http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/...ml?hpid=z3
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Kate Michael answers the door to her top-floor co-op wearing pre-party sweatpants and flip-flops, yet somehow managing to look like the beauty queen she once was. Her purple T-shirt has a crown splashed across the front, and she’s in full makeup, her deep brown eyes expertly lined and painted in shades of plum.
The former Miss D.C. — and current writer, model and local cable talk-show host — even has a schedule like a pageant champion’s. On this night in late March, she’ll appear at Zaytinya restaurant’s Greek Easter celebration in Chinatown, the Pink Tie Party at the Renaissance Downtown Hotel and something called Emerald Spring at Erwin Gomez’s Karma salon in the West End.
As the editor of the online K Street Magazine, Michael, who goes by the moniker “K Street Kate” when she’s not referring to herself as a “D.C. Darling” or “Concierge of Cool,” will run the party gantlet in high heels, with a clutch in one hand and camera in the other. Snapping photos left and right, she’ll document her evening — the people, the food and, in the case of the Gomez event, the free manicure — and post the results on her Web site, where the party recaps will address the curiosity of invitation-less readers, give exposure to those captivating enough to be caught on film, and provide publicity for the cause or business the parties are being held to promote.
But first she has to pick out an outfit. Michael, who is 31 and has long, dark, shiny hair, heads to her dressing area, a narrow hallway between the living room and bathroom of the Foggy Bottom studio apartment, which has a Murphy bed and sweeping views of the Watergate. “I have two closets,” she says. “One is just for cocktail and evening gowns.” The other, stuffed with outdated business suits and more casual items, is rarely entered. During the day, Michael is usually dressed in other people’s clothes, promoting designers such as Oscar de la Renta while parading around Tysons Galleria for $75 an hour, or donning wedding gowns as a fit model for David’s Bridal in Philadelphia.
“I’ll get a gazillion e-mails a day from people asking me to do things. I try and do three things a day and do the best three things.” Kate Michael
Flipping through an impressive amount of glitz, Michael considers wearing the obvious to the Pink Tie Party before deciding to buck the trend. She settles on a bottle-green Elizabeth and James dress so short it appears as if she has forgotten her pants.
“If everyone is wearing pink,” she reasons, “I want to stand out.” That will be easy to do in the four-inch heels she straps on, which make her a neck-craning 6-foot-2.
Negotiating all the places to go and people to see over the course of just a few hours will be harder. For that purpose, Michael sets the alarm on her iPhone to sound at intervals, reminding her to move from one party to another.
“I’ll get a gazillion e-mails a day from people asking me to do things,” she says, swiping on more blush. “I try and do three things a day and do the best three things.” Because this particular Wednesday night features more than three parties, she’ll dispatch a small team of K Street bloggers to cover what she considers the lesser events, including a benefit for veterans and a happy hour for an organization that fights multiple sclerosis.
Michael says she decides which invitations she’ll personally accept based on “who the VIPs in attendance are, who’s giving a keynote, who can I get a quote from.”
“No one cares about some Joe Schmo at a fundraiser for breast cancer,” she adds with what seems like completely unintentional glibness.
Kate Michael is one of a small crew of Washington women who — through eponymous blogs and sheer force of will — are working hard to establish themselves as social leaders and influencers, a band of Zeligs in stilettos who pop up in the middle of Washington’s inextricably linked social, charitable and professional circles armed with nothing but a palm-size camera and an unabashed desire to mix business with pleasure.
If you’re still scratching your head about what she does, allow Michael to explain, in a voice-over for a Cadillac advertisement that has run locally on a handful of social Web sites. “People ask me all kinds of questions. ...” she says from behind the wheel of the 2013 Cadillac ATS she was paid to test-drive for a day, her hair whipping in the wind. “I get, ‘Where should my girlfriend and I go to dinner tonight?’ ‘What movie should I watch?’ I answer every single one of them, and I think in order to answer them authentically, I actually have to live that life.” It’s a life she lives every night of the week. Although she would never acknowledge it, Michael’s competitors in the social and virtual worlds include Pamela Sorensen, who has a similar Web site called Pamela’s Punch, and Andrea Rodgers, whose site, Ask Miss A, has the tagline “Charity Meets Style.”
While several newer sites, with names such as Guest of a Guest and B----es Who Brunch, have arrived at the party, Michael, Sorensen and Rodgers are generally acknowledged to be among the first to document Washington’s boldfacers on the Web: Sorensen and Michael started in 2006; Rodgers in 2008, as an offshoot of earlier Web writing.
“They pioneered the idea of social news and saw the potential of providing insights into D.C.’s charitable and social scene on the Internet long before anyone else did,” says Daniel Swartz, founder and self-proclaimed “lifestyle architect”of Revamp, a party pic site he began four years ago. “How do you insert yourself into that world?” he asks self-reflectively. “Well, you take pictures.”
It was a game changer, says Kevin Chaffee, senior editor of Washington Life Magazine, a party-photo-packed glossy that was joined on the scene by Capitol File and DC Modern Luxury in the mid-2000s. “You have a computer, you have a cellphone to take your pictures, and voila! You have a magazine.”
Kate Michael is editor of K Street Magazine. Kate Michael is editor of K Street Magazine.
Pamela Sorensen’s blog is Pamela's Punch. Pamela Sorensen’s blog is Pamela's Punch.
Andrea Rodgers’s Web site is Ask Miss A. Andrea Rodgers’s Web site is Ask Miss A.
The parties Michael and her competitors cover feature a modern-day cafe society of ballplayers, boutique owners, DJs, high-end stylists, local TV anchors, restaurateurs, club promoters and professional pretty people. It’s a crowd several rungs below the elite dinner-party milieu of senators, diplomats and A-list pundits that outsiders consider to be real “Washington society.” Yet Washington is a town obsessed with power, and according to Linda Roth Conte, president of public relations and marketing firm Linda Roth Associates, the bloggers have a new one: “Their power is they know what’s cool.”
Of course, power also comes from followers and influence, factors that in this case are difficult to measure. As of press time, Website Outlook, an online analytic site, estimated that K Street Magazine gets an average of 326 page views a day; Pamela’s Punch, 682; and Ask Miss A, which has a presence in 21 cities, 5,351.
Rodgers, who prefers to be called a publisher, also had the most Twitter followers, 18,604. Michael, who prefers to be called a writer, had 8,799, and Sorensen, who is fine with being called a blogger, 6,926.(People are stymied when asked how to refer to the women, who have been described as “media mavens,” “socialites” and “blog-ebrities.”)
Then there’s each woman’s Klout score, a number compiled using proprietary algorithms, with 100 being the Justin Bieber-level pinnacle. The three bloggers come in close, somewhere around 60, which is considered the tipping point for influence. It was Michael’s Klout score that brought her to the attention of Cadillac, and it is perhaps the Klout scores, as well as the women’s sociability, attractiveness and style, that makes them perennials on many Washington invitation lists.
Roth Conte often invites Michael and Sorensen to functions promoting her clients’ businesses. When asked what the women could do to make her stop inviting them, she quipped: “Move.”
None of the bloggers can support herself from her Web site; each has a day job, or three. (All are single; Sorensen and Rodgers are divorced; Michael is dating Michael Andrews, a bespoke clothier based in Manhattan.) But their goal, speculates Barbara Martin, a principal in the public relations firm BrandLinkDC, goes beyond self-sufficiency. “They all want the glory of Graydon Carter,” Martin says, referring to the longtime editor of Vanity Fair. “They all want to be considered the premier social Web site.