Gawker Media founder Nick Denton revealed how much that he paid for pictures that NFL Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre sent to Jenn Sterger: $12,000. “I love paying for information,” stated Denton at the Business Insider Ignition conference last week. Deadspin’s traffic increased by millions. The blog post with the pictures have close to 5 million hits so far. [BusinessInsider]

Gawker.com has taken down leaked excerpts from Sarah Palin’s unreleased and upcoming book “America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag” from their website after being hit by a lawsuit by HarperCollins. The injunction prohibits Gawker from “continuing to distribute, publish or otherwise transmit pages from the book.” There is a hearing expected on November 30th as well. The blog post that had the leaked excerpt now leads to a 404 error message. [AllThingsD]

This is a guest post by Simon Owens, a social media consultant and online journalist. You can read more about him on his blog at Bloggasm.com and follow him on Twitter at @simonowens.

AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) admitted this past week that there was a security hole in their website which leaked customer email addresses. Goatse Security claimed that they were responsible for the intrusion. Goatse said that they exploited an opening in AT&T’s website for finding numbers that identify iPads that are connected to their service.

A story written by Gizmodo editors Jason Chen and Jesus Diaz about the new iPhone has hit about 8 million views, 9,000+ diggs, 35,000+ retweets, etc. You figure Gizmodo brought in a lot of extra money for parent company Gawker Media and the company founder Nick Denton. However Denton admitted that breaking the news about the new iPhone did not make him any extra money. To buy the iPhone from the thief, Gawker paid $5,000. On top of that there was $7,000 in extra bandwidth for the servers. Chen and Diaz will most likely be paid for traffic bonuses too. And lastly are “whatever legal bills we end up paying,” said Denton. [DailyFinance]

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.