20 they would have paid to learn "How Bloggers Get Book Deals."

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?

You've got to love an item that reports the possibility of a sale with "said to be" in the headline, but there you have it: AdAge.com is reporting that Mediabistro may be on the block, according to "several people familiar with the discussions."

Expect to see Laurel Touby sell MediaBistro any day now that there's empirical evidence of its success: Finally someone who shelled out $400 for one of its seminars actually got published. Sure, it's an essay in Newsweek, the magazine you read when someone else at your podiatrist's has already grabbed S.I., but no matter: For one student, at least, MediaBistro gets results.

It's come to our attention that one of Mediabistro's ever-helpful panels may not be selling too well, the irony being that for once, it seemed like a not-horrid event. Rather than learning how to pitch AutoWeek, this event was a gathering of mildly interesting journos-cum-writers to talk about making the change from magazine whore to book whore. Just a thought, but if the arguably unboring gatherings aren't selling, could it be the first, tiny sign of the death of the media panel? And if so, how long until Michael Wolff keels over?

Valleywag provides party crash info for educational purposes only. We are not responsible for crashers getting kicked out of this Mediabistro bash for being non-media or just uncool. With that in mind, check out this leaked invitation. Experts say this media-resource company knows how to party.