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Jeremy Greenfield & Courtney Barnes
CEO/Cyberhostess, Mediabistro
It started as an informal cocktail party, a way for media boys and girls to meet and maybe mate. Today, what was basically an excuse to drink and flirt—don’t we seem to come up with a lot of those in media?—is now a media juggernaut, with a Web site, job boards, classes, insurance plans, and, of course, countless parties. This year, Touby's assault on traditional forms of media recruiting, networking, and reporting (the daily feed and Fishbowl blogs) was validated as a smart (and profitable) enterprise when she sold the company to Alan Meckler’s Jupitermedia for $23 million. Only several months into the ownership, it’s hard to say what Meckler and Touby will accomplish together, but if past progress is any indication, we'll all be getting Mediabistro party invites, reading the feed and the blogs, and recruiting our next crop of hot editors from the site for a long time.
- 1994: Touby meets Russ Baker. Together, they plan their first informal get-together and called it a “media salon.” Ten people show up to Jules Bistro on St. Marks in Manhattan for the first party. Twenty show up to the next one. Soon, the party outgrew its location and had to be moved to Flamingo East on 2nd and 13th.
- “Our not-so-hidden agenda was to potentially find media mates.”
- 1996: Touby starts using e-mail to send out party invites after two years of sending postcards, faxes and making phone calls. Popularity of the “salons” increased after The New York Times wrote a glowing piece on them; The New York Observer came out with a negative piece at the same time, calling the parties “Unvicious Circles,” referring to the movie “Vicious Circles” (about Dorothy Parker running salons for New York’s literati at The Algonquin hotel).
- “They wrote about how it was less of a ‘media salon’ and more of a pickup joint.”
- 1997: “Why not have a Web site where people from the party could meet up? Really, it was one of the first social networks.” First name, not so catchy: GoldenNYC.com/pressclub.
- 1999: The party grew out of its digs again and had to move to a new URL, HireMinds.com. At this point, Touby started asking for donations if customers were happy with the service provided by the job listings. Thousands of dollars started coming in, and Touby quit her writing jobs to spend more time on the business. Then she was sued.
- “As I was pulling together my business plan, I got sued by this guy who had paid a marketing firm to think of a name for him for a headhunting company. Even though I was using the domain name, he trademarked the name before I did. He offered to buy the name, and I said no, so he sued me. I eventually sold him the domain name with the proviso that I would get to point the domain to Mediabistro.com for six months.”
- 2000: Mediabistro got funding from Marty Peretz and Bill Ackman: $1,000,000—half up-front and the other half dependant on milestones.
- “In March of 2000, I started hiring people and executing my business plan. I had so many big ideas. Who knew how much we could get done? We wanted to offer freelancers nationwide health insurance. We wanted to get discounts for LexisNexis. And some things were surprising, like that we could sell premium content. The classes and seminars also turned out to be a big business, and I would never have guessed.”
- 2001/2002: These were dark years for media, and especially for Web-based businesses.
- “I always believed in the business, but when my money started to dwindle in 2001, I was scared. When 9/11 hit, I almost closed the business. I thought, ‘What’s the point? How can we have a party after this?’ What made me continue was my investor. He was so goddamn tough. He said, ‘Wake up! What’s your problem? We’re just going to continue business as we always do.’ I took a lot of strength from that.”
- 2004: Touby and BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine marry on December 5 after meeting at the AMC conference—notably, not a Mediabistro party.
- 2007: Touby sells Mediabistro to Jupitermedia for $23 million after almost a year of sale rumors.
mInsight
Touby's problem meeting men at her own parties wasn't as ironic as it seemed. According to Touby, men were afraid to date her lest they not be invited to any other Mediabistro parties, "the source of all women," according to Touby.
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