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Who

Touby is the founder of Mediabistro.com, which she sold off for a pretty penny in July 2007. She still refers to herself a "cyberhostess" despite the fact that no one else has used the prefix "cyber" in half a decade.

Backstory

A former staffer at Working Woman, BusinessWeek and Glamour, the Miami native says she came up with the idea for Mediabistro in 1993 when she hosted a party for fellow gig-hungry freelancers at Jules Bistro in the East Village. By 1997, she'd officially set up the site, using it to organize booze-and-schmooze sessions for low-level media professionals across the country. During the dotcom bonanza, Mediabistro landed some seed capital (from the New Republic's Marty Peretz and the investment fund Gotham Partners) and expanded with a slew of Learning Annex-like classes. Touby also launched a successful job board, which has since become popular with media companies looking to find junior writers, editors and producers. In 2005, Mediabistro added blogging to the mix when it launched two media-centric sites (FishbowlLA and FishbowlNY) as well as TVNewser, GalleyCat, and unBeige. The company's latest initiative is an "on-demand" video library where users pay $15 for the privilege of watching 15-minute instructional videos on such brain-taxing subjects as how to post on Wikipedia.

Of note

Following years of false alarms, Touby unloaded MediaBistro in July 2007 to Alan Meckler's JupiterMedia for $23 million. The owner of 62 percent of the company, Touby walked away with a $12.4 million cut. She's remained at the company since the acquisition, now serving as a senior vice president of JupiterMedia.

The look

Joking about the feather boas Touby wears to all Mediabistro functions just never gets old for bloggers. She also always wears eyeglasses with either red or pink frames.

Personal

Touby is married to BusinessWeek media columnist Jon Fine. In 2009, the couple paid $3.905 million for a 4,100-square-foot penthouse on East 19th Street.

True story

In 2005, when Touby met Mayor Bloomberg at a party at the home of Time editor Jim Kelly, she didn't recognize the media titan/billionaire. After introducing himself and shaking her hand, Touby kindly asked the mayor to repeat his name again since she didn't catch it the first time.