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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.

The NYT leads with: "Laurel Touby turned her popular cocktail parties into a high-traffic Web site for job-seeking media and creative professionals. Yesterday, she sold Mediabistro.com, the company that sprang from those mixers, for $23 million." Which sounds a lot like how entrepreneur Nick Denton made the millions he later used to build blog network Gawker Media (publisher of Valleywag). Denton co-founded First Tuesday, a series of social gatherings that became a social network in the 90s. I'll let him analyze the meaning of history repeating. Later today: Reactions from the one person I know who used to work for Mediabistro; and how company founder Laurel Touby just made millions from her parties while dot-com columnist Courtney Pulitzer failed to do the same with her "Cocktails with Courtney" events.