Earlier today, Gawker broke the news that Brian Williams thought Lana Del Rey had “one of the worst outings in SNL history” (not a huge news story but what do you expect on a national holiday?). How did they get this quote? Well, it turns out it was from a private email Williams sent to Gawker head honcho Nick Denton. Gawker posted Williams’ Del Rey critique along with some choice quotes about how often he checks the site’s “shit” on his iPad. Unsurprisingly, NBC PR wasn’t thrilled to see the message hit the front page.

Major changes at the top of Gawker’s masthead are afoot for the next year, as Editor in Chief Remy Stern announced today that he would be leaving the site. Stepping into his shoes will be longtime Deadspin editor in chief AJ Daulerio. The New York Times reports that changes take place at the end of the year, though Stern called today his last day on the job.

Earlier today Gawker published the much ballyhooed “bombshell” story that Nick Denton had previously alluded to as the supposed motivation behind what appeared to be a recent spate of attacks made by Fox News outlets towards Gawker. The story, reported by John Cook, alleges that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly may have sought a police investigation into a detective who had is alleged to have had a relationship with O’Reilly’s wife.

Fox & Friends‘ Steve Doocy hosted BreitbartTV Editor-in-Chief Larry O’Connor this morning to discuss reports of several popular websites that are now, supposedly, “dead or dying.” The real target here, though, was obviously Gawker, who Fox says has lost 75% of its traffic since last year. You can almost audibly hear the axes grinding, as Fox extracts some payback for Gawker’s unflattering coverage of Fox News, and O’Connor blames the whole thing on liberal hoity-toitiness. Gawker’s Nick Denton immediately pushed back against the story.

Time magazine’s annual “Time 100″ list is live today, highlighting 2010′s most influential people. Unsurprisingly, the list includes several big media names, proving once again that those who bring you the news continue to be quite adept at making the news.

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.

It seems our initial hesitation to embrace the site’s bold new design choices was totally warranted – so many people had issues with Gawker’s new look (and, subsequently, unique views to the site dropped) to the point that Gawker Media founder Nick Denton sent out a memo basically admitting that the whole… experiment… could have gone better.

With many still buzzing about the deal between AOL and The Huffington Post, the speculation over what website might be gobbled up next is running rampant, with even a New York Times blog suggesting that Gawker Media could be next. There are many reasons why this is not likely to occur, one of which is that Gawker’s founder Nick Denton exhibits an entirely different, less spotlight-hungry personality than Arianna Huffington.

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.

The long-rumored, much-anticipated (in the blogosphere, anyway) New Yorker profile on Nick Denton is out this week and geez is it long. Ten thousand words long to be exact. And yet in all those ten thousands words I’m not convinced writer Ben McGrath reveals a whole lot about the man behind the Gawker empire beyond that the MSM has finally come round to thinking the “evil, soulless, Machiavellian puppeteer” (as he is often caricatured, according to the New Yorker) is now a sort of respectable voice of wisdom regarding the future of media.

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.

he announcement today that the Washington Post Co. intended to put Newsweek up for sale initially appeared to take the media world by surprise and, according to Howie Kurtz, stunned the newsroom into silence. For those who have been following the travails on the magazine in recent years, however, the news should probably have not come as much of a surprise

Nick Douglas has spent a lot of time on the Internet. Douglas was the founding editor of Valleywag, Gawker Media’s Silicon Valley blog, and is the now senior editor of the AOL blog Urlesque. He also penned the definitive book on Twitter. Yes a book! This week he, along with artist Erin Fusco, launched Big [...]

Out magazine’s annual list of the most influential gays and lesbians has been announced and CNN’s Anderson Cooper again tops the list of media names, coming third for the second year in a row. Although Cooper and fellow power-lister blogger Matt Drudge (he dropped from 6th to 15th) have never publicly acknowledged being gay, that doesn’t stop Out from consistently counting the two men–as well as actress Jodie Foster–when tallying who is gay and lesbian.

Gawker is losing one of it’s longest tenured writers, as Alex Pareene announced yesterday afternoon, after it was posted by John Koblin at the New York Observer, that he was leaving Nick Denton’s employ for Slate’s “War Room” blog. This is just the latest in a recent succession of departures from the influential blog, and has been raising questions about what’s going on at their Nolita offices.

Ink-stained wretches, it’s not just you! The social media and Twitter elite fret about the future of journalism too — and wonder how it will survive the digital revolution. At SXSWi, there was no shortage of panels obsessively deconstructing this topic (and tweeting about it, natch).

Wow. Well this is interesting and surprising news. Gawker head Nick Denton just sent out this memo to staff announcing that Gawker media is acquiring Cityfile, the New York news/gossip site founded by Remy Stern. Perhaps even more surprising (shocking?) is the news that Gawker editor-in-chief Gabriel Snyder will departing and Stern will be taking his place (update: in his memo, below, Snyder says he was “canned”). Both memos after the jump.

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.

Back on January 13^th, Valleywag, the Silicon Valley subsidiary of Gawker Media, cut the ribbon on a “scavenger hunt” for information about the Apple Tablet, which led to Apple’s rather predictable response of sending Gawker a cease-and-desist letter. As the rumored release date of the Apple Tablet nears (January 27^th, according to numerous sources), so too, it would seem, does the end of Nick Denton’s mad quest to make Steve Jobs get serious about their relationship and sue him already. It promises to be interesting.

A book review in today’s New York Times examines Shocking True Story, the new history of original gossip magazine Confidential. And reading about the early celeb rag’s conquests — from Lucille Ball to Joe DiMaggio — it’s impossible not to be reminded of today’s gossip leaders, from Gawker to Perez Hilton. It’s a comparison Gawker boss Nick Denton would not only be proud of, but made himself.

Nothing aids the launch of a new website like a little bit of controversy! After being interviewed by Business Insider about the launch of his new site, Andrew Breitbart took to the webs with complaints of being misquoted and proceeded to accuse Business Insider of merely being a front for Gawker. We untangle it all after the jump.

Tucker Carlson, four days before the launch of his new website, which boasts a staff of 21 editors and reporters, has yet to lose his idealism about the Internet! It’s a lovely thing to behold. Also, he has no plans on being the next Nick Denton.

When Gawker brought in the coming end of the decade by running a “douche of the decade” poll, the winner, Girls Gone Wild honcho Joe Francis, was not pleased. He didn’t especially object to the “douche” label, but to another, more loaded word they used to describe him: rapist. Francis’ back-and-forth with Gawker’s legal department is revealing in many ways, and raises the question of what, if anything, the gossip site can’t get away with:

The year 2009 had many media bright spots, break-out stars, dominating networks and game-changing technologies. The Mediaite 50 collects the finest, most exemplary innovators and influencers of the year, defining a media moment in time and setting the agenda as we move forward. See the full list after the jump:

In August Gawker got its hands on a sort of sex tape (there was no actual sex) featuring Eric Dane, his wife Rebecca Gayheart, and “beauty-queen-turned-Hollywood-madam” Kari Ann Peniche. The post got a whole lot of traffic. Shortly thereafter Dane and Gayheart sued Gawker. Turns out they really should have thought ahead.