Its not every day that you see a traditional media company poach from a new media company, but this is exactly what happened when CBS hired Richard Lawson from Gawker Media.

Lawson will be writing for TV.com in a role that is similar to what he already has been doing for Gawker: writing what is happening on famous TV shows.

Lawson will be writing fewer posts per day and do actual reviews.  Lawson has supposedly been generating 2.4 million pageviews per month for Gawker, more than any of Gawkers’ others writers.

[via BusinessInsider]

Owen Thomas has stepped down from Valleywag in order to pursue a career at NBC.  Ryan Tate will be the official replacement for Thomas.  Thomas decided to leave because he misses managing his own website.

Tate has previous experience at Business 2.0 and Upside magazine.  He has actually been in the Gawker family for about a year now since he left the San Francisco Business Times.  Gawker is even looking for another editor for Valleywag  to run breaking news after 7PM Eastern time.  Valleywag was recently merged in to Gawker.com.

[via Valleywag]

In late February, Defamer.com was rolled into Gawker.com.  This put Seth Abramovitch, Kyle Buchanan and S.T. VanAirsdale out of a job.  However they were given another opportunity in the form of blogging once again for Movieline.com.  Movieline was originally a magazine that started in 1989 and was stringing along for a couple of years.  Jane Fonda was on the first cover of the magazine.  Jay Penske, the son of automobile racing team and Penske Corporation founder Roger Penske set-up the revamping of Movieline.  Movieline will be part of Mail.com, the company that was relaunched by Penske and raised $35 million in funding last year.

Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media has decided to fold Defamer into Gawker.com in order to assimilate to a struggling economy.  This past December, it was rumored that Defamer was up for sale, but I suppose that there wasn’t any good enough offers.  Defamer will simply become part of Gawker’s entertainment section.

Defamer.com will still remain open but their posts will feed into Gawker’s feed.  Gabrie Snyder, Gawker’s managing editor will oversee the transition.  Defamer is about four years old.  Gawker brings in about 3 million visitors per month.  This is four times the number that they were receiving a year ago.

Defamer writers Seth, Stu, and Kyle will be out of a job at Gawker, but the company is now hiring a Hollywood gossip writer.  This past November, Valleywag was also rolled into Gawker.

[via NickDenton.org, Defamer]

I knew there was something fishy about the Consumerist article that claimed Facebook had the rights to use your content for any reason even if you deactivate your account.  Gawker’s network built itself on stirring up controversy.  In this case, Consumerist took advantage of people fearing that Facebook is becoming too much of a “big brother” social network.  No need to freak out about your photos on Facebook as long as you can trust your friends.

“When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information,”  stated Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook blog. “One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox.  Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.”

Facebook Beacon on the other hand was a blatant violation of privacy.  Sometimes it is good to keep Facebook on their toes about their TOS. Well done in spotting the changes, Consumerist.

TechCrunch is one of the leading technology blogs that has a lot of influence on venture capitalists and web startup companies alike.  Basically TechCrunch is the middleman between an up and coming web startup company and gaining enough publicity to get funding or acquired.  Being the middleman of such a powerful tool isn’t easy though.  People have tried to break into Arrington’s house to get publicity and most recently, someone at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany spat in his face.

Arrington believes that allegations from other bloggers directed animosity at him.

“Whoever is the top blog will get attacked by everyone else and that’ll just be the way it is,” stated Arrington in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We really need to think about, the community of bloggers, if we’re going to continue to slay our own for competitive reasons.”

Arrington believes that other bloggers allege that TechCrunch accepts payments or favors for publicity.  A couple of sites he blamed for damaging TechCrunch’s reputation for allegations includes AllThingsD.com and Valleywag, a technology gossip blog under the Gawker Media network.  Both AllThingsD co-founder Kara Swisher and Gawker founder Nick Denton personally responded to Arrington’s blame game.

“Our site is trying to raise ethical and reporting standards in the tech blogosphere but is in no way responsible for people stalking Michael Arrington. To say so is truly unfortunate on his part,” stated Swisher. “I am appalled he is being stalked, which is scary and disturbing, and am sorry for the strife it has clearly caused him and his family.”

Nick Denton stated that Arrington’s decision to step down for a month “says more about his emotional volatility than it does about anything more meaningful — like the pressures on tech journalists or Internet publishers.”  He added “Gawker titles have made many people’s lives uncomfortable, but I’ve never received a death threat.”

Arrington isn’t worried about TechCrunch’s traffic going down at all since he has many other writers maintaining the site.  Last month, TechCrunch received 650,000 unique visitors, up from 397,000 the year before.

“Did Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates or Bush take any break when they were attacked with eggs, cakes & shoes? Then why should Arrington do so,” wrote Labnol founder Amit Agarwal on his Twitter account.

I feel sympathetic for Arrington, but he was wrong for blaming his competition for the attacks on him.  Especially when TechCrunch publishes stories criticizing the livelihood of many others too.  This includes Dare Obasanjo and Ted Murphy.

Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, is acquiring Consumerist.com from Gawker. Consumers Union plans to keep the blog as-is. Consumerist’s editorial team will stay on board as well. Nick Denton mentioned the troubled advertising market as a reason for the sale. He put Consumerist on the block in November.

Consumers Union will use the blog as a marketing tool. They hope to acquire younger subscribers through the blog.

Consumerist gets 1.8 million unique visits  a month. But attracting advertisers is hard for the site because it bashes brands and companies. Consumers Union does not accept advertising on its magazines so they will not be accepting advertising on Consumerist after the sale.

Nick Denton, millionaire and founder of Gawker Media.  Gawker is one of the most visible media companies today with 12 subsidiary blogs.  The 12 blogs include Gawker.com, Defamer, Fleshbot, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Consumerist, io9, Kotaku, and Jezebel.

Denton is putting Consumerist for sale and is rumored to be consolidating Valleywag, a gossip blog centered around Silicon Valley into Gawker.com.  Standing alone, Valleywag receives about one million monthly uniques.

Owen Thomas, editor at Valleywag will be keeping his job but will be publishing on Gawker.  Gawker has between 100-150 employees.

Why is Gawker doing this?
Gawker receives more hits and has a lot more of a broader market.  This makes it easier to sell advertising.  Imagine if you were an advertising company and Gawker is pitching that they own a blog on Internet celebrities and another blog on every single celebrity.  Which would you invest in?

[Via AlleyInsider]

I’m impressed with Gawker Media, a network of blogs started by Nick Denton.  If I miss a major event like the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Macworld, or the Detroit Auto Show, I always looked at the newspapers for the pictures.  But between Jalopnik and Gizmodo, I did not have to attend the Detroit Auto Show or CES to get a feel of what is happening at the event.  These two blogs have the most number of pictures I have seen for any of those given events.

The automotive industry in America seems to be in such peril and this is reiterated all over the media, but the Detroit Auto Show is the automotive industry’s time to shine.  The angles and photography of all the cars I’ve seen on Jalopnik are just amazing.  A lot of these pictures get uploaded in real-time.  Looking at these pictures makes me feel like a kid again when I used to attend the show almost every year.

I believe that the reach Gawker Media has makes them qualified enough for an acquisition as big as Weblogs Inc.  Its too bad that some of their editors tend to be big on pranks, thus causing Gizmodo to be potentially banned from further CES events.

New Media: 1, Old Media: 0.

Curbed is a New York, NY-based real estate network blog that focuses on local events and architecture.  The blog network raised $1.5 million recently from a plethora of investors including Nick Denton (founder of Gawker Media), Zach Nelson (CEO of NetSuite), Joanne Wilson (wife of Fred Wilson, author of A VC blog), and Brad Inman (founder/publisher of Inman News). 

Curbed was founded by Lockart Steele and he is a former managing editor of Gawker Media.  Steele founded Curbed before working for Gawker, but went back to working for Curbed after leaving Gawker.

“We’re not just about real estate,” stated Steele.  ”People come to the site to talk about their neighborhoods and about life in the city.”  Some of Curbed’s advertisers include American Express and Volkswagen.

The New York Times’ Dan Mitchell broke the news of the funding.