“If you open your front door to people they just act like jerks,” agreed former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson. Now the managing editor of Animal NY, he favors abolishing comments sections altogether.

Blog proprietor Nick Denton has a different plan—he’s giving them the run of the place. The commenters are creating content, after all, just like the writers. What’s the difference?

“I want to erase this toxic Internet class system,” he told The Observer in a gmail chat.

“Nick has always loved to subtly and not so subtly insult his employees,” said Gawker writer John Cook. “He thinks of us as glorified commenters.”

In some cases, the writers are glorified commenters. For years, the sections served as a farm league for the blogs’ staffs. It’s where Drew Magary (BigDaddyDrew), Richard Lawson (LolCait), and Erin Gloria Ryan (MorningGloria) launched their writing careers.

Now, with a new commenting system called Kinja, Mr. Denton is offering a set of housekeys to anyone who wants them. Gone are the old barriers to entry—the invites, the followers, the star-shaped badges—that kept the comments cliquish. Under the new order, the commenters babysit themselves, while a secret algorithm ranks their conversations by relevance. In fact, their contributions are not even called “comments” anymore. Internally, the company has instituted a $5 penalty on anyone who uses the c-word.

“These are posts,” Mr. Denton explained, reclaiming a word once reserved for professional prose. “And we intend to hold the posts contributed by readers to the same standards as those of writers—and erase the rather old-fashioned distinction between the two castes.”

Which sounds utopian, unless you’re a Gawker writer who has found his or her job description radically altered by the new scheme. Bloggers trained to fear, ignore or disdain the commenters now have a mandate to engage with them, a job that is equal parts forum moderator, lifeguard and whipping boy. Or become obsolete.

Asked if Kinja, in its fully realized form, even required writers, Mr. Denton replied, “As long as readers want to see discussions in which our staff writers participate, we’ll have staff writers.”

Not especially reassuring news for his editorial employees, who are fretting that those who fail to adapt will be fired.

“Look, it’s been hinted at,” said Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio. “I’m taking that not quite at face value.” Gawker was the first site to use Kinja, which will roll out across other sites in upcoming weeks. Mr. Daulerio is now carefully monitoring the system’s use, to see which writers are being active in the comments and which are not, and brainstorming ways of embracing the new scheme without “frustrating or incapacitating” his staff. One potential strategy for worried bloggers: keeping their heads down and praying the boss moves on to a new obsession.

“I’ve worked at Gawker long enough to know that the best way to be is to be patient,” Mr. Daulerio said.

MR. DENTON’S SUDDEN POPULISM is especially surprising given Gawker’s snarky DNA. (“Who put ecstasy in his Coke?” wondered Mr. Johnson.) But the former Financial Times journalist claims that he got into the business to build a blogging platform that would replicate real-life reporter bull sessions; the editorial was merely an afterthought.

“Remember that Gawker was a hobby,” he said.

Gawker Media has been working on Kinja since CTO Tom Plunkett joined the company in 2005, though the development was “put on ice” during the recession, Mr. Denton said. Several Gawker insiders put its price tag at $1 million, but Mr. Denton said it had cost “much more,” accounting for infrastructure. And if, as he hopes, Gawker executive director of content Ray Wert manages to cement branded Kinja discussion threads as the advertising unit of the future, the company will climb out of the lowly ranks of content providers and join the Reddits and Facebooks of the world as a bona fide tech player.

For longtime readers, this has meant a somewhat rocky transition. Some have complained that the site’s writerly wit has been an unintended casualty of the change in focus. In recent months, Neetzan Zimmerman, Gawker’s so-called traffic troll, has been charged with keeping the site moving with weird news and would-be viral videos, freeing up veteran writers to work on more ambitious pieces, as well as some that are decidedly unambitious. For instance, since Kinja rolled out, Gawker has published three posts debating the finer points of over-air conditioning.

“How do YOU keep warm in the cold office?” Hamilton Nolan asked his commenter comrades. They responded in earnest (“I’m lucky. I have my own thermostat.”). Well, except for Gawker-editor-turned-Awl-proprietor Choire Sicha and Forbes media writer Jeff Bercovici.

The Observer asked Mr. Nolan if “privileging the idiots,” which is how one writer described the new system, ever got tedious.

“It’s not annoying if there are smart commenters, but it is annoying if there’s nothing but dumb commenters,” Mr. Nolan wrote in an email message. “And a lot of the smart commenters were chased off by our various redesigns. Hopefully they come back.”

FOR ALL ITS EGALITARIANISM, THE KINJA algorithm favors the comments that in-house bloggers are willing to engage with, effectively tearing down the treehouse longtime and starred commenters had built.

Mr. Daulerio described their discontent: “They’ve helped build the site, helped make Nick Denton rich, they actually care about the quality of the site, their voices are important. Now they can’t have their little chats with the people they’ve made imaginary friends with.”

The oft-banned commenter Brian Van Nieuwenhoven (a web developer who goes by the handle BrianVan) stopped commenting on Gawker when the site abandoned its New York focus and has since soured on the whole enterprise.

“I’ve moved on from the concept of commenting,” he told The Observer. “It’s not my calling. It’s not my job.”

Mr. Van was part of a tight-knit (if largely anonymous) cadre of hard-core commenters who helped drive up the site's traffic by swarming into the wake of every post to banter among themselves. This group has met each of Mr. Denton’s platform tweaks with indignant reproach and waves of defections—first, to The Awl, then to The Hairpin.

“God knows where it is now,” Mr. Denton said.

It may well be at Crasstalk, a popular Gawker separatist blog founded by Amy Frame, a 44-year-old charity manager, along with two fellow Gawker exiles who go by the handles BotswanaMeatCommissionFC and DogsofWar. (Its name refers to “Crosstalk,” the Gawker commenters forum where Ms. Frame says she lost many hours of her grad school years.)

“One can’t build for a small and nomadic band of wannabe writers,” Mr. Denton said.

Instead, Kinja is built for even more exceptional people: sources, subjects and experts who, Mr. Denton expects, will elevate the discourse and create conversations around each post that are every bit as engaging as the items themselves. Destroying the superstructure that separated the writers and the commenters is just the latest and most drastic move in Mr. Denton’s longstanding bid to serve as the Internet’s salonniere.

First, he tried to lure the establishment by fostering a sense of exclusivity, sending invitations to join the Gawker commenting community on printed noted cards. Invitees could extend the offer to their friends and, later, wannabe commenters could audition by submitting a comment. If it made then-intern Kaila Hale-Stern laugh, the commenter would earn a log-in.

But while the drive-by wits came to epitomize Gawker’s comments, they were hardly its platonic ideal. According to Lockhart Steele, Gawker’s former editorial director, there was one person whose participation would prove that Gawker’s comments were a success.

“We were always asking, would Kurt Andersen use this? Would Kurt Andersen comment?” he said. (The dream commenter is now said to be Brian Williams.)

But the commenting habit appears to have never really taken hold among the most desirable set. When Gawker’s commenter data were compromised by a group of hackers in late 2010, bloggers scoured them to figure out which Condé Nast editors and striving socialites were secretly commenting on every Gawker post. There were none.

GAWKER INSIDERS LIKE to cast the new commenting system as merely the latest obsession of their mercurial and adaptive boss. Remember 2010, when Mr. Denton declared text an inferior medium and said the future of Gawker was video? Or the year after that, when Gawker—having won the scalp of “Craigslist Congressman” Chris Lee—looked like the future of journalism? He changed the site’s tagline to “Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news,” but it has yet to repeat that sort of reporting coup.

Until now, Mr. Denton’s pivoting had little real impact on his employees. No matter what he declared in his widely read memos, young, ambitious writers came to work for Gawker Media to get a little bit famous and left, mostly unscathed, for jobs at more established outlets. But in Kinja, Gawker Media writers will be central to Mr. Denton’s experiment in public, collaborative, do-it-live journalism.

Here’s how it works: Don’t worry about nailing a story down, post what you have. “The work can be the product of a discussion,” Mr. Denton said, “a back-and-forth between writers, editors, sources, subjects and readers.”

He calls it “iterative reporting,” and he believes it reproduces conversational thought and gossip as faithfully as possible, bypassing the publicists and other gatekeepers who “chew the story over so much that all the flavor is removed.”

“I want the writing to be fun again,” said Mr. Denton, who has long threatened to make his writers’ chat rooms public.

Once the comments become a “safe space” for writers, as he put it—and not the battlefield of psychological warfare Jezebel writers are sometimes advised to avoid—the tipsters and insiders will stop depending on the privacy of the email tip box.

“Everybody will do everything in public,” he said. “Just give it time.”

Mavericks owner Mark Cuban did recently make an appearance in the discussion of Adrian Chen’s story about a cancer charity hoax, though he might have been laughed out of the old Gawker comments for confusing “its” and “it’s.”

And as for dream commenter Kurt Andersen, he is almost positive he never commented on Gawker. “Internet commenting, on Gawker or otherwise, is an activity I think not even Nick Denton’s genius can persuade me to take up,” he told The Observer. But he will appear in a Jezebel discussion next month, to plug his new novel, True Believers, in a Q&A with readers.

Kinja proved a useful medium for such Reddit-style Q&As when Chris Crocker, the  “Leave Britney Alone” video artist, stopped by Gawker last week to promote his forthcoming HBO documentary, Me @ the Zoo. Mr. Crocker—one of the most despised people on the Internet, Mr. Denton told us—reported back that his Kinja web chat was “the most pleasant hour in a day of media interviews.”

“That was a gratifying moment,” Mr. Denton said.

kstoeffel@observer.com

Brian Williams (Getty Images)

Nikki Finke's Deadline has a so-called "speculative" schedule for NBC's fall season, in the run-up to the network's upfront presentation on Monday. Included are 30 Rock, which is said to be moving to Wednesday night along with Parks and Recreation, and Smash, moving to Thursdays. Missing? Rock Center, the Brian Williams newsmagazine. This doesn't necessarily mean the end for the low-rated series--the schedule is anything but definitive, and even if it is, Rock Center has a way of cropping up. The series came on air earlier than planned after last fall's Playboy Club flopped.

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

On a recent post-NFL season Monday night, 7.3 million people watched a remake of Hawaii 5-0. Another 6.7 million watched Castle, a crime procedural that’s safely avoided buzz for four seasons. A crowd less than half that size, 3.2 million, watched an American furniture manufacturer tearfully repent for outsourcing the family business, met a real-life moon colonist, and saw a chimpanzee flip through a children’s book. “They like to look at the pictures,” the voiceover explained.

They had landed on the three-month-old newsmagazine Rock Center, NBC’s prime time bid to recapture an audience for TV news by offering a looser format in which to showcase Brian Williams’s formidable charisma. Mr. Williams’s sensibility is so deeply ingrained in the programming that Rock Center executive producer Rome Hartman likes to say that, when it’s working, it feels like “Brian’s playlist.”

“He’s got tremendous personality,” Mr. Hartman said in a phone interview with The Observer. “We wanted to give him an opportunity to show the breadth of his experience, his knowledge, his news sensibility, and the range of his personality.”

Since when do news anchors need a personality?

The previous generation of TV news gods—Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw—didn’t have personalities; they had jawlines, which were square, and brows, which they knit when they told us with patriarchal gravity how the country’s day went.

In 2010, network news lost more than 750,000 viewers, according to a report by the Pew Research Center. Although NBC shed the fewest, the report noted that network news is on “a slide so long and gradual that few imagine it can now be abated, except perhaps by moving to new platforms.”

Mr. Williams has a lantern jaw and an expressive brow too, but he also has the comic timing and pop culture antennae that make him the kind of guy you’d want to make you a playlist. These traits, though by all accounts genuine, might have been reserved, in another era, for the anchor’s close friends and off-the-record confidantes. Instead, they’ve been drilled into us in what seems, retrospectively, like a company-directed cross-platform Brian Williams congeniality campaign.

He hosted SNL capably. He skewered himself on 30 Rock and he skewered his medium on Fallon, slow-jamming the news. As part of a roundtable assembled on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss the biggest media story of 2010, Mr. Williams delivered a satiric monologue about The New York Times’s “discovery” of Brooklyn so uncannily pitch-perfect that it felt like watching Skynet (the Terminator’s artificial intelligence overlord) become self-aware. It knows it’s an anchor.

It seems to be working.

“When he got the anchor job, I distinctly remember having zero opinion of him,” Eric Cunningham, a 27-year-old sketch comedian told The Observer. “But then it’s almost like he went out of his way to let people who weren’t news junkies know that he was cool.”

Interestingly, NBC opened up programming space for Mr. Williams’s personality at the same time the ratings of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart were surpassing those of every Fox News host’s except Bill O’Reilly. NBC Universal tried to lure Jon Stewart away from Comedy Central more than once, according to sources familiar with the matter. But judging from Mr. Williams’s 2007 turn as the host of SNL, they didn’t need to.

“Brian was funny before Jon Stewart,” said Alexandra Wallace, a senior vice president at NBC News and a longtime executive producer at Nightly. Ms. Wallace said that his move toward entertainment was organic but that the network opened up to his comedic outings when it saw they didn’t cost him any credibility.

“The news has become more personal,” she explained. “As the viewer, I want to feel more of a connection, and I want to feel that I’m getting to know the person who’s telling the news.”

Some NBC insiders said the laid-back, on-air Brian belies managing editor of Nightly News Brian, who has an assiduous, Type A personality and whose staff abides by a strict code of punctuality and professionalism. Mr. Williams has been through five executive producers in his seven-year tenure (the survivors went on to higher posts at NBC) and has said he wouldn't wish the job on anyone.

“You don’t get where he is without having really high standards for yourself and the people who work for you,” Ms. Wallace said. “I think Brian has a ton of fun, and the staff has a ton of fun but it’s a lot of work. So I’m sure there are some rules. But we might be getting on at 6:45 if there weren’t any.”

Last summer, Mr. Cunningham and some friends started a semi-serious Brian Williams for President campaign. Not because they viewed him as a paragon of trustworthiness and authority, but because he was funny.

The real signal of the anchor’s “indie comedy cred,” he said, was Mr. Williams’s turn on ASSSCAT, a regular improv show put on by the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Mr. Cunningham doesn’t watch broadcast news religiously—especially now that it appears BriWi (a nickname Internet gadabout Rachel Sklar takes credit for) won’t be running for office—but said that he’s seen Rock Center, and likes it. “It’s a lot like Dateline, but if Dateline were allowed to not do stories on cheerleader-murderers,” he noted.

For people accustomed to digesting news through a Twitter stream that contains both CNN breaking news and Onion headlines, it’s no big deal to see the man in the anchor’s desk toggle between hard news and comedy.

“I was talking with a friend of mine about how Brian Williams manages to make you truly care about tragic-but-evergreen stories you hear about nearly every day—in a way that’s hard to pin down,” Mr. Cunningham explained. “Then four minutes later, he’ll do a segment on the ‘Shit Girls Say’ videos and it doesn’t feel weird.”

Given Mr. Williams’s obvious chops as an entertainer, we wondered, does Mr. Cunningham think Mr. Williams is wasted doing the news?

“I would be shocked,” he replied. “He’s got it together up there and is too sharp to be drunk at the desk. No offense to Pat Sajak, but going toe-to-toe with Jon Stewart comedically is a lot harder than remembering which letters are vowels.”

Um, actually, we meant wasted as in, Is his true talent going to waste behind the news desk, reading other people’s words? Mr. Williams reportedly abstains from alcohol.

“Ha, oh man—sorry, BriWi just did a segment on Sajak being drunk last night, so I thought that’s what you were referring to,” Mr. Cunningham replied.

Just because Mr. Williams is allowed to loosen his tie once a week does not mean that NBC executives are preparing for hard news doomsday. Mr. Hartman noted that NBC News’s viewership is up, and Ms. Wallace believes the glut of information online has increased the demand for TV news’s distilled synopses. Still, it would be wise for the network to experiment with repurposing its talents sooner rather than later. In 2002, when Mr. Williams was Mr. Brokaw’s heir apparent, eight out of ten 18- to 29-year-olds got their news from television, according to Pew Research Institute. By last year, more than 40 percent of them had disappeared.

But watching a news anchor pander to a generation of news consumers who don’t remember his Peabody-winning Katrina broadcast can be a little bit painful, like watching someone’s freshly divorced dad try to figure out what he missed while he was off the market.

For example, if the new BuzzFeed is banking on the idea that breaking news is a viral meme, Rock Center is banking on the idea that viral memes are breaking news. Mr. Williams has already interviewed Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and the girl from “Shit Girls Say”—not just the comedians behind them but the memes themselves.

During the Marcel the Shell bit, Mr. Williams asked viewers to look at the number of times the video has been viewed, adding, “A lot of network prime time shows would kill for 14 million plus viewers.”

Mr. Williams comes by his new media interests honestly. He has two 20-something children. The elder, Allison, has been linked romantically with Ricky Van Veen, the College Humor founder, and is a star of Girls, Lena Dunham’s HBO series about emerging adulthood in Greenpoint.

But his apparent awareness of the declining influence of the medium he’s mastered gives his coziness with Gawker a whiff of desperation.

On Jan. 15, Mr. Williams wrote to Gawker owner Nick Denton, a friend, to praise one of the site’s new weekend hires and shoot the shit. “I do wish the main page featured more TV coverage,” he wrote, adding, “Brooklyn hippster [sic] Lana Del Rey had one of the worst outings in SNL history last night — booked on the strength of her TWO SONG web EP, the least-experienced musical guest in the show’s history, for starters.”

Mr. Denton forwarded the email to Gawker’s new editor in chief A.J. Daulerio, who promptly published it.

The post drew hundreds of thousands of viewers for several reasons. It had America’s news anchor piling on Lana Del Rey, a high-artifice songstress whose SEO, if not her record, is gold. It employed the term “Brooklyn hipster.” And it revealed a bit of in-house cattiness—the face of NBC News sneering at SNL’s booking!

But really, like most people who find themselves in Gawker’s inbox, Mr. Williams was asking the site—which attracts more than six million monthly visitors (twice as many as watch Rock Center each week)—for a little attention.

“I do wish the main page featured more TV coverage.”

NBC asked Gawker to take down the email. It declined. Others internally said they thought it was good for Mr. Williams’s image.

“We’re very busy with this show we put on,” was all Mr. Hartman would say of the matter.

In fact, the next week, a team of Rock Center producers were busy invading Gawker headquarters to film an upcoming profile of Nick Denton Gawker Media.

Though some bloggers presumed the segment was a public hatchet-burial, it had been in the works for weeks.

Next week, Rock Center will move from Monday nights to an earlier slot on Wednesdays, going head-to-head with ABC’s Emmy-laden Modern Family, a new Fox reality show about flash mobs and yet another crime procedural, Criminal Minds, on CBS.

“Prime time is valuable real estate,” Mr. Hartman said. “It’s a tribute to NBC News from NBC Universal and the Comcast Company that they have made this valuable real estate available to us.”

Indeed, some sources consider the creation of Rock Center a sop to the news division from the network’s new owners, which were then busily gutting its ranks.

Although the general interest newsmagazine appears to be trying to be everything to everyone, in many ways, Rock Center’s strategy is a concession to the fact that viewers consume news in many, disaggregate forms. At its core, Rock Center its an assemblage of videos in YouTube-friendly lengths that can be dismantled, liked and shared across platforms. Some Rock Center stories are posted online long before they air.

“I aspire to have people sample the program, people who might not be what we consider traditional viewers,” Mr. Hartman said.

With blandly palatable long form content and a host who is, by now, enough of a celebrity to carry even the dullest interviews, the show sometimes feels like an extremely well-placed billboard for Mr. Williams and his NBC News Superfriends like Kate Snow, and, yes, Chelsea Clinton.

But if NBC puts any stock in the notion that Brian Williams’s personality will outlast the waning primacy of the news anchor, the parable of Lana Del Rey might be instructive. In the Internet echo-chamber, even the most finely calibrated persona delivering expertly produced material isn’t immune to the negative impact of overexposure.

On Jan. 23, Mr. Williams moderated a GOP debate under the Rock Center banner. The spectacle was mostly put on by NBC’s politics and special events teams, but as a strategic branding opportunity for Rock Center, it was a triumph, doubling the usual ratings.

The next day, Mr. Williams’s friends at Gawker featured more TV coverage on the front page, deriding the “orange hipster” for overdoing it.

“Williams would not shut up,” John Cook wrote. “He uttered almost precisely the same number of words last night as Ron Paul, who was ostensibly there as a participant.”

If the criticism stung, Mr. Williams shouldn’t feel too bad. Ms. Del Ray has survived much, much worse.

kstoeffel@observer.com

Brian Williams, not a Lana Del Rey fan. (Getty Images)

In a private email between Brian Williams, the NBC News anchor always eager to prove quite how with-it he is, and Nick Denton, Gawker honcho, Mr. Williams asked just why Lana Del Rey's outing on Saturday Night Live hadn't gotten coverage on the site. As reported by Gawker editor AJ Daulerio himself, Mr. Williams wrote:

"Brooklyn hippster [sic] Lana Del Rey had one of the worst outings in SNL history last night — booked on the strength of her TWO SONG web EP, the least-experienced musical guest in the show's history, for starters."

Brian! We can explain Lana Del Rey to you just as if you were our roommate! Failing that, you can plumb the mystery of Lana Del Rey on Rock Center tonight, or read the item on "Lana Del Rey's Infamous SNL Performance" posted seven minutes before the leaked email on Gawker's homepage. Or ask your daughter Alison Williams, who's about to play a Brooklyn hippster [sic] on TV!

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Dr. Anita Hill with a bunch of white guys.

This afternoon, Time magazine held its annual lunch and panel for it's prestigious person of the year issue. We went in with our money on Occupy Wall Street, but most of our other journo diners seemed to take it as a given that the honor would be bestowed on Steve Jobs.

It was an impressive panel led by Time's Rich Stengel: NBC's Brian Williams, Anita Hill, Jesse Eisenberg, Mario Batali, Seth Meyers, and Grover Norquist, president of the advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform.

The panelists themselves were split about the Jobs vs. the Arab Spring/OWS phenomenon (which Mr. Eisenberg voted for as a general "Populist Movement.") Mr. Williams cast his lot for the Apple founder, though Mr. Stengel was quick to point out that Time has never chosen a deceased person for their cover. (As if that would be a big deal...they put the friggin' iPad on there.) MSNBC contributor and Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? author Toure may have had the only good point against putting Jobs on the cover, which he likened to giving someone who died an Academy Award even if they didn't give the best performance. "Did Steve Jobs actually change the world in 2011?" he asked the panelists. Mr. Stengel also likened putting Mr. Jobs on the cover with giving someone "a lifetime achievement award."

Mr. Batali was pro-Jobs, saying: "The smartphone has changed the world as much as the Bible has."

Mr. Williams worried that giving the honor of "Person of the year" to a protest wouldn't sit well with readers. "There is an institutional distaste for a movement without a face."

Perhaps that is why Dr. Hill chose  Elizabeth Warren for her attempts to enact real change in Washington. She also nominated a woman involved in the uprising from Cairo, because a "social justice movement" was more important than the technology behind it.

Mr. Meyers cast his lot with Nicolas Sarkozy or Angela Merkel should be in consideration for their role in trying to stop the euro debt crisis, but didn't know if they would end up being considered heroes or villains when the dust cleared.

Eloquent on stage, Mr. Eisenberg sounded like Jeff Goldblum on meth after the panel when we tried to ask him about Occupy Wall Street. Had he been down? What did he think of it?

"Sure, sure, sure," Jesse said, nodding his head vigorously.

Wait...so...he has been down to Zuccotti Park?

"Sure, yes, I have."

Thoughts?

"These protests are, uh, always good and, I hope that, you know, it grows into something."

There went our hope that the Social Network actor had winked at us earlier...it was probably just an involuntary tic.

Zak Pelaccio’s Williamsburg hotspot Fatty ‘Cue opened its West Village outpost last month, and, now, Bedford Cheese Shop—probably Brooklyn’s most noted cheese monger—has signed a 15-year lease at 67 Irving Place.

Besides grabbing 5,000 square feet of high-end retail space in Gramercy Park near Mario Batali’s Bar Jamon and historic Pete’s Tavern, the cheese purveyor’s landlord has also agreed to modify the space to make it more Williamsburg-y.

“The doors and façade will be changed. We’ll make it more suitable to Williamsburg clients,” said George Constantin, Principal at Heritage Realty Services, the operator of 67 Irving Place.

The landlord is a high net-worth European family, which owns the building through a corporation in the Netherlands, said Mr. Constantin.

The boutique cheese purveyor, which currently operates at 229 Bedford Avenue, will pay $240,000 in annual rent, or about $80 per square foot. They plan to offer cheese classes and charcuterie in addition to lots of fromage at the new location.

The 12-story, 46,000-square-foot Gramercy Park address is home to retail and commercial tenants, and close to the Union Square subway station.

Al Lawrence of Heritage Realty Services represented the landlord, Puble N.V., and David Chaiken of Sunburst Advisors represented the tenant.

Word has it: Brian Williams is—yes—a professed fan of Gawker, and was subsequently introduced to Nick Denton through a mutual acquaintance,  Brian's daughter Allison Williams' current beau, College Humor founder Ricky Van Veen. Brian Williams and Nick Denton then became email penpals, and a lunch was set up for the two of them and some editorial staffers over at Gawker.

Mr. Denton was contacted for comment on this groundbreaking meeting of the minds, but he's likely breaking bread (literally) with Williams at the moment, and wasn't able to get back to The Transom on the fly.

And now you know: This is how your media power lunch sausage is made. Never underestimate the power of gossiping about one's love life and the byproduct of ego-flattery (ergo, networking) that comes with it.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Harry Smith (Getty Images)

Another shift in the TV-news landscape today, as Harry Smith--the former anchor of CBS's beleaguered Early Show--departs for NBC News, where he will work on Brian Williams's as-yet untitled primetime newsmagazine. The glossy allure of new projects (a new prime-time show luring talent like Mr. Smith, a new talk show for Katie Couric) just can't hold up to the dubious lures of ever-struggling CBS News!

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

“Well,” NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams told the Transom, “we’re surrounded by irony.”

He gestured towards the room’s boom-time centerpiece. “We’re having this conversation 10 feet from a sculpture of a bull nicely mimicking [the one] on Wall Street, and standing on, um, help me with the imagery...” Mr. Williams said. We did. “Yes!” he said. “A pile of money.”

Subtlety be damned! Or so screamed the four Robert Indiana paintings reconfigured from the iconic L-O-V-E to spell H-O-P-E. Under them, Warren Buffett sat with five women, snacking on pastries. George Soros ambled about, at one point breezing by Mr. Sorkin when the Times writer attempted a handshake. Mr. Soros spent the rest of the night at a table—also filled with women—in plain sight, unmolested. Other subjects Mr. Sorkin reports on mingled around the pool, along with some of the actors—James Woods, Topher Grace, William Hurt, Paul Giamatti—paid to portray them.

Yet, for Mr. Sorkin, one particularly accurate performance stood out.

“I play a reporter for about four seconds,” he said. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, ‘How did I prepare for that?’ Well, it was really torturous.”

“He’s unusually capable of imitating a human being!” chimed in fellow Times man David Carr. “You go, ‘God he’s really nice,’ but then you see his work and you go, ‘There must be something secretly evil about him.’ But there’s not!”

“The check is in the mail for this man,” Mr. Sorkin concluded.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Some typical responses from Mr. De Niro: “I’m O.K.” “I am and I’m not.” “No.” “Yeah.” “What?”

Closing the conversation, Mr. Williams eased out of his triumphant deadpan, returning to newsman mode and forcing the actor and film festival founder to fashion a real response. 

“When you go on IMDb,” Mr. Williams said, “the lead sentence alongside a picture of our guest today and our founder of all of this is ‘Robert Mario De Niro, Jr., who is thought of as one of the greatest actors of all time, was born in New York City.’ That’s all we need to say.”

“Wait, wait, wait!” the actor countered. “My middle name is Anthony!”

This mattered little to the audience giving the standing ovation at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center—the actor does not need anything between “Bobby” and “De Niro” to sell tickets to the films he picks for his festival. The perpetual line around the block stuffed the plaza. Granted, The Observer chose to attend the flashiest of the events, the films with boldface names, the premieres that could rival Tribeca’s opponents on the festival circuit.

And so the personally curated schedule seemed like spectacle, imported from the West Coast. Scenes at the parties reeked of L.A. As we navigated the schedule’s first half, The Observer spent screenings jittery from chugging free cappuccinos and then jetted to the obligatory bashes, each packed with the same flavored-vodka cocktails.

Last Thursday The Observer slouched late and tired into a tote-bag-laden seat for The Bang Bang Club. It’s a picture about war photographers, a topic made tragically timely by the deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Libya. As lucky ticket holders took their seats, Taylor Kitsch, who plays one of the featured photographers, stood and merrily flicked off three women who catcalled him from the back. Later, at the after-party, Mr. Kitsch entertained the guests flocking by the useless pool table at the useless faux-boîte La Bottega with a quick stand atop a dining booth, girl clutched to his side.

Paul Haggis, the screenwriter, was having a glass of white wine. “I’m only here for a few days before I’m taking off,” he told The Observer. He was going back home to L.A.

And you, Ryan Phillippe, star of the movie we’re celebrating—surely you’re staying for more Tribeca action, right? “I’d like to but I’m flying back to L.A. tomorrow,” Mr. Phillippe said to. 

The documentary God Bless Ozzy Osbourne, which screened Sunday, detailed the Prince of Darkness’ descent into harrowing substance abuse that left him as a stammering, pill-popping dad on The Osbournes. It had its fans.

“Rock ’n’ roll!” shouted a man before the lights dimmed. He repeated this chant, unprompted and unwelcomed. Other heckles from the one-man peanut gallery: “Boring!” “Shut up, bitch!” “Been there, done that.” The seemingly superfluous members of New York’s finest suddenly had a job to do—they gently, then firmly, warned the guy that, no, you cannot yell at a movie screen. He still did, every time a member of Black Sabbath appeared.

It’s a shame the men and women in blue opted out of the after-party, as assault-prone Paz de la Huerta stopped by draped in leopard print. She refrained from swinging fists but did sway her lankiness through the nautical knickknacks spangled all over Anchor Bar, her brows heavy and forehead pleated. She settled down with Kelly Osbourne. Having just watched a documentary about his crippling addiction to alcohol, Mr. Osbourne left the vodka to The Observer and succumbed to no more than a quesadilla wedge.

And then Last Night, two hours of Keira Knightley fretting and pouting as she and her husband ponder extramarital flings. On film, Ms. Knightly dwelled mostly in Soho House, but after the screening, its viewers had to suffer Avenue, its slim alleyway crushed by the thick ripples of sport coats clutching wineglasses. As The Observer leaned from the beamed catwalk above, Courtney Love chatted up a capped Liev Schreiber, Eva Mendes replicated her character’s allure and hands everywhere snapped up the requisite coconut shrimp.

It became clear that neither Ms. Knightley nor her co-star was going to make it to the party. And where was Mr. De Niro, “one of the greatest actors of all time”?  The Observer instead spotted Gilbert Gottfried against the wall, and knew it was time to leave.