Amanda was laid off from a magazine job, and now has to scrape by as a wage slave blogger in Laurel Touby's empire—where she's reportedly paid one third her previous salary. Meanwhile, Laurel Touby and her husband are taking a few months off right now just to travel around the world, doing whatever they like. Hm.

Under these circumstances, it's probably okay you didn't get a chance to shout out Fishbowl NY, Amanda. Good luck out there.

Brazilian newspaper O Globo: What is it even talking about? The paper says "It's war!" because the New Yorker published an article this week about Rio's hellacious favela violence—right when the city's trying to get the Olympics. Conspiracy, clearly! Hey O Globo, the whole "It's war!" thing is what they were talking about. Duh.


We missed this yesterday: Mediabistro millionairess Laurel Touby's exit interview. "Exit" meaning, "She's taking a grand worldwide vacation for a few months, whatever, she's already rich." Laurel sez, "People are constantly asking me for personal advice or one-on-one help, and I've thought for a long time that if I just write it in a book it will be very helpful for entrepreneurs." Just don't take advice about email from her.


Yesterday was the NYT's annual "State of the Times" thing where the big execs stand up and tell the staff what the hell's going on and answer some questions. We hear it was boring. No final decisions yet on how the paper will go forward with its inevitable paid online content move. But Pinch Sulzberger did, allegedly, get off one funny line. Yea, video or it didn't happen.



Rachel Sklar is all mad because stupid Capitol File magazine headlined a story about Diane Sawyer, "Woman on Top."
Women. Geez.

If you know what he was talking about, it wouldn't be David Lynch's Twitter stream.

Laurel Touby, blog millionaire, finally tried blogging, and found it difficult. Does anyone have a boa we might hang ourselves with? (Via @Choire)

Sasha Pasulka, gossip blogger and Jew, has had it with JDate's taunting. Over Yom Kippur, that is.

The Huffington Post's Jason Links just doesn't feel about The Pianist the way he did about the Naked Gun trilogy.

The Huffington Post's entertainment section, meanwhile, just so happens to have a Roman Polanski photo gallery scheduled to publish, according to the lead of the linked article.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Touby said at the time that she earned somewhere between $9-11 million after taxes from the sale of the lightly-trafficked mish-mash of message boards and blogs she founded years before. Shortly after the sale was complete the Times reported that she "remains determined to buy a Manhattan loft apartment, which will consume half her money, and must still earn $100,000 a year to maintain it." Two years later, she finally got it!

Reports the Observer:

According to city records, (Touby) just closed on a $3,905,000 penthouse loft at 43 East 19th Street. According to a listing, the 4,100-square-foot full-floor loft, in a 101-year-old limestone building, has four-sided views, three "grand Egg & Dart columns," three bedrooms, and "sole recreational use of the roof."

Laurel Touby, you are an evil genius and we genuflect at your wacky altar, now and forever.

Laurel Touby Closes on $3.9 M. Penthouse Loft [Observer]

Laurel Touby became a middle class millionaire after selling Mediabistro for $23 million two years ago today; now, she's officially free of the corporate yoke. She's a consultant (for Mediabistro). Despite everything we've ever said, Laurel Touby is clearly smarter than all of us.

A Boston Globe update! Haven't had one of those in a while. Newsroom union members are voting on their new package of cutbacks on Monday, after rejecting it last time, then deciding that wasn't so great after all. The alternative is the current 23% pay cut. But the outcome of the vote still seems unpredictable. Oh, Boston Globe. We don't envy you.

David Carr's profile of crazy-but-connected Hollywood blog supremo Nikki Finke makes the front page of the New York Times today, but not even the paper of record can turn up a new photo of Nikki. "Why is there only one Nikki Finke photo?" is Hollywood's greatest mystery.

Oh look some sort of cable news 'ad war' thing: CNN is running ads that say it's ""No. 1, with more viewers than Fox and MSNBC."

This came as a news flash to Fox and MSNBC, considering that both top CNN in the ratings. During the second quarter, Fox News — which has been handily beating CNN since January 2002 — more than doubled CNN's audience in prime time and for the entire day. Even MSNBC, a onetime also-ran in the cable news wars, topped CNN in weekday prime-time ratings for the first time in the second quarter.

At issue is the metric that CNN is using in the advertisement to back its claim. The cable news channel is attributing its No. 1 status to a cumulative number that reflects anyone who watched CNN for six minutes in a given month, a tidbit it chose not to disclose in the ad.

Why not just say you are less fucking stupid than the competition, CNN?

Boa-bedecked media horror Laurel Touby was stymied in her real-estate quest by husband Jon Fine's raging metrosexuality.

Bicoastal tech execuwrangler Brooke Hammerling outed Gawker alumnus Lockhart Steele as a non-porn star.


TechPresident blog blowhard Micah Sifry waxed Foucauldian.

Brazen divorcist Penelope Trunk contemplated barter.

Technology Review Twitterer-in-chief Jason Pontin thought about the poor, but only for 140 characters.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Barbara Walters gushed over View colleagues. (She loves Sherri, but not enough to know how her name is spelled!)


E! News anchorlady Giuliana Rancic got into a Twitterfight with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush over gay marriage.

Boa-laden media horror Laurel Touby interviewed a recruiter about her bus.

Former Engadget editor Ryan Block coped with San Francisco's hipster heatwave.

Wired editor Adam Rogers fed the hand that bit him.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

What is the Semantic Web? Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, came up with the notion in 2001 as a followup to his hypertext creation. After "Web 2.0" became synonymous with cool kids hanging out at Mission Wi-Fi cafes putting rounded corners on websites, people adopted "Web 3.0" as a name for the Semantic Web movement. Business 2.0 attempted an explanation a few years ago:

[The Web is] basically a compendium of billions of text documents designed to be read by humans. You can search it for keywords, but the results aren't much use until you sort through them to find the page that has the info you want.

To take the Web to the next level — to move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 — the information in those documents will have to be turned into data that a machine can read and evaluate on its own. Only then will computers be able to take over tasks we now do by hand: find the nearest restaurant, book the best flight, buy the cheapest CD.

What does this have to do with Alan Meckler, you ask? Absolutely nothing! But we're sure he will come up with some cheaply produced website staffed by talentless hacks to write drivel about it.

(Video still via Beet.tv)

There are two pictures, just posted on Facebook. One is a portrait of the gloriously becoiffed future media queen (sans boa, in these days), the other a cross section of college dorm life. Two shirtless, lean young men, louche on a bed. Two permed, and fully clothed women sit upright. The girl on the inside is Touby, we believe. These were taken at Smith college in Northampton, MA sometime around 1981.

This is something of a Part Two to our The Way We Were series. We'd like to keep it going! Have any old media heyday photos lying around? Send them over! We'd like to compile something of yearbook, to remember how the world used to be before the internet, like a mad and glowing Pied Piper, led us all to ruin.

The caption on this is both priceless and sad: "After slumber party in Laurel and I's room. Don't ask me what happened that night. I spent the night in a friend's room. Anne Laufe was going to nearby Mt. Holyoke at the time. I can't remember the guy's names, Laurel?"

Laurel Touby's assistant. Who will tie your boa now, Laurel? Time to put those middle-class millionaire skills to work.

If the assistant was responsible for keeping Laurel's mass emails under control, expect trouble soon.

[Additional details or denials here. JupiterMedia changed its name to WebMediaBrands last month.]

UPDATE: The 60 layoffs are confirmed. Silicon Alley Insider has the staff memo from CEO Alan Meckler. MB-related highlight:

Specifics on our business: we have witnessed firsthand the huge decline in revenue with the Mediabistro job board numbers. This powerful and vibrant business used to run paid listings for 200 plus jobs a day. Presently the number is significantly lower. Advertising, the lifeblood of Internet.com, has declined markedly in the recent quarter. Event registrations have been weakening. Our biggest gain has been in the online "learn" area and in overall traffic growth across all of our communities (Graphics.com, Internet.com and Mediabistro). Growth in traffic bodes well for the company. Once the economy turns neutral and then positive, greater traffic will equal big revenue growth.

The New Yorker was Conde Nast's biggest ad page loser last year, and now their publisher is leaving! Drew Schutte came to the NYer last year from Wired—now he's leaving to be "chief revenue officer" of Conde Nast Digital. He's being replaced by Lisa Hughes, publisher of Conde Nast Traveler. Which did better than the New Yorker last year. Needless to say. [NYP]


Last fall Time Out NY had some trouble paying its bills, but fearless president Alison "you can sign my name to that" Tocci assured staff that they'd pull through the tough times. Today, we hear, Tocci announced a new 5% across the board pay cut at a staff meeting. Allow our shamefully anonymous tipster to take up the story there:

[She said it's the] only way, they've done every single cutback possible and had instituted a hiring freeze. We were then invited to a pizza party — do you know how much money 50 large pizzas with toppings must cost? This is a week after they proudly sent an allstaff e-mail announcing their annual sponsorship of yet another NYAMBL bowling team, because god forbid we don't get back against Rachel Ray's team.

Oh, and that hiring freeze? Not ten minutes before she brought it up, she had introduced our ten new hires to everyone.

But she did so while using her real name, presumably. So cut her some slack.

Whoa, Philly Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky, whoa! "Should Google 'pick up' (steal) our stuff, if we successfully sued them for $1 billion, two good things happen: 1) Our money problems are solved; 2) everyone else will stop stealing our content." And should Stu Bykofsky suddenly shit gold, his money problems would be solved as well. Whoa now.


Some dude from Tennessee wants to buy the six-paper Creative Loafing chain of alt-weeklies for $13.3 million. Sell. Sellsellsell! Quickly!

Finally, Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby is Twittering LIVE from the high-powered TED conference. What can you tell us, Laurel?

Thanks, Laurel.

Sure, private planes were always an easy target. They're incredibly expensive, they're luxurious to an offensive degree, and they destroy our precious, precious ozone layer warm our planet till everything dies for the comfort of the rich. Plus, as commercial airline travel got more and more terrible and inconvenient, the average person's desire for the rich to share in that pain grew.

But now it's on a whole other level. Private jets are now resented, merely for existing! You could see the issue taking shape when there was the big outcry over the GM executives flying private to Washington to ask for bailout money. And now the new consensus seems to be: if your crappy failure of a company got any bailout funds from taxpayers, riding in a private jet for anything but the strictest business reason is a PR disaster.

The Post slammed Citigroup exec Sandy Weill this weekend for charging the company to fly him and his family to a Mexican resort for Christmas. Today, he's swearing off jets, just like that!

Weill used the jet to fly him and his family to the One & Only Palmilla beachfront resort in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico, where they stayed from Dec. 26 through Jan. 3. The cost of using the plane was estimated at $70,550 to $90,550.

The jaunt came just weeks after Citigroup, which has lost $28.2 billion over the past five quarter, avoided total collapse with a $45 billion federal bailout, courtesy of taxpayers.

What a bastard! But what's coming is not just anger at abuse of private jets; soon it will be taboo for business people to ride a private plane for any reason. With all the layoffs and stupid corporate recession cutbacks, it will just be considered unconscionable. What kind of capitalist monster could blithely go burning thousands of gallons of jet fuel just so they don't have to associate with the unwashed masses?

The whole thing is worse than an under-rehearsed church Nativity play. One of the people to hop on Laurel's lap is the CEO of Jupiter Networks, which as a company today sports a market cap of $17 million, well under the $23 million they paid to buy the freelancer-helping website in 2007. We don't think he's joking about what he'd really like from Laurel.

Julia Allison, fameball extraordinaire
Dominant themes: Sex, famous people, faux-exhaustion

Laurel Touby, founder of Mediabistro
Dominant themes: Uninteresting media minutiae, uninteresting life minutiae

John Dickerson, Slate political writer
Dominant themes: His kids, pithy self-deprecation, Twitter itself

Jennifer 8 Lee, NYT trend specialist
Dominant themes: Food

Bonnie Fuller, former US Weekly editor, currently only vaguely employed
Dominant theme: Sad, Jackie Harvey-like simulacrum of the editorial content of an actual celebrity magazine

This video, "How Do I Got from Model to Model Journalist?" costs $15 FOR A SIXTEEN-MINUTES. Laurel, that's the phone-sex model of making money, not the "freelancer-helping" one.


Meanwhile, Fishbowl NY, one of their blogs, is posting insane predictions that there are still media jobs left. Yeah, well, let us know! Of course it's in their interest to lead us to think that. Don't forget, MediaBistro was purchased by Jupiter last year for $23 million. Jupiter's stock's been down, and there's an earn-out clause in Touby's contract—is MediaBistro trying to bleed the flock for more cash from desperate newbie freelancers?

Okay, I am officially a procrastinator. I got asked to speak at this National Writers' Workshop Conference down in Florida. The Topic: Best Practices in Freelancing.

The speech is coming up THIS WEEKEND and it occurred to me that I haven't freelanced in...let's just say many moons — voice mail existed, but email barely did!! So, I need your advice, my dear assigning editors and freelancers, on the best practices today. Your responses are anonymous and we'll publish a useful article after compiling all the results.

ASSIGNING EDITORS SURVEY, click here.

FREELANCERS SURVEY, click here.

If you would rather privately email me, feel free at LaurelT ATTTTT mediabistro DOTTTTT Com

Thanks so much for your help!

Laurel Touby
founder
mediabistro.com

This, she actually posted on FishbowlDC. I guess the fact that she didn't email 2,000 people is progress.

A year ago, the boa-sporting Touby sold Mediabistro.com for $23 million. But lots of other people had smaller stakes in that company, so Touby walked off with a significantly smaller amount of cash than the total purchase price. She can't even afford to move out of her sixth-floor walkup! Meanwhile, Levy can now afford to buy as many Daily Candy-endorsed trinkets as she wants, forever until the end of time and beyond.

Still, Touby and Levy are the two most cash-rich media-centric internet entrepreneurs NYC has thus far produced. And they're both women! Is that notable? Not yet, but if Arianna Huffington decides to sell the HuffingtonPost for an ungodly sum and turn Republican again, it will make three, and an official trend. Until that time it means nothing.

[More about Levy's privileged family background at CityFile]