Disney, which has been busy reorganizing its interactive group, is buying Babble Media, a New York-based parenting platform that features several hundred mom bloggers.

The entertainment giant declined to provide the purchase price for the New York-based start-up, which was founded by aiming at urban hipster parents and has garnered more than $6 million in funding since it was spun off from Nerve Media several years ago.

Babble’s venture investors include Greycroft Partners, Village Ventures and iNovia Capital.

Co-founders Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman and the rest of the 40-person Babble staff will join the Disney Interactive Media Group unit as part of its Moms and Family portfolio, Disney said in its official press release (see below).

Disney described Babble as the “premier blogging platform for a new generation of connected parents.” To me, that roughly translates into Brooklyn-living, Bugaboo-pushing, organic arugula-eating, yoga-calm moms and sensitive New Age dads.

But don’t take my word for it — today’s front page features on Babble include “15 Vegan Recipes for Thanksgiving” and “Is It Selfish to Have One Child?” (Yum and kinda!)

The next obvious stop for its audience, after the kids get a little bigger: Gwyneth Paltrow’s fabulously twee and irksomely addictive GOOP.

But Brooke Chaffin, who is SVP of Moms and Family in the Disney Interactive Media Group, said in an interview that the highly interactive content site with a definite “sophisticated” editorial voice has become mainstream, and is actually where the whole category is going.

“Babble is sharing the experience and stories on a daily basis through the parents lens,” she said. “And it brings in a blog network that is so important to this audience, because it’s by, for and about parents, and that’s far more important for them than experts.”

There will be that, too, said Chaffin, who noted the site has grown 100 percent year over year. It is now up to four million unique monthly visitors.

Disney plans to add its more evergreen family-focused content to Babble, to give it more heft to compete with other similar parenting sites, such as Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, NBC’s iVillage, Parents.com and CafeMom.

Interestingly, Disney had taken a gander at buying CafeMom a while back.

Chaffin, who came to Disney earlier this year after a stint at Auditude and a long time at Yahoo, said Babble has carved out a unique niche in combining content with social — the current gold ring for a lot of publishers.

“What Babble is doing is best of breed … it is just a different approach to blogging,” she said. “It felt like we at Disney are about storytelling and Babble does an amazing job doing just that.”

Added Jimmy Pitaro, co-President of Disney Interactive Media Group: “Disney has a long legacy of storytelling, and no mom-blog platform empowers storytelling better or more powerfully than Babble. Babble is a strategic complement to our Moms and Family portfolio of sites, which together make up a business that is critical to Disney Interactive’s mission of delivering world-class products and content and growing engagement among our guests.”

In other words: Mainstream and hipster!

Here’s the Disney official press release:

THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY ACQUIRES LEADING ONLINE PARENTING PLATFORM BABBLE MEDIA, INC.

Burbank, California — November 14, 2011 — The Walt Disney Company, through its wholly owned subsidiary Disney Online, has acquired Babble Media, Inc., a leading online parenting platform featuring more than 200 influential mom bloggers. The acquisition of Babble further strengthens the position of Disney Interactive Media Group’s Moms and Family portfolio as a leading online resource for moms and families.

Disney Interactive’s Moms and Family portfolio is a trusted resource for parents today, giving them the online tools and information they need and the ability to share their experiences. Through the acquisition of Babble, Disney Interactive’s Moms and Family business gains a blogging platform that elevates the first-person stories of parenthood.

Since its inception in 2006, Babble has become one of the most celebrated parenting sites on the web, named by Time Magazine as one of the 50 Best Websites of 2010 and by Forbes as one of the Top 100 Websites for Women. Its stable of bloggers contribute daily to parenting topics including pregnancy, child care, health, food, family activities as well as lifestyle topics such as home, fashion and family products. As the premier blogging platform for a new generation of connected parents, Babble has created a vibrant community of parents who support, encourage and celebrate the highs and lows of raising children.

Babble attracts a broad and engaged audience with its nearly constant stream of posts, written for and by moms. Disney Interactive will infuse its Moms and Family evergreen content into Babble, thereby enriching the Babble user experience and extending the best of what Disney has to offer to today’s parents.

“Parents’ relationships with Disney are founded in stories, and Disney’s best stories are about families. We believe that Babble and Disney can harness the power of storytelling to inform, entertain and empower parents everywhere,” said Brooke Chaffin, SVP of Moms and Family, Disney Interactive Media Group. “With more than 3.9 million mom blogs in the US alone, Disney Interactive recognizes and values the important and powerful role moms have taken on in new media.”

“We can’t imagine a better next step than joining the world’s leading media company for families, The Walt Disney Company, and look forward to bringing together Babble’s resonant voice and community with Disney’s expansive family audience, wide range of content and multi-media platform,” said Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman, Co-Founders of Babble.

Babble will remain headquartered in New York. Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman will join the Disney Interactive Media Group.

There it was again–like the gnarly ghost of Christmas past–in the Los Angeles Times this week. But this time Lloyd Braun wasn’t going to take it anymore.

The object of his ire was dropped right in the middle of a blog post on how Yahoo was “reversing its Hollywoodification” with–egads–no more reserved parking spaces for top execs at its Santa Monica offices.

The Times said the new rule “signals a stark new era of austerity that overshadows the elimination of the last vestiges of the corporate culture war spurred by the hiring of former Warner Bros. chieftain Terry Semel and ABC’s Braun.”

Knock, knock, L.A. Times! Because that war is actually still raging at Yahoo (YHOO)–although the parking spaces carry little symbolic weight anymore at the company, which has much bigger problems to solve these days.

But even more unusually, the piece also abruptly dropped in old allegations the newspaper had included in a devastating story in November of 2005 by Chris Gaither about Braun and Yahoo’s media push at the time, titled “Can Yahoo Sign on to Hollywood?”

It was noted in the post as an aside:

(Braun also converted a conference room with a patio into his personal office and requested a corporate jet for the Santa Monica office. Oh, and there was the time he reportedly took an umbrella without paying for it from the Yahoo store on a rainy day and then asked the clerk who requested payment: ‘Do you know who I am?’ He later explained that he just wanted to make sure the clerk knew he was good for it. But we digress).”

Digress is right, because it turns out, the bulk of those juicy anecdotes about him in the new blog post and the old story actually don’t check out, after extensive reporting BoomTown had done previously and this week too, talking to a range of key execs at the company at the time.

Thus, when I saw the Times post this week, I contacted Braun (pictured here) and sent him the link. He quickly responded via email:

“I am not an umbrella thief–and I promise I never will be. I never once asked for a corporate jet. I was and continue to be a big fan of Southwest Airlines. And I certainly never engaged in any kind of office construction while at Yahoo.”

Braun–who now runs his own online and traditional media production company called BermanBraun in L.A. with Gail Berman–also said he had immediately asked the Times for a correction of the blog post, as he says he did three years ago when the original story ran.

Times Business editor Sallie Hofmeister, whom I also contacted (but who was not in charge at the time of the 2005 piece), said the Times was looking into the situation and wrote in an email to me:

“The story we published in 2005 was a reflection of the sentiments within Yahoo at the time. We worked very closely with Yahoo on the story, so the company’s top management had every opportunity to challenge our reporting. After the story ran three years ago, neither Yahoo nor Lloyd requested a correction and no correction ran. What you hear from people today probably would be different than what they would have said three years ago. Lloyd is long gone and so are the tensions of entertainment’s invasion at Yahoo. People’s recollections also change. Enemies then are friends today.

“As for blog post, we strive for accuracy and when people in our stories take issue with our coverage, we take them very seriously.”

So do I.

Thus, it is long past time to set the record straight and put to bed a fable of raging Hollywood high-handedness–with too-good-to-be-true-because-they’re-not, clichéd lines like, “Do you know who I am?” and filched umbrellas.

Why bother looking into it at all these years hence? Well, for one, it is just not fair for inaccuracies about Braun to remain, complete with a never-die life on the Web and a nagging perception that he was some digital version of Ari Gold from “Entourage.”

But, more importantly, the struggles at Yahoo back then have everything to do with what is going on now. And that is a company culture at war with itself about what it is and should be.

I have, in fact, been collecting string on Braun’s alleged escapades for years, mostly from Yahoos. I was fascinated since, like a game of telephone gone awry, those who worked with Braun closely and would know, told a different story from some of those in Sunnyvale, who might not.

That did not stop many there from telling various stories about Braun, almost none of which were accurate when I actually followed up.

Because of that, I started to look very closely at Yahoo to figure out why such fallacies went unchecked about him and later, about an ever longer string of departed execs.

But let’s start with what was clearly true in that 2005 piece, which began with another parking kerfuffle and a hissy-fit email from a new Yahoo exec, recruited from Fox, threatening to tow “someone” who parked in his assigned place.

It was a classic opening, trying to show in an anecdote the clash that was going on at Yahoo at the time.

And it was an apt one. There was indeed a lot of resistance to the decision by then-CEO Terry Semel, who was pushing Yahoo as a media company.

To do it, Semel hired Braun–a highly successful Hollywood figure (think being key to initiating and developing “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” and you have a good idea of his stature)–to pull it off at a big new and splashy office complex in Santa Monica.

Thus, the lines were drawn by some at Yahoo HQ, where execs mostly work in cubicles and where a we’re-all-equal ethos prevailed among some of the techie old guard especially, at least in their skewed perceptions of themselves.

(Guess what? They do work in cubicles, but some Yahoos in Sunnyvale are more equal than others.)

Still, back in 2005, it was easy to make an ebullient, brash and sometimes abrasive entertainment exec like Braun into a tidy little caricature and mock the idea of his task.

And who was hired to make new and innovative kinds of online programming hits, much as Braun had on television so well.

There is no doubt there were tensions. The Times story began focusing on the level of distrust, which in my estimation–I also was watching Yahoo closely at the time–was mostly from the tech side and mostly without interface with those in Los Angeles.

But, as Gaither noted correctly:

Yahoo’s ability to blend the cultures, milking each for what it does best, will be key to reaching its ultimate goal: to build on its success as the most visited destination on the Web by leveraging the links between content and the technology used to create and deliver it.”

Unfortunately, the Times story then launched into a series of really broad clichés about Hollywood versus Silicon Valley, using the typical “conspicuously expensive car” in LaLaLand versus the “energy-saving” one in Geekville.

(Again, my experience is that the tech folks always seem to have Porsches too, much as many Hollywood slickies drive Prius hybrids.)

The story went on to talk about the arrival of Semel, whom Gaither reported was seen as not as Hollywood at first as was expected by some wary Yahoos. He then got to Braun, who apparently was.

That’s where the problems come in, first by making it seem as if Braun was responsible for the pricey lease for the new Santa Monica offices at the Colorado Center.

Actually, according to top execs like Dan Rosensweig–Braun’s direct boss–as well as sources close to Semel and many other execs involved, that facility’s planning was directed largely from Sunnyvale, as most such projects are.

Braun did give an interview when the lease was announced, but was in no way the driver of the building’s renovation, which was actually being done by the company Yahoo rented the space from.

Next, came an assertion that the execs in Santa Monica got “Hollywood-style perks,” pointing out that Braun had “converted a conference room with a patio into his personal office. He also reserved a parking space close to the elevators for his car.”

Well, Braun did have a reserved space, which was no real crime to my mind, and which was actually not particularly close to the elevators.

How do I know? I have walked Braun to his car in the parking garage, which is about as nonluxurious as it gets, as opposed to Yahoo HQ, which used valets.

More importantly, Braun converted no office space and was assigned a temporary office elsewhere during the renovation, according to a panoply of execs and workers at Yahoo, such as Rosensweig, Jeff Weiner, Scott Moore and sources close to Semel.

It was a good office–after all, Braun was the boss of the Media Group.

And while both offices did have patios, the large outdoor spaces were also kind of dingy, especially compared to the manicured lawns of Yahoo HQ. And the patios were accessible to many parts of the floors, as I noticed on my many visits.

(As an added note, after the renovations were complete, Braun’s official office was not by any means fancy and was very standard in its drone-like look.)

The worst part was the next line: “Yahoo’s top executives drew the line when Braun asked for a corporate jet,” which was followed by a stunning quote by Semel.

It read:

The reaction was basically, ‘No,’ said Semel, who does not ask Yahoo to foot the bill when he flies to Northern California in his own private plane. ‘A lot of the more traditional media companies are doing their best to scale back on some of the perks and put the investment into the products and the consumers.’”

But, top Yahoo execs have uniformly told me over the years and this week that such a request from Braun never happened.

What was actually occurring, again directed by Yahoo’s Sunnyvale HQ, was an analysis about whether the company should start a charter air shuttle for the many engineers in its Burbank facility, working on its then-Panama search project, and employees at its growing Santa Monica facility.

There could be up to 20 workers going back and forth north daily, and the Southwest Airline bills were getting high.

Thus, a look-see to determine if an L.A.-Sunnyvale shuttle for everyone was needed. But it was conceived as a less-than-high-end plane, essentially a puddle-jumper that left at 7 a.m. and came back at 7 p.m.

Braun thought it was a good idea to examine and told Rosensweig, who was in charge of looking at the charter idea. But Braun was not part of the consideration of it.

Ultimately, Semel nixed the idea as too costly, and Braun did not object.

Why Semel seemed to tell Gaither that is curious. But a person familiar with Semel’s thinking said he was only referring to an company shuttle for everyone and not a corporate jet just for Braun and his minions, as the story opaquely implied.

“The discussions over the charter had nothing to do with Lloyd,” said the person. “And he did not ever ask for a corporate jet ever.”

Rosensweig, Weiner and several other top execs at the highest echelons–many of whom did not get along with Braun–support this version, on the record.

“I never saw anything out of the ordinary or Lloyd playing by Hollywood standards,” said Vince Broady, who worked for Braun, after being brought to Yahoo by Rosensweig. “I mean, Lloyd is a colorful character, which makes people notice him, but the idea that he was more difficult than anyone else was overblown.”

There is no doubt why Braun would attract attention–he is very noticeable and had a long and bruising career in Hollywood, with lots of stories of his dishing it out. He’s a genuine character, indeed, but not really that unusual compared to others in the entertainment sector, except perhaps to some at Yahoo.

Thus, I have no doubt, though, that such a story went around that Braun did desire a jet of his own and that Gaither heard it told, just like this most incredible of anecdotes in the piece.

The infamous umbrella!

Here is what Gaither wrote:

Braun’s long career in Hollywood has led to some awkward moments and misunderstandings inside Yahoo–and provided gossipy fodder for critics eager to cast him as a technically illiterate egomaniac.

According to one widely recounted tale, on a rainy day Braun took an umbrella from the Yahoo merchandise store without paying for it. Then, when asked for payment, he reportedly berated the store clerk, asking, ‘Do you know who I am?’ In fact, Braun’s representatives say, it was an innocent question to ensure that the clerk knew he was good for the money.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the umbrella ultimately ended up in a pool of umbrellas available to all employees.”

I could not, obviously, find the clerk to whom Braun allegedly said this. But I can say that there are free baskets of umbrellas for staffers all over Yahoo, and top execs like Braun can also buy them at company stores and just use their names as part of an account system.

And while I have no proof, the use of such a clearly hoary Hollywood phrase–“Do you know who I am?”–seems like it was simply made up to me by critics bent on making it a much better story than it was.

To be fair, Gaither does portray it as a “tale” that was circulating around Yahoo. But that probably should have alerted him that it was a very tall one indeed and not very reliable–a kind of digital urban legend rather than an actual event.

That’s why I would not have used it, without a much more explicit explanation that it was more an example of the tensions at Yahoo between the media and tech units than it was reality.

Perhaps worst of all was the impact of the piece, which forever cemented Braun’s reputation as a Hollywood-gone-wild exec.

Most interesting was that, according to both the Times and Yahoo sources, the company complained about the tone of the piece, but never asked for a correction.

Why? Sources familiar with Semel’s thinking said that he and PR execs thought it would cause more attention to focus on Braun, if they contested the piece, and it was better to just let it go.

It was probably a bad decision, given it was in the L.A. Times, which had a lot of credibility.

And, indeed, the high-profile Braun was later slapped silly by Valleywag, as the Times piece kept circulating within Yahoo. By the next year, Braun became one of the gossip blog’s first targets.

Valley–which knows a good character when it sees one and likes to poke and prod many, many such Silicon Valley-linked figures in mocking glee (with varying levels of accuracy)–even had a countdown to when Braun would be fired.

Because of this kind of thing, Braun said he tried to get Gaither to take another look at the stories about him, and met with Times editors to get them to make corrections.

The Times said Braun never formally asked for a correction and instead just complained about the story. To me, that is the same thing, but I am not privy to the Times’s internal corrections process, and Hofmeister declined to elaborate.

In any case, looking back, Braun told me this week the lack of support from Semel and Yahoo to fight the story was hugely disappointing and was the moment he realized he felt he would probably have to leave Yahoo.

Eventually, the feeling was mutual, as tensions escalated even further after the article appeared.

Braun–who had a particularly rocky relationship with Rosensweig, which is now patched up–was eventually pushed out in late 2006, after Yahoo moved away from its media focus to drill down in search.

That turned out to be a bad move, as Yahoo got its head handed to it by Google in search efforts. And it has since seriously been in tailspin in the wake of a series of jarring events.

Those include: the sudden departure of Semel mid-2007; the appointment of Co-Founder Jerry Yang as CEO; a painful public struggle to redefine Yahoo; a botched takeover fight with Microsoft (MSFT); a messy proxy battle with Carl Icahn; a collapsed search partnership with Google (GOOG); a decimated stock price; a scarily declining graphical advertising market; wrenching layoffs; and the stepping down of Yang and the thus-far uncompleted search for a new CEO.

You get the idea.

More importantly, with the cutting off of its more vaunted media aspirations, Yahoo closed the door on possible innovative directions that could have made it more competitive now, as it continues to struggle to define itself.

One of Yahoo’s great strengths–and it still is–has been its content properties, which are the most popular, by and large, on the Web. Instead, stinging from the article and the fallout of it, the company retreated from pushing forward aggressively in media.

Had it not, I can imagine a host of stuff it might have done.

And, ironically, Braun is now working on an online project with Microsoft, a celebrity site that will debut early next year and use a lots of the concepts he worked on at Yahoo.

In the 2005 piece, Gaither quoted Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner as saying, in a Yin-Yang concept: “We’re often asked, “Is Yahoo a media company or a tech company?”

Sadly, that question never got resolved then and still has not today.

It almost makes one nostalgic for stolen umbrellas, controversial parking places, questionable patios and wrangling over corporate jets.

Almost.

“Is that all there is, is that all there is.
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing.
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball,
If that’s all there is.”

Peggy Lee sang it best about troubled times in the classic song “Is That All There Is?”

But, dancing and making a video about dancing is obviously something that elevates Yahoo (YHOO), which is no small thing in this tough period for the iconic Internet company.

In the video below, Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal Blog Editor Nicki Dugan (whom BoomTown is immediately offering a job as AllThingsD.com video chief) takes the well-known dancing-fool Internet celeb Matt Harding of the Where the Hell Is Matt? Web site and places him all over Yahoo for 33 dancing sessions.

The video was recently shown at the company’s all-hands meeting, and it is simply delightful to see Yahoos looking happy simply by tripping the light fantastic.

I think activist shareholder Carl Icahn should make Harding one of his picks for the Yahoo board. (Icahn was officially appointed to the board yesterday, and his two board picks will be revealed Aug. 15.)

Highlights of the video of Harding dancing at Yahoo include Co-Founder David Filo’s infamous mess of a cube, a video conference jig with the team in Burbank, doing a sitting-down boogie with President Sue Decker, having a tango with Yahoo’s Purple Cow and a hip-shaking visit to “Frenemy Territory” at Google.

Best of all, of course, is a do-si-do with Yahoo Co-Founder and CEO Jerry Yang, who seems to be channeling an odd combination of Tony Manero in “Saturday Night Fever” and Barney the purple–how perfect!–dinosaur in his dance stylings. (Enter a caption contest here related to the picture above.)

Happily, this is the kind of dancing it is enjoyable to see Yang doing, because the two-stepping, shuffling and tap-dancing he is going to have to do to stay in power–after the much less sanguine shareholder vote this past week–is going to be much less fun to watch.

Here’s the video from Yahoo (all credit to Dugan and Yahoo) and the wonderful “Dancing 2008″ video that Harding did all over the world (I dare you not to smile):