In the continuing vein of using this blog solely as a press release for myself, I feel compelled to link to the official statement that I'm leaving my job as editor-in-chief of mediabistro to finish a novel I just sold and do some writing that isn't about media. My contract was up November 1 anyway and I figured, easier now than a few months later.
But it's been a great year. We did a crash 90-day redesign on almost zero budget that left the site with 40% less orange and 600% more blog. And you can see the effects here:
I should add that I'm incredibly proud of the mb bloggers who are working hard to make sure that trend continues. Thanks to TVNewser's Brian Stelter, FishbowlNY's Rachel Sklar, FishbowlDC's Garrett Graff and Patrick Gavin, mbToolbox's Claire Zulkey, UnBeige's Eva Hagberg, FishbowlLA's Mike Sonnenschein and Claude Brodesseur, Galleycat's Ron Hogan and Sarah Weinman and our indefatigable media news editor/blogger, David Hirschman. Thanks also to writer/reporter Greg Lindsay, Associate Editor Aileen Gallagher, and our regular contributors (Rachel Bussel and Jesse Kornbluth, especially). Thanks also to the rest of the mb staff for aiding and abetting--and among the latter, in particular, mb CEO Laurel Touby and publisher Kyle Crafton for luring me away from NY mag in the first place. If you were in New York during the dot com boom, you can understand why mb's profitability and continued growth under Laurel's leadership is significant, and Kyle is, hands down, one of the best managers I've ever worked with.
Looking back, this is the bio that went up on the site the day after I arrived: "Elizabeth started at mediabistro.com on November 1, 2004, having celebrated Halloween the night before by dressing as New York Times reporter Judy Miller (short bob wig, handcuffs and a can of Raid labeled "precursor element")—a costume symptomatic of her frightening and near-pathological obsession with media. Armed with site redesign mockups, back issues of SPY, and an annotated copy of Graydon Carter's last book proposal, she came to mb from New York magazine, where she was a contributing writer and edited the magazine's Intelligencer column."
The Judy Miller handcuffs were, I suppose, unintentionally prescient.
Posted by espiers at October 17, 2005 12:13 AM