After Hours   

Think journalists know how to party? Prove it. And cut down on the high-minded political news talk. This shindig is for drinks, chats, fun and, OK, more than a few business card exchanges.

Your hostess is Laurel Touby, or a like-minded protégé, who will make sure you're introduced to other party-goers and having a good time. Touby runs mediabistro.com, a site whose main attraction is its journalism job listings, but whose beginnings and offline draw are in monthly bar gatherings for media and publishing types.

In 1994, Touby, a lonely New York freelancer who wrote a careers column for Glamour, and another freelance writer threw a party to make more media friends. Twenty people showed up. Touby kept hostessing and people kept coming. Now, she presides over monthly cash-bar cocktail parties in New York and has recently launched similar soirees in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Washington, D.C.

"I like to say I'm aggressively friendly," Touby says. And her gregarious nature led to a business. Touby, who says she's in her mid-30s, became a good point person for employers and prospective employees in need. "The parties turned me into a centrifugal force," she says. "People would call me up as if I were a resource center."

In 1997, she turned her fun side project into a job by founding HireMinds.com and enabling job seekers and givers to find each other. (She later changed the name to mediabistro.com)

Like any good dotcom must, she's secured funding--about $1 million from investor Gotham Partners and New Republic Editor in Chief and Chairman Marty Peretz. ("I think it's going to make money, and it's going to be fun besides," Peretz says.) And she's in the black, thanks to the $150-a-pop job listings, Touby says.

With the newfound capital, she's taking her party show on the road, setting up regular gatherings in major metros across the country, and eventually, in other cities abroad.

For her Washington party debut in July, Touby's intriguing and spirited e-mail invites lured about 120 or so media types--from the Associated Press, Washingtonian, National Geographic, Washington Times, various D.C. newsletters--to the back half of a funky coffee bar in the city's hip Adams Morgan section.

Touby showed her D.C. counterpart, freelancer Sacha Cohen, the ropes. Cohen, 31, who writes a column for Kiplinger.com, is being paid by mediabistro to throw the Washington get-togethers. "The key here is to make sure that everyone feels comfortable, that no one is standing around by themselves...act as an old-fashioned hostess," she says.

Most attendees said they came because they got an e-mail and thought, "Sure. Why not?" It was a happy hour for soon-to-be friends or contacts. "What I like is that you're kind of pre-certified," says Fred Frommer, a staff writer for the AP. "You can talk to anybody, and they don't think you're weird."

Near the end of the night Cohen chastised me for not having a drink in my hand. Who ever thought this could be part of a profitable Web business plan?