Last month, Alan Citron silently disappeared from TMZ.com, the gossip megasite he helped launch. He has suddenly reappeared at Buzznet, a music-blog startup that's dabbling in celebrity news. "It goes to my reputation of being quiet," he told me. I felt bad for Citron when, as the general manager of TMZ.com, he sat next to me on a panel on gossip at the South by Southwest conference in Austin this spring. Julia Allison, the notorious nobody with a nonstartup, stole the show, literally leaping from the audience onto the moderator's lap.

It was utterly unfair: Citron had built TMZ.com, out of nowhere, into the Web's undisputed champ of 24/7 celebrity chatter, with some 10 million visitors a month. Allison had done exactly nothing, except for, unbelievably, further trivializing the very notion of fame. And yet Allison dominated the conversation.

How was it that, in a newsroom full of gossips, no one thought to mention the departure of a top executive? Did he not make enough of an impression around the office? Citron's discretion is to his credit. But it's possible there's such a thing as being too quiet.

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