Today, a flight attendant filed lawsuit against Gawker Media for a post (later retracted) that guessed that she may be the mistress of Arnold Schwarzenegger that fathered his illegitimate child. This afternoon on Fox News (a network that’s never had the best relationship with Gawker), the panelists of The Five had quite a bit to say about the website.

Today, Gawker Media’s Lifehacker site announced that $2,000 would be awarded to whomever could come up with a solution for a stubborn kink in the blog network’s much talked-about redesign. You might remember that, last week, we reported on a memo sent by Gawker founder Nick Denton, basically admitting to staffers that the site’s new look and navigation wasn’t all they’d hoped it would be. So, it seems, they’re now turning to their readers for help – the very readers, it should be pointed out, who have expressed feeling increasingly ignored or undervalued by Gawker, if the sentiments in this comments thread are anything to go by.

For the past few weeks Glenn Beck has joined the chorus of opinion-media personalities discussing the fascinating story of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. In Beck’s inimitable fashion, he cut straight to the part of the story that resonated emotionally with his audience, focusing on revolution and youth, represented by “hactivists” and “Operation Payback.” But now that someone claiming to represent the renegade vigilante set of hackers known as Anonymous has sent a message to Beck regarding his coverage, one can only wonder if he is in danger of painting a target on his own back.

his past weekend, Gawker Media was dealt a damaging blow when a group that calls itself Gnosis successfully hacked into Gawker’s servers and thereafter released a torrent which contained Gawker’s source code and a database containing 1.3 million Gawker commenters’ usernames, e-mail addresses, and passwords, about a fifth of which Gnosis decrypted. Considering that many people use the same password for multiple web services, this is bad news. Mediaite’s sister site Geekosystem got in touch with members of Gnosis and discussed what the attacks meant for Gawker Media, web publishers, and everyone who shares unsecured information on the Internet.

Over the last 24 hours Gawker Media’s network of sites have been under attack from a group who have identified themselves “Gnosis,” a seemingly mysterious collective of hackers who has been falsely considered part of the 4chan-related group of renegade vigilantes knows as Anonymous. Via several private email exchanges with Mediaite, an individual claiming to represent “Gnosis” has explained both the reasoning and methodology of his actions, which has led to a compromised commenter database and a content management system.

Earlier today Gawker confirmed earlier reports that their commenter system had been hacked. Now we know that the security breach is much worse – the Content Management System also appears to have been compromised as well.The following story was recently published on Gawker, and the current editor Adrian Chen just announced via Twitter “FYI: That post linking to a torrent of our source code was not written by me. We’ve been hacked.” Update: the fake post published by the hacker has been removed from the site.

Yesterday Gawker Media denied reports that their database of 1.5 Million usernames, emails and passwords had been hacked. Comments broadcast via the apparently compromised Twitter feed of Gawker Media’s tech and gadget site Gizmodo strongly suggested a security compromise. Mediaite can now confirm that the Gawker’s database has been compromised at least to some degree. Evidence delivered from an anonymous source claiming responsibility for the security breach, also claims that a complete sharing of the private user data will be shared later today at 9PM GMT (4pm EST.) Update #2 – Data has been shared and Gawker’s CMS as been hacked as well.

Always the iconoclast, Nick Denton surprised his peers when he acquired CityFile and replaced Gawker’s Editor-in-Chief last February, ostensibly because he felt there was a need for change at Gawker. Now we see Phase II of what some may call the re-engineering of the seminal media gossip blog: a rather dramatic re-design that appears to effectively change the definition of Gawker media properties from “blogs” to “sites.” And yes, there is a difference.

Gawker’s Ryan Tate provides a tough-but-fair portrayal of Tina Brown. According to Tate, she is very much living in an anachronistic version of New York: ridiculous amounts of money unwisely spent, Sex in the City as pastiche, and people using fax machines to exchange content. No, that is not hyperbole – according to Tate, Tina Brown can read her website via fax while traveling overseas! Update: Gawker Media owner Nick Denton defends Brown in the comments section of the original post.

Long before Gawker Media changed the way we consume information, analysis and media, there was a surprising little literary journal out of Chicago’s south side called The Baffler. Edited by Thomas Frank, who’s also known as columnist for WSJ and best-selling author of What’s The Matter With Kansas, The Baffler compendium Commodify Your Dissent was a must-read for every literary hipster in lower Manhattan in the mid to late 90s. Well good news now-aging-hipsters. The Baffler is back with a brand new issue!

NBC News White House Correspondent Savannah Guthrie is on the way up. She was recently named one of 2010′s Faces to Watch in TV by the LA Times, and has just launched a new show, “The Daily Rundown,” on MSNBC (9am EDT), with fellow White House correspondent Chuck Todd.

Savannah gets real with “The Daily Rundown,” on MSNBC (9am EDT), with fellow White House correspondent Chuck Todd.

Savannah gets real with Inside the White House Press Corps, with some surprising observations about Twitter, media bias, and the role of pudits in shaping the news.

New York magazine lost two high-ranking employees this week: deputy editor Hugo Lindgren to the revamped Bloomberg BusinessWeek and online managing editor Jessica Coen to Gawker Media’s Jezebel. Gawker’s reacquisition of Coen is the fourth in a recent trend: medium-to-high profile bloggers and reporters, nursed as neophytes on Nick Denton‘s teat, coming back to Gawker Media for a second time. Does this company represent online media’s last best hope?

As you may have heard, Gawker was recently named the blog of the decade by Adweek, which proclaimed it “the template for what a blog should be.” Leaving aside the question of “should,” Gawker has set the template for what the blogs of this decade aspire to be. Gawker Media was founded in 2002. In those seven years, its founder Nick Denton has built an empire, and forever changed the game, how it’s played — and who gets to play it.

Yesterday, we wondered about the future of advertising, and acknowledged that bloggers face a new predicament of impossibly low rates. But there are other technological pitfalls — just ask Gawker Media, who was scammed by a client pretending to be Suzuki into running ads that crashed readers’ browsers and even installed malware onto their systems.

As online writing becomes increasingly a part of the mainstream dialogue in America, “blogger” is no longer a dirty word. Some of the best writers of our time operate exclusively on the internet, but some of the most talented still work under the radar. In this in-depth, magazine-length feature, Mediaite has assembled a list of 25 of the best underappreciated bloggers and explained why they matter.

Today’s Gawker Media redesign unveils a new feature that attempts to optimize the loyalty of the network’s already robust fan base. Gawker Open Forums now exists on all of the group’s nine blogs, integrating social networking, crowdsourcing and standard discussion forums, leaving each blog as not only a conversation starter, but a channel where news can be broken, shared and commented on by readers, all in one place.

Seven years after its founding, Gawker Media is getting more online traffic than the LA Times and nearly as much as the New York Times — and with a staff a fraction of their sizes. Need evidence of their influence? They are now effectively running the state department. A look at their growth and impact after the jump.