At Michael’s the other day, I had lunch with Laurel Touby, the perky impresario of Mediabistro.com, the Web site that many reporters, editors, and the like click on to daily to check out the latest press happenings as well as scout out job openings, enroll in career-enhancing courses, and find out about the many parties the Web site hosts.

Currently the site has 750,000 members. “We’re not Google,” Ms. Touby said. “And we don’t want to be. Look, we don’t want teachers in Iowa on the site. But 750,000 media professionals – isn’t that pretty impressive?”

Mediabistro has been Ms. Touby’s baby for a long, long time. She started it informally as a social network in the early 1990s when she was a freelance writer. “I was lonely,” she said, “and I realized that there was no place for media types to get together so I started hosting parties. That wasn’t easy for me because I’m shy, but I just pretended I was like my grandmother, who was a Southern belle. And I found out that when I was playing a Southern belle I was good at hosting and getting media people together.” Over the years, her informal gatherings slowly evolved into a profitable multifaceted Internet business.

Now Ms. Touby says her site is entering an important new phase. That’s why we were joined at lunch by Mediabistro’s new editor in chief, Elizabeth Spiers, who was the original editor of the gossip siteGawker.com. Ms. Spiers is credited with establishing that site’s witty, one might say, downright snarky, tone.

Ms. Spiers started at Mediabistro.com in October after leaving New York Magazine, where she had edited the Intelligencer column. Ms. Touby and Ms. Spiers said that the Mediabistro site will be redesigned in the next few weeks with much more emphasis on editorial content.

“When I joined Mediabistro I noticed that Laurel’s business card said something like Mediabistro – parties, jobs, courses,” Ms. Spiers said, showing their brand-new business card that now lists “news” first in the menu. “We want people to go onto the site not once but several times a day and keep reading because there will be so much of interest on it,” Ms. Touby said.

In the next few weeks there will also be more links to a variety of blogs. Currently Mediabistro is linked to a blog on cable news, written, Ms. Touby said, by “a teenager who is absolutely obsessed by cable television and is always getting big scoops,” and one on publishing, called “Galley Cat.” Ms. Spiers will also write a daily gossip column.

Ms. Touby recently made news herself when her marriage to Advertising Age’s magazine reporter Jon Fine was featured in the New York Times’s Vows column. They married in December and spent a month on a honeymoon in New Zealand.

Do she and her new husband talk about media all the time? “Yes, absolutely. But if we have a big scoop I will not be telling Jon,” she said. Ms. Spiers agreed, smiling sweetly “We will be trying to drive Jon into the ground.”

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News flash: Yes, sex still sells. At least to the young brainiacs on the University of Chicago campus. A new student-produced, sex-themed magazine has turned out to be, excuse the pun, a very hot seller. Called “Vita Exscolatur,” which is Latin for “life enrichment,” the publication includes a photo spread of a topless student reading Sigmund Freud’s “Ego and the Id” and another photo essay of homosexual couples entitled “Love in the Stacks,” which was shot inside the university’s Regenstein Library.

Staffer Mollie Kazan, 19, said the magazine’s aim is to get the school’s very serious students to open up a bit. “Sex gets so intellectualized here, it’s ridiculous. You just can’t have a lighthearted conversation about it.” Ms. Kazan and the magazine’s editor, Sida Xiong, 22, are currently soliciting nominations for the “sexiest” teaching assistant on campus for the February issue. In the first issue there were also some serious pieces on sexually transmitted diseases and an advice column about one-night stands.

Ms. Xiong said the twice-quarterly magazine’s budget is around $2,500 and comes from the university’s student activity fund.

Has Bill O’Reilly heard about that?

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But, hey, it’s not only students who are interested in sex education. In March be prepared for a new highly informative magazine called “$pread” (and, yes, that dollar sign’s part of the title), which is for and about workers in the sex industry. According to Mary Christmas – don’t bother asking if that’s her given name – who came up with the idea, “We want to publish something that gets read by sex workers and the general public. The idea is to make $pread more attractive than your typical indie magazine. Women who work part-time in a massage parlor are more likely to pick it up if it looks like a fashion magazine, as opposed to some rag at a small anarchist bookstore,” she said.

The first issue includes features on women of color in the pornography industry, negative effects of the anti-trafficking laws on European prostitution, and a report on an AIDS conference in Thailand. Plus – how else can I put this? – “service pieces,” such as advice on “Sex Worker Burnout.” The first issue is slated to mail March 15.

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Also saw my friend Richard Stolley the other week on the day that Elvis Presley would have turned 70. Mr. Stolley, who was the launch editor of People Magazine, acknowledged that he may have made one of the worst decisions in magazine history the week Elvis died: He didn’t put The King on the cover, instead going with little-known British comic actor Marty Feldman. No surprise, the magazine’s sales tanked. “I should have been fired,” Mr. Stolley admitted.

But then Mr. Stolley was the Life magazine reporter in Dallas when JFK was shot and snagged probably the most famous home movie ever shot, the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. Mr. Stolley, during his long career, was also the editor of Life and still consults for Time Inc.

Time Inc.’s corporate editor, Isolde Motley, who has overseen several of the company’s most successful new launches including Real Simple, the magazine that last year increased its circulation more than any other title, recently shared Mr. Stolley’s “Six Stages of Magazine Development. (With apologies to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. ) First: It’s Exultation, Second: Disenchantment; Third: Confusion, Fourth: Search for the Guilty; Fifth: Punishment for the Innocent: And then Sixth : Distinction for the Uninvolved!”