NO DEGREES OF SEPARATION
Working and Partying -- It's All in the Media Mix

BY LINDSAY FABER

A lunch date at Michael's, the media hotspot at 24 West Fifty-fifth Street. On this day the reservation list includes Arthur Taylor, formerly of CBS; Peter Price, of Avenue Magazine; Glenda Bailey, of Marie Claire; Michael Davies of ABC; Owen Lister, the literary agent; Michael Wolff, the New York media columnist; John Tisch, owner of the Regency Hotel; and Heather Cohane, of Hamptons Magazine, among others. And this is only one day.

On his way in, Price stops off at Tisch's table to say hello, and on his way out, Tisch stops off at Bailey's table to bid her a friendly goodbye. At Michael's, the tables are spaced with just enough distance between them to afford each meeting a little privacy. Still, it is almost guaranteed that you will run into a media acquaintance or a connection over your medium-rare skirt steak and sparkling water.

But Michael's (or Elaine's, for dinner) is only a foot in the door. The real elite has to pick among weekly invitations to functions like magazine anniversaries, film openings, book parties, or a Tina Brown gala. James Goodale's October party at the Four Seasons is a good example. The party, thrown by his wife, Toni Goodale, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the PBS series The Digital Age, which Goodale hosts, is like a networking, name-dropping nirvana. Roaming the crowd in the Grill Room under the thousands of balloons dangling from the ceiling -- amidst the chicken satay and pâté -- are, to name a few, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Brokaw, Morley Safer, Howell Raines, Kevin Buckley, Peter Osnos, Walter Isaacson, and Kofi Annan.

There they are: Osnos chatting with Buckley, Arthur Sulzberger chatting with Tom Brokaw, Victor Navasky chatting with Lillian Ross. Betsy Gotbaum, head of the New York Historical Society, is speaking freely about how Liz Smith's column in the New York Post is "a wonderful place to be." Conversation carries on over scallops and Schnapps. At moments, the circles overlap, trading one member for another.

"Did you read my story yesterday?" Somebody asks. "Quite good" is the answer.

In the New York media playground, the line between business and pleasure is a fine one. Members of the media do business at these parties. They say there is a culture in today's media world that suggests the need to be a player. "There's a lot of chumminess," concedes Joe Ferrer, executive editor of Time. "These days, I don't think you can afford to be insular. Today, if you want to publish a successful magazine, you need to have other people be aware of it."

Patrick McMullan of New York magazine agrees: "I've introduced business deals many times because I know who the players are. I've literally said, 'Person A meet Person B' because one of them could benefit from the other -- like if someone has a book coming out and the other is the editor of a major magazine, for instance."

Not everyone thinks this tight social system is a wonderful thing. "The people who hang out together in that elitist group have the smoothest cheeks in the world because they kiss each other so much," says Don Forst, editor-in-chief of The Village Voice. "They all read the same papers, they all endorse each other's books and they all think they're wonderful."

Still, they work hard at playing. A senior writer who covers the media for a major newspaper says these parties are all about business: "I usually look over the invitations to these parties and see who is coming, and I think to myself, 'Hmmm, I have questions to ask five or six of these people. If I go to the party, I can get what I need.' I don't think anyone comes to these things without intentions." Reese Schonfeld, one of the founders of CNN, says he can do more business "in one lunch hour than I could do in a month at the office."

This social culture, meanwhile, is a commercial force, and nobody knows more about employing it than Peggy Siegal, a fifty-something public relations princess who looks as glamorous as the people she entertains. She is paid by the major film companies to publicize the latest movies -- to create buzz. And the way she does it is with screening parties, and with a list of potential guests that includes nearly every famous face in this city -- from actors to newscasters. Her list includes roughly 1,000 members of the New York media establishment, divided into "On Cam" (to designate those on television) and "Media Elite" (though she notes that some are in both). And her categories have subcategories. "I'm supposed to screen Quills for the literati and the media elite," she said in November. "But there's a clear difference between them. The media elite have much more of an immediate impact on society. The literati are like an intellectual boutique of the media elite."

Siegal knows exactly who the partygoers are and who the homebodies are. "My latest friends are the guys on CNBC's Squawk Box," she says. "They want to make the scene and they're doing it. Suddenly these guys are opinion-makers."

She says she realized several years ago that the media were worth inviting to glamorized events: "I picked up on this idea of the media elite early on. I needed to fill parties with faces, and since we don't have many movie stars who live here, I convinced the L.A. studios it was important to have these media elite attend our events. The studios hire me to get faces -- I need faces -- and actors don't show up for someone else's movie. So I get news people. And not only are these faces smart, but they go back to their own audiences and talk about what they've seen."

Siegal traces the rise of the media elite to the onset of the information age, when e-mail, fax machines, and the Internet became assets. "There was a tremendous shift in social status in the city. As information became a commodity, great fortunes were being made. Those who delivered information started to become very important."

Lindsay Faber is a student at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. .