MediaBistro Media Network Makeover Case Study

ARTICLE SNIPPET - Laurel Touby started MediaBistro in 1997 in the dot-com heyday with the goal of creating a community for journalists. "We weren't really sure how we were going to make money," she confesses, "we just wanted to bring media people together." While this may not sound like an auspicious mission for a profitable business, MediaBistro has developed some very profitable income streams, all of which flow from this community, and all of which provide content models easily adopted by traditional publishers.

One of the first initiatives the fledgling New York-based MediaBistro mounted was organizing no-host, after-work parties for journalists at local watering holes. It posted invitations on its website and waited to see if anyone would show. "As I look back on it," jokes Touby, "I organized these parties mostly because I wanted to meet boys." (Several years later, Touby married a journalist she met not at one of MediaBistro's parties, but at a journalism convention.)

Mixing dot-com sensibilities with traditional publishing plays, MediaBistro grows a profitable, high-visibility online business. It also turned out to be a perfect example of a website that could potentially better serve its users by spinning off into a Mequoda Website Network.

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