"Richard is one of the finest writers I have worked with, and I am thrilled he is bringing his unique voice to The Atlantic Wire," said Mr. Snyder, who has been the site's editor since January. Certainly, Mr. Lawson will bring a "New York tone" to the brand, something Mr. Snyder told The New York Observer was part of his plan to revamp the site.

Mr. Lawson has been working at Gawker since 2007, making his way up from ad sales to writer, based in no small part due to his popularity as a commenter, LolCait. In July of 2009, Mr. Lawson left the site to write for TV.com; he was back at Gawker in his old chair by December.

Of his new gig, Mr. Lawson told The Observer, "I am very excited about moving to The Wire." (We hope this starts a trend of referring to The Atlantic's online property like it's an HBO show about drug gangs in Baltimore.) "Both Remy (Stern, Gawker's current editor in chief) and Nick were very gracious of my decision; I think they both knew that I wanted to do other writing."

As for what he'll be covering, Mr. Lawson sadly informs us that for right now, he doesn't think he'll be doing recaps of any Real Housewives shows. "I believe it's going to be mostly blog stuff and reviews," he told us, adding that original content such as celeb interviews might be on the table as well.

Any chance we'll be seeing his name back on the Gawker masthead in six months? "I hope this time it sticks," Mr. Lawson laughed. If he doesn't return, well, we'll always have Paris.

Mr. Carr presents an example from The Huffington Post — "Obama Rejects Rush Limbaugh Golf Match: Rush 'Can Play With Himself'" — to show what best practice has to offer in 2010.

It’s digital nirvana: two highly searched proper nouns followed by a smutty entendre, a headline that both the red and the blue may be compelled to click, and the readers of the site can have a laugh while the headline delivers great visibility out on the Web.

Gabriel Snyder, who took over as executive editor of Newsweek.com after his exit from Gawker, told Mr. Carr that he thinks of headlines on the internet as “naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.”

Sites like The Huffington Post have continued to test multiple headlines and see which gets more clicks, according to Mr. Carr, while Politico's new site TBD.com writes headlines with clarity in mind so that readers scrolling past hundreds of stories (on an RSS reader, for example) will be able to know what they're getting when they click.

The length of these headlines is another consideration, and shorter is better.

"Google’s crawlers and aggregators like Digg quit paying attention after 60 characters or so, long before readers might," writes Mr. Carr.

Long before joining The New York Times, Mr. Carr worked for years, editing The Washington CityPaper, and writing lots of punchy, newspaper headlines.

This morning we pondered what a web-friendly headline would have been for Jake Tapper's Washington City Paper story about dating Monica Lewinsky from twelve years ago, entitled "I dated Monica Lewinsky."

Huffington Post media editor Danny Shea, himself a master in the arts of S.E.O. friendly headlines, chimed in with an idea: "Monica Lewinsky Boyfriend: My Date With Bill Clinton's Blow Job Intern."

“Ah, this is going to be fun,” posted Nick Denton when Cityfile went live in 2008.

Among the information contained in the site’s 2,000-plus profiles: the Gawker czar’s own middle name—“Guido.”

He was duly impressed. And he seems not to have forgotten.

Cityfile went from fun Web diversion to serious business proposition this week, when Denton announced he had bought the site, making it Gawker Media’s first acquisition. Gawker editor in chief Gabriel Snyder was out. Cityfile founder Remy Stern would be taking the helm at Mr. Denton’s flagship blog.

>>READ MOLLY FISCHER'S PIECE ON THE CITYFILE ACQUISITION

Longtime Gawker readers have gotten used to Mr. Denton’s aggressive staffing (and unstaffing) strategies. Mr. Snyder had an impressive tenure, distinguished by the very sort of expansion that Mr. Denton apparently wanted—but even success on the overlord’s own terms was no guarantee of safety.

So it goes: At this point, Mr. Denton takes any outcry in stride.

“It’s all to be expected,” he said via instant message (his preferred mode of communication) on Tuesday. “The journalists see this as more evidence of their newly Hobbesian existence.”

But the Cityfile acquisition made the news seem bigger, as though Mr. Denton’s plans for world domination were entering a dramatic new phase. This wasn’t just employment shuffles and stressed-out staffers. This was about the identity of Gawker itself. Mr. Denton wrote in his announcement memo that Cityfile would serve as “the New York and media industry channel on Gawker.” Which sounds a lot like “the Gawker on Gawker.”

So if Cityfile becomes Gawker, what does Gawker become?

“Gawker’s explicitly been a national site since the end of the Choire era in 2007,” Mr. Denton insisted, referring to former Gawker editor (and former Observer staffer) Choire Sicha. “And even before that, we had nearly as many readers in California [as] we did in New York.” The audience underwent what Mr. Denton calls a “massive expansion” in the past three years, a period that saw Gawker fold in regional sites Valleywag and Defamer.

“The irony,” he said, “is that we were left without a channel for the old Gawker. There are—even now—some people who want high media gossip and news about Manhattan power-brokers. … There just aren’t that many of those readers. They’re important and influential—but not that numerous.”

Younger readers, he says, care more about Mark Zuckerberg than Mort Zuckerman.

But Cityfile does more than serve a readership that Mr. Denton now sees as somewhat marginal. It also provides a hefty resource: its archive of reference articles and ready-made profiles of noteworthy New Yorkers designed to draw eyeballs and search engines alike to the site.

“Google—and the readers—love reference articles,” Mr. Denton said. “Much more than they love a bitty news story, actually.” Sure, in contrast to Gawker, Cityfile’s tone is “distinctively dry”—but think of the page views!

Which is not to say Mr. Denton has abandoned the strategy of nabbing talent rather than properties.

“One thing people haven’t picked up: Remy was key to Radar magazine’s online property,” Denton said. “We went after Remy several times—going as far back as 2004.” This time: “We just happened finally to be at the same place at the same time—like formerly star-crossed lovers.”

Before it was dead, Radar was “a deadly rival,” and Mr. Denton has an affinity for Radar refugees: In addition to Mr. Stern, there’s investigative reporter John Cook, and Mr. Denton says that he’s tried to hire Jeff Bercovici and Neel Shah “on several occasions.”

“Radar was a great magazine that should never have been a magazine,” Mr. Denton said. “It would be ironic if we were the ones to realize Maer Roshan’s dream.”

Amid all the Snyder drama, Gawker weekend editor Foster Kamer announced that he’s leaving to blog for The Village Voice. But even given the editorial turmoil, he does so with a measure of regret.

“I drank a very, very large cup of the Kool-Aid,” he said. “Great, old talent is coming to Gawker”—like Jessica Coen, the first blogger he says he ever read. And the new EIC himself: “Shit, I won’t get to work with Remy.”

Mr. Denton encounters a lot of “hostility” from the print media world—because, Mr. Kamer thinks, they’re not sure whether he’s one of them, and he isn’t. “But does he have a little bit of George Hearst in him? Yeah.”

Mr. Denton won’t go that far. Carving out a role as the 21st century’s version of a print mogul? “No idea,” he said.

“We always liked the magazine and cable models,” Mr. Denton said. “Properties with personality—organized around people’s identities and passions. I think at one point we even said we wanted the same portfolio as Condé Nast: 17. But they have fewer now, I guess.”

mfischer@observer

More from Molly Fischer:

Gawker Fires and Acquires

At 400 Million Pageviews, Denton Urges Bloggers Onward

The Awl has two in-house memos heralding the changes, which apparently went out one minute apart.

In Denton's announcement of the Cityfile purchase, he writes:

The company is making its first acquisition: Cityfile, the New York news site founded by Remy Stern. The price is not being disclosed.

Cityfile will be the New York and media industry channel on Gawker, alongside Valleywag and Defamer, our tech and entertainment sub-sites. Cityfile's 2,000-plus profiles of New York notables will be the centerpiece of our new topic and people pages. And Remy Stern, a former writer on several Gawker sites and editor at the now-legendary Radar magazine, will take over as editor-in-chief of Gawker. He starts on February 22nd.

We had hoped to persuade Gabriel Snyder to stay in a management role. But he's moving on. With help from an awesomely strong team of writers and the new Gawker.tv operation, Gabriel doubled Gawker's audience during his tenure (http://bit.ly/c6BXk8.) To anyone out there looking to build up an online property: snap him up quickly.

Snyder's goodbye memo provides a more terse summary:

Honesty is Gawker's only virtue, so it seems inappropriate to engage in the usual corporate euphemisms of "wanting to explore new new opportunities" or "take a larger role in the company" or "spend more time with my family" (though eighteen-hour days and seven-day work weeks do take their toll on personal relationships), so I'll put this as plainly as we'd report any other masthead ouster: I am being canned.

Cityfile's site already links to a new Gawker channel.

He'll be covering covering a variety of things: his old beat in television; he'll respond to the day's news when he's got something to say; and he'll be digging through FOIAs and courthouse documents for topics "that align with the stuff Gawker does," something the Web site has long been after but hasn't found anyone with the time or resources to do.

And Mr. Cook, a writer whom Nick Denton has coveted for some time, seems like he has finally relented to Mr. Denton's way of thinking.

"Look, if the Daily News isn't there in three years or in two years or in however many years it takes, there's still going to be an appetite for the things they do and there will be places like Gawker to fill that role."

Mr. Cook said that Gawker will pick up the slack from fading newspapers and magazines.

"Nick and [Gawker editor] Gabriel [Snyder] and I had been talking about—and this is Nick’s term—is iterative reporting, or iterative journalism," he said. "One of the things we want to do is the kind of story that would be potentially a two-, a three-, a four-, or five-thousand-word investigative-type story that might be in a magazine or newspaper but do it one post at a time and toss seeds out and threads out and see what happens."

He pointed to the Josh Marshall method.

"We don’t want to do things that are long," he said. "That stuff doesn’t work. I was accustomed to doing the kind of thing where you spend six weeks reporting and working on a story and developing sources and finding new information and doing all the things you do for a 5,000-word story, and then you sit down, you collect it all and you write it, and it's edited and published. You take that amount of work and the amount of the skill that it requires and here you'd just do it live. You start with whatever your first nugget of information is and put it out there and see what develops. It's an opening-up-the-notebook kind of thing."

Mr. Cook has been out of work ever since Radar folded last September. He was a longtime ally to Maer Roshan, so we wondered if he's been sitting on his hands the last few months waiting and hoping if Mr. Roshan would be developing something else he could jump on board for.

"Radar went under nine days after my son was born," he said. "I got a call, while I was on paternity leave, that said come in and get your stuff. And so the upside is, I've been able to raise him for his first couple of months. The downside is, I didn't have any income from my side. Maer’s an editor at large for the Daily Beast and I’ve talked to him about stuff about the Daily Beast and freelance stuff. I haven’t been waiting for his next move."

And would Gawker's notoriously stressful pace finally drive Mr. Cook back to cigarettes? No, he assures, his Nicorette pack will take care of that.

"I'm chewing it right now," he said. "It increases efficiency."

Mr. Pareene is going part-time for Gawker, which means he'll be working a few days out of the week for the Web site and the rest of the time working on "other projects," he sad.

Last week, Mr. Pareene told us that he wasn't too pleased with the new mandatory weekend shifts for Gawker writers, and that he was ready to quit. He said he was getting sick of the new site redesign ("Which I'm not a huge fan of") as well, and that he'd had enough.

"It's something that’s been bubbling up for a while," he told Media Mob.

Gabriel Snyder, Gawker's new Managing Editor, apparently was able to talk him off the ledge.

"He came to me and said he was burnt out and I tried to convince him to stay," said Mr. Snyder. "We talked about him going to a part time thing in the new year and we're still working on the details."

In other Gawker Media news, two employees have been laid off from the tech side, and one of those jobs will apparently be outsourced to a person in Budapest —something Nick Denton warned us that he'd be doing about a month ago.

Gawker.com's managing editor Gabriel Snyder wrote in a note to his staff that each writer would be required to edit the Web site on Saturdays and Sundays , on a rotational basis. "This person will be responsible for posting beginning at 10am and doing at least six posts on Saturday and then at least four on Sunday, also starting at 10am," he wrote. "These are both designed to be half-day posting loads, but the news editor will be responsible for keeping on top of news as it breaks throughout the day, so don't plan on wandering too far away from your computer. As a comp day, you will get the Friday preceding your shift off."

In addition, for those writers who aren't required to edit the Web site that weekend, they are expected to contribute three posts in advance that can be rolled out on Saturdays and Sundays.

The news hasn't gone over well at Gawker.

"I was bitching about it," said Alex Pareene, one of Gawker's day editors. "Everyone is upset about it."

Starting in January, the pay-per-pageview model used to compensate each Gawker writer will be supsended, according to Mr. Pareene. Writers will rely on a regular salary, so they won't be able to benefit financially by driving in big traffic numbers during their working weekends.

"They just laid off Sheila," he said, referring to Sheila McClear, who was let go earlier this month. (Ms. McClear contributes to The Observer as well.) "If you want a 24 hour Gawker running, set aside the resources to keep it running for 24 hours."

Gawker has been in need of a new weekend editor ever since Ian Spiegelman left. The former Page Sixer apparently wasn't too pleased with the upcoming page view-pay model freeze.

Nick Denton, for his part, said that the weekend plan is "nothing new," and that in the first half of the year, while he was managing editor, he would regularly contribute during weekends, and so would his staff.

Mr. Denton said he'd also be on the rotation for Gawker's flagship site, and said he thinks it "sucks."

"None of them RSVP'd, none of them said yes or no," he said last night, while speaking to a reporter, Gabriel Snyder from Gawker, Gawker czar Nick Denton and David Carey, the group president of Condé Nast.

We couldn't even find News Corp spokesman Gary Ginsberg!

Well, truth be told, one person did reply to his invite: New York Post editor Col Allan who told Mr. Wolff to lose his e-mail address and never to write again.

We'll take that as a 'no.'

Much was made of how Mr. Wolff's party had to be rescheduled for Tuesday night instead of Monday so it wouldn't conflict with Wendi Murdoch's blowout birthday party at the Gramercy hotel on Monday.

Invites were sent out a few weeks ago saying the party was scheduled for Monday, before a new email said it would be Tuesday.

Everyone figured, Okay, scheduling conflict!

So we got excited we'd see the Murdochs. But we were confused when we couldn't find the Murdochs.

Mr. Wolff said that was all a big misunderstanding.

"We just made a mistake," he said. "It really wasn't for the eighth [Monday], but it was was always for ninth [Tuesday], and then someone came along said, 'Oh! That must have come that because...'"

"Look, the truth is we had no idea," he continued.

In any event, he said the door was open for Mr. Murdoch.

"We're waiting," said Mr. Wolff.

Once we got off that topic, we talked about what Mr. Murdoch likes and dislikes. Apparently there are only a couple people he likes in media.

"Well, you know Rupert really likes Si [Newhouse]," he said. "There are very, very, very few people Rupert likes. In fact, I can name Silvio Berlusconi and Si. That's it."

"He not only knows Si, they almost got into business a few times," he continued. "He tried to get Si to buy FOX with him."

"He talked about everybody with me, and there's no one he refused to talk about. The only two people that he said nice things about were Si Newhouse and Silvio Berlusconi."

Why did he like Si so much, we asked?

"Rupert likes people who have really, really, really, a lot, a great amount of money," he said.

Mr. Wolff's party took place in the Penthouse of Milk Studios and offered a delightful outdoor deck with views of New Jersey, which looked lovely. The party had an open bar of red and white wine and champagne that went beyond the 8:30 p.m. closing time for the party. Even though the Murdochs were a no-show, the party had plenty of media people: in addition to Messrs. Denton, Snyder, and Carey, we saw Time, Inc. managing editor Jim Kelly, The New York Times' Nick Confessore, New York Magazine's Jesse Oxfeld, Portfolio's David Margolick, Jeff Bercovici and Lloyd Grove, and NBC's Jonathan Wald.

Another person we bumped into was Michael Jackson, who we heard had recently given up his title of president of programming at Barry Diller's IAC. He's now a senior advisor.

"I'm working for the larger IAC on various projects, and I'm doing something myself," he said.

What's he working on?

"I can't say yet!" he said.

So why the new position?

"IAC is concentrating very much on its search business," he said. "There's less room for smaller, start-up content businesses."

After talking with Mr. Jackson a bit, we took another look around the room. Still no sign of Rupert.

Mr. Roshan was surveying his party, the night before Halloween, which had become a kind of Night of the Living Dead for journalism. "PRINT IS DEAD! LONG LIVE RADAR!" read the invitation, which was retooled after a recent development at the magazine.

Six days before his staff had been given a couple of hours to pack everything at their desks into collapsible white boxes and shove out, after the sudden declaration from his sponsors that the magazine was officially kaput, his staffers, many of whom have been fixtures in the young journalism scene in New York for years now, mingled with their media friends at the bar, Citrine, in Chelsea; not yet officially opened, the walk-up spot, which looks a bit like a Hell's Kitchen gay bar, has already held parties for Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s daughter and Heatherette seamstress Richie Rich.

Mr. Roshan's was a glossy magazine, so there were loads of stylists and photographers around, too, and Shannen Doherty, the magazine's last cover star, who added a weird gallowsy punch line to the invite list.

"When I started Radar, I kept thinking about Jann Wenner, Hugh Heffner and Gloria Steinem and a time when you could actually say, 'I want to start a magazine!' And do it," he said. "That's what always compelled me. I felt like we could be like that."

Instead, this. Free drinks at Citrine, unemployed.

Free for a time from the immediate postmortems, Mr. Roshan was able to take a more general picture of the Manhattan media universe.

"People are much less willing to gamble on ideas," he said. "Those magazines worked because those were visions that people struggled for. All of that has been rounded down by bureaucrats that come up with things like Men's Vogue."

And after all, the bureaucrats aren't doing much better. Earlier that day, Men's Vogue was scaled back from a monthly to a twice-a-year affair. Only so many watches you can sell against fey photo spreads of men in outfits.

The chill even radiated from the gainfully employed.

"I've actually been looking into worst-case-scenario ideas, like being a waiter at Oscar at the Waldorf because I know they're really old there," said Michael Musto, veteran columnist of The Village Voice. "But I've been told those are union positions, so you can't just break into that! I guess I'll be stuck working in an elevator. I don't have any skills." But you know what they say about working in an elevator …

Gabriel Snyder, the new managing editor of Gawker (and a former writer of the Off the Record column at this newspaper), may have taken the last available media job in Manhattan. He was telling us a story about how these sort of crashes have happened before. Remember the dot-com crash? It happened to inside.com. And when they were laid off they were talking about the new jobs they were getting--and David Carr and Kurt Andersen were there!

"Everyone was talking about what their passion was," he said. "'I want to get a job at a fashion company!' Or 'I want to go to cooking school!' A lot of them did get jobs. But a lot of them …"

That's part of the morbid appeal of a party like this—not just to a still-working observer but to everyone, like Graduation Day. Where will we all be five years from now?

Neel Shah, a Radar reporter until a week ago, is one guy we happen to know has not been short on job offers lately. But not even he was sounding very optimistic.

"A friend of mine is an editorial assistant at a magazine," he said. "He's going to go into grad school in visual arts or photography."

Is there no hope left in our line of work?

"You probably can go into the PR world," he said.

Of course the other big news out of Oct. 30 was that at Portfolio, the Condé Nast business glossy, 20 percent of the budget was being cut, and much of the Web staff would be laid off. We found Jeff Bercovici, writer of the Mixed Media blog on portfolio.com, who has missed much of the on-the-ground action this week due to a bout of jury duty. He hasn't been fired, but it was unclear whether he was safe.

"If I were breaking in now, I would learn how to shoot and edit video," he said. He's one of those people with a charming story about falling into his journalism career by accident. A classic tale. That's how all the old greats did it. But it's rare now. There's journalism school. And the inexplicable desirability of this line of work among Ivy Leaguers, which, if you think about it, is a fairly recent development.

"You can't fall on your ass backwards and get into journalism anymore," he said. The question of the night, though, was whether you can fall on your ass backwards and get out.

Ben Widdicombe, former gossip columnist for the Daily News, and currently an editor at large at Star, is spending less time writing and lots of time on TV. What a medium!

"New York is one of the tough cities," he said. "The strong survive, and the weak move to Pittsburgh."

As has been speculated, Gabriel Snyder, most recently of W and formerly of The Observer, will be replacing Nick Denton as Gawker's managing editor.

Gawker is also letting go 19 employees. We also hear that Moe Tkacik, who was brought to Gawker from Jezebel after she nearly left for Radar, is among those being let go.

Mr. Denton's memo: