Happy 10th Birthday, Web Creature
Some of you have been with me in this venture since 1994, when Russ Baker and I started hosting the very first community cocktail parties for media professionals. You may even have been at Jules Bistro before I was wearing feather boas to identify myself in the crowd. That's because there was no crowd. In the early days, just 10 or 20 editors and writers showed up for some after-work camaraderie.

How could an innocent little cocktail party evolve into a Web site and a business where hundreds of thousands of people find daily delight? People ask this question a lot, as well as "Laurel, can you believe what you created?"

I have to say no, I cannot believe what WE (that is you and every other media person out there) created, I wake up in disbelief every day, because the business was forming and evolving over the course of many years. This crazy party-turned-job-board-news-and-education community Web site arose out of a series of small decisions made, life choices, disasters averted, and even sheer banalities...

Shall we add a job board or just have bulletin boards?
Do I work from home or raise capital so I can rent an office and hire people?
How do we ever get back to work after 9/11?
Charmin in the bathroom or the 100 percent recycled kind?

Thousands of seemingly trivial decisions strung together with some luck, by excellent staffers (not to mention writers, hosts, bloggers, volunteers, and interns!), combined with my vision for an engaging community web site, are what slowly evolved into the mediabistro.com that is there now.

Today, we are marking the day that the Web Site itself launched. In all honesty, we aren't actually sure of its actual birthday. It was sometime around 1996 or 1997, we know that. It was a directory on another Web site and the URL was http://www.goldennnyc.com/pressclub. The second iteration of the site was www.HireMinds.com, launched sometime around 1999. And mediabistro.com (Adrian, I'm ever-indebted to you for the name!) was registered by March of 2000, when I got $1,000,000 in funding to expand it.

In the beginning, the site was a casual affair, with a bulletin board, a resources page, an event listing page and, of course, The Job Board. Every day now, the site morphs. Thanks to our truly amazing staff (both past and present), our tireless bloggers, our unsung Party Hosts (in 22 cities!), our interns and volunteers world-wide, this thing continues to grow wildly.

I'm always stunned by the sheer number of our offerings. Bear with me as I cite these figures. I know, I know, I'm like a mom pulling out baby pictures, except my snapshots are data points:

700,000+ registered users
7,000,000 page views/month

1,600 hundred and growing Media Jobs

162 In-Person Classes
54 Online Classes
22+ Videos On Demand

22 AvantGuild offerings
12,000 AG members

1,100 Freelance Marketplace members

10 Industry Blogs (AgencySpy, FishbowlDC, FishbowlLA, FishbowlNY, GalleyCat, MobileMediaNews, PRNewser, ToolBox, TVNewser, Unbeige)

In the end though, none of these numbers would matter if an important element of the site weren't there. You. Without you, the site is meaningless, just one big zero. You are its life force. It is a refraction of your dreams, your wishes, your wants.

So, for our 10th Anniversary, it is appropriate that we honor you — the people in the media community who give us our reason to exist. Since we couldn't hand out 700,000 awards, we have asked you to select people from the 10 media disciplines we serve to accept your award: 10 among you, 10 who matter, 10 who committed their lives to media and have made a difference to those around them. The honorees for our first annual Golden Boa Awards are:

2007 Golden Boa Honorees
Advertising — Scott Goodson, StrawberryFrog
Book Publishing — Jane Friedman, President & CEO, HarperCollins Worldwide
Design — Luke Hayman, Partner, Pentagram
Photography — Tyler Hicks
Interactive — Craig Newmark, Craigslist
Magazine — Adam Moss, Editor-in-Chief, New York
Newspaper — Dean Baquet, Washington Bureau Chief, The New York Times
Public Relations — Ken Sunshine, Sunshine, Sachs & Associates
Radio — Adam Davidson, Correspondent, International Business and Economics, NPR
Television — Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report

If you've read all the way down to the end of my note, thanks for sticking with me. (I know it's long.) So, here's a treat. Because it's our 10th Birthday, we are offering $10 Amazon coupons if you join or renew your AvantGuild membership!

Click here for details on that. Go on, try it out. You owe it to yourself to be truly a part of the AvantGuild community.

Love and hugs everyone,

Laurel
PS — If you want to write in and send your remembrances of the early days, I'll post them here. Send a note to FromLaurel AT mediabistro Dot Com