Coming to a 3 a.m. near you! (YouTube)

Anyway,for as many women as he claimed to have boned (250 or so) in his 2007-2009 heyday, he was also a creep who deflected some serious attempted rape charges and then bragged about it on Dr. Phil.

For the past four years however, Janka has been off the grid. We assumed he met an inevitable fate in a Thai prison, but the slick-haired stubble-puss love-child of Dylan McDermott and 80s soap star Don Diamont resurfaced last month in Austin, Texas, giving an interview to Highbrow Magazine. Obviously. Obviously that is the correct publication for Mr. Janka to make his comeback. So, what has he been doing for almost half a decade?

He's been getting super rich, if his word (and the magazine's) is to be believed. PaulJanka.com, where the PUA sells his book as well as tickets to his seminars on skeeving out ladies, wasn't making much money until 2011, when "everything changed."

After hiring a fulltime ad-buyer to generate website traffic, the business began bringing in the bucks with 1.2 million dollars in sales and Janka anticipates 2012 ending similarly. Although primarily Web-based up until this point, Janka was recently in Los Angeles shooting an infomercial that could begin hitting the late-night airwaves usually reserved for super-charged blenders and wearable blankets in early 2013.

So...by "everything changing," we really mean Mr. Janka "hired someone to buy advertising and raise traffic." That's pretty mundane. But whoa-my-god, Paul Janka infomercials? Is the world really ready for this? Are late night infomercials really still a way to make money? Aren't there enough sexually dangerous men talking to you late at night to begin with?

Well, maybe not, since Vince Offer left ShamWow to start beating hookers and making hi-larious movies with Adrien Brody. It looks like a position just opened up, Mr. Janka! And no, that's not what she said.

"Scocca wanted to write about politics and media. He and Cook are pretty much the dream team at Gawker," Gawker head honcho told us in an email. "And Emma's on a site lead track for us. This was on the cards last week, but Slate was also making a run at Scocca. That had to play out."

Well played.

"We saw a chance to get younger," Deadspin editor Tommy Craggs said in the post. "We appreciate all the veteran leadership Tom has given us, but this is a young person's game. Emma gives us a much-needed shot in the arm."

Mr. Scocca went over to Deadspin from Slate back in June 2011.

"It's a tremendous opportunity for me, but it's been a great ride here," Mr. Scocca said in the announcement. "You'll go a long time before you'll see the kind of back-to-back imperiousness Craggs and I had going. And it'll sure be different without these Deadspin fans."

The trade marks a return for Ms. Carmichael. The Vassar grad started working at Deadspin immediately after graduating in 2010. She became Gawker's first managing editor when she moved over last year.

"There's no question about it, it doesn't get any better than this," said Ms. Carmichael in the Deadspin post. "I'd like to thank my Lord and savior and also Nick Denton for this opportunity. I'll miss Gawker, but it is what it is."

(Updated: 3:44)

A.J. Daulerio (Photo: Facebook)

Gawker editor-in-chief A.J. Daulerio is leaving the site. He sent out a memo to Gawker staff this afternoon shortly after the news broke on NY Mag's Daily Intelligencer blog. In his email announcing his departure, Mr. Daulerio was vague about his future plans.

"This is the right move for the site in 2013," he wrote. "As for 2014, who the fuck knows?"

Mr. Daulerio joined Gawker in December 2011 from Gawker Media's sports site Deadspin. He will be replaced by Gawker writer John Cook. Sources told the Observer Mr. Daulerio had recently asked Gawker head honcho Nick Denton to take a higher position overseeing multiple blogs at the Gawker Media network but was told by Mr. Denton that he was not "responsible" enough. In spite of this, other sources at the company say he quit and was not fired by Mr. Denton.

Mr. Denton sent out an email of his own in which he praised Mr. Daulerio for improving the site while  taking "the pressure off writers to deliver traffic with every piece."

"AJ's tenure at Gawker has been much like him: bold, infuriating, unpredictable... and often brilliant," Mr. Denton wrote. "He's melded both the writers he inherited and new hires into the strongest editorial team Gawker has ever seen. I don't know how he does it. I mean, I really don't fully understand: AJ breaks all the usual rules of orthodox management and has still been the most successful editor of Gawker.com. (As a former editor of the site myself, I'm slightly piqued.)"

Mr. Denton also expressed confidence Mr. Cook will "will preserve the crew and build on the success of 2012."

In an email to the Observer, Mr. Daulerio quoted an infamous line from his girlfriend, erstwhile Vice columnist Cat Marnell, to describe his next move.

"I plan to hang out on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars smoking angel dust with my friends," he wrote.

Mr. Denton told us to "ask AJ and John about their plans."

Read Mr. Daulerio and Mr. Denton's full emails below.

Mr. Daulerio's email to Gawker staff.

"For those of you not in the people aquarium meeting a few short minutes ago, it is my duty to inform you via email that I'm leaving Gawker Media. John Cook is the new editor of Gawker.com. This makes me extremely happy.This is the right move for the site in 2013. As for 2014, who the fuck knows? You should keep that attitude and continue to make this site work for you right now. That's what makes it fun. 

You were all hired here (or kept here) for a reason. 

If you have questions, you know I will be here to answer them even after John takes over this desktop covered in Vaseline.

xoxoxoxo.

Onward."

Mr. Denton's email to Gawker staff:

"Date: Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 5:28 PM
Subject: Fwd: Dear Staff

But other than that, the assumptions of publicists, clients and journalists—that being featured matters, that being written about will drive awareness or sales or public image—are a collective chimera. The widespread belief is that the media has "reach."

Trust me, they don't. Not anymore. It's become almost pathetic.

It hit me the other day when I snagged a profile for a client on a well-known website. The day it ran, the editor sent me an email: "Hey, we hate to ask but could you guys be sure to tweet and share the article for us?”

Dear God, I realized, my client has more readers than they do. The website needed us to attract an audience for them. They wanted the subject of the piece to send his readers over to them rather than the other way around.

This is our new media reality.

Today, after a media outlet or a blog writes about someone or something, the outlet typically engages in a frank discussion with that subject on how they can promote the piece together. The bigger the draw or online presence of the subject (whether an individual or a brand) being written about, the more conflicted the media is. A publisher can hardly expect to do solid journalism when the real reason they’re agreeing to the article is because the person has a lot of Twitter followers or a big email list.

The problem is, unlike the old days, when a media outlet could count on a set number of subscribers or tune-in viewers or newsstand sales, online there is more competition for everyone’s attention and no guarantee of anyone seeing what gets published.

Check out Forbes.com or Business Insider, two sites honest (or stupid) enough to show their pageview stats. Despite the sites’ huge viral reach, it’s not uncommon to catch articles with 250 views. Or 25. Or 2. Gawker has a better floor, but from time to time you’ll see a post do less than 1,000 views. Sure, these numbers are better than nothing, but these sites claim to have millions of “readers” each month. Many sites get far less. Which means that placing an item (as we used to say) is akin to pissing in the wind unless you’re willing to do the extra legwork of promoting it’s existence.

Check online versions of articles from some major magazines and you’ll notice the same thing: Most pieces draw zero comments (another way of saying nobody read it or cares). It’s true for this column as well: if I don't get it started on social media, there is a risk it could go unnoticed.

In an environment with zero publishing constraints—where it doesn’t cost anything to publish and there is infinite editorial space—most modern media outlets have adopted the simple but self-defeating strategy of publishing everything they possibly can. Translation: throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. Well, most doesn't.

Unsurprisingly, readers have an awkward relationship with this kind of content. Mostly, they don’t value or trust it much. So nobody—or basically nobody—reads Business Insider every morning. They read articles from Business Insider (or Politico or Buzzfeed or Huffington Post or Bleacher Report), in a one-off capacity. Most readers have probably never even seen the home pages of these sites.

Pulling up one site and browsing for good stuff is increasingly rare. Instead, we read the links that get passed around or come up in web searches. Or we see them on aggregators like Reddit or Google or Yahoo News. In other words, we’re an audience of glancers, and sites have to do whatever it takes to catch our eyes.

Aside from the obvious implications of this One Off reality—which mostly means more of the kind of content that is easy and fun to share, like BuzzFeed listicles—it undermines an important power once reserved by media outlets. They used to have an audience they served and could count on. This gave them an upper hand when it came to what or what not to write about. It allowed them to preserve an editorial mission and perspective.

Either that or was necessary illusion, because when nobody really knew how many old media subscribers actually plowed through that 7000 word feature on Richard Gere, we could at least hold onto hope. The media was in the driver’s seat because there wasn’t sufficient evidence to dispute their right to it.

Today, when stories risk going unread or unnoticed, the subjects of such coverage must ask themselves why they should bother cooperating at all. (For a small business, the equivalent is when Groupon or LivingSocial asks you to advertise their offer to your existing customers. Um, I thought you had your own audience and if you don't, why are we working together?) The purpose of getting media is exposure, to spread the word through an impartial source. If the media no longer has a dedicated audience, what good is it? Why would Taylor Swift (21.3M followers) ever need the New York Times (6.7M followers)? In the future, the Times might think twice about bashing Guy Fieri, considering he’s got nearly 1M of his own followers, a television platform and I’m sure an enormous mailing list.

As PR person, this means I’m doing two jobs. I take one of my clients and get them an excerpt or an article or a guest post on a "respected" outlet and then also have to drive an audience to it if I want people to know that it happened. Why not cut out the middleman and publish myself?

Simply put, it’s more effective to borrow a publication’s name. It makes an article seem less self-serving, more objective. And the website goes along with it because they need the pageviews. We create the news and then launder it via your “trusted” media outlets.

The saddest part is how the desperation for traffic makes media brands so easy to hijack. Marketing firms—the smart ones, anyway—will get an article published, then drive tens or hundreds of thousands of "visitors" to it through paid traffic sources like StumbleUpon in order to make sure that the article seems like a hit—driving it to the front page or most popular lists. (The same happens on YouTube, where the first 50-100,000 views might well be fake.) From here, cumulative advantage takes care of the rest.

How much longer media brands can greedily spend down the credibility that took decades to build? They sure aren’t making many deposits these days. In my view, it’s akin to a high fashion brand that started off doing a little bit of licensing with third parties but then grew addicted to the cheap cash flow. At some point, when you say yes to everything, you start undermining the intangibles that made the brand worth licensing in the first place…and the whole house comes crashing down.

It's a short term play by both parties—exploiting the difference between perception and reality. Outlets hoping to catch handfuls of the audiences they've lost their grips on, marketers and brands leveraging their own access to fans in order to get the "credibility" that comes from being featured. The result is readers being fed more crap news.

It’s going to stay that way—and getting press will continue to be of less and less value—until media outlets start thinking about a new business model.

Until then, I, along with every other public figure, brand, and business, am stuck tweeting about my own article. So please, for the love of god, share this on Facebook and Twitter for me. Thanks!

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of  Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator and a PR strategist for brands and writers. Follow him on Twitter: @RyanHoliday.

Dickdickdick. (Lifetime)

– Chris Brown wants to poop and fart on lady comedian; deletes Twitter account.

– Charlie Sheen once gave Lindsay Lohan a check for $100,000 to help out with her IRS "debt," which is one case of the blinded-by-syphilis leading the blinded-by-syphilis.

– Liz & Dick premiered last night on the Lifetime channel, and Twitter was very excited about it, but apparently it was awful, no d'oy.

– If you ever wanted to know how to destroy Goop, here's Gawker's handy guide.
– Justin Bieber no longer beloved by Canadians, even while being given a White Trash award by the nation's Prime Minster.

Gawker's Back!

Gawker Media sites returned to their regularly scheduled format last night after the websites posted on a new, spare looking tumblrs while the servers struggled to get up and running after they were flooded.

"Hey, Old Pre-Superstorm Sandy Gawker is Back, You Guys," Gawker EIC A.J. Daulerio posted last night. The tumblr had its fans, however. Mostly fans of the way things used to be, pre-Gawker redesign, post-invention of the Internet-weblog. And those fans will be inevitably disappointed that the site is back to normal. 

Oh well, it will take some time until all the tumblr posts are moved over onto Gawker sites. And, like all hurricane-related recovery, don't expect it to be a smooth process.

"So we're back. Kind of," wrote Mr. Daulerio. "There will be some other kinks obviously (ALWAYS) but let's just all pretend that tomorrow and the rest of the week will be somewhat back to normal for this site."

But stop complaining, commenters. Count your blessings. There are lots of people actually impacted by this storm. You know what, how about helping the recovery effort instead of reading blogs?

"We're still in better shape than most people and everyone who reads this site should devote some time this week to helping the Rockaways and Staten Island recover," Mr. Daulerio wrote. "Seriously. Do something."

Actually, there is no reason you can't waste time on the Internet and volunteer. There sure are a lot of hours in the day now that we are back in our offices.

Look familiar? (Screenshot: Gawker).

Natural disasters sure have a way of advancing a relationship, don't they? You go from drinks and late nights here and there to spending days together, unable to leave. It's like pushing the fast forward button on a relationship. You learn a lot about someone. Like that "Glamorous Drug Addict" you are hooking up with is kind of a handful. Who knew?

If you are Gawker EIC A.J. Daulerio and you spent Hurricane Sandy shacked up with Cat Marnell--or someone who sounds an awful lot like her (and looks like her too), you can use the opportunity to share all the things you learned with the world. 

Mr. Daulerio's post outlines eight simple rules for dating a "Glamorous Drug Addict."

"Be ready to explain to your Glamorous Drug Addict that the storm is really bad and that even though it looks like just a little rain, their life will be upended for a significant amount of time," wrote Mr. Daulerio. That is step one. Waiting out a storm can really take a toll on a relationship. And judging from this post, it was a stressful couple of days chez Daulerio. Ms. Marnell, who is referred to as "The Glamorous Drug Addict" throughout the post sounds like maybe not the best guest.

To judge from the post, the "Glamorous Drug Addict" left the "bedroom covered in debris like empty Coke Zero cans, Hawaiian punch bottles, stale bottles of poppers, Cheeto dust, donuts, and half-drank iced coffee, stray beauty supplies, empty packs of cigarettes, and random pills,"  slept for 12 hours on end, put her clothes outside to get that "weathered" look, refused to eat because getting fat during a Hurricane is lame and didn't seem to fully grasp the whole idea of the storm.

But worst of all? She didn't even say goodbye. Or thank you.

"The Glamorous Drug Addict will leave without warning, most likely while you’re sleeping," Mr. Daulerio wrote. "There will be no thank you note. There will be no goodbye."

Not even a thank you note? Geez. At least Mr. Daulerio can blog about it.

Not the best location for a server.

Gawker Media sites and BuzzFeed went down last night during the worst of the winds and rain, but they are up and running again--although Gawker is in a slightly different format. Both have servers at Datagram--which, incidentally, is in lower Manhattan and was heavily impacted by the storm.

Gawker sites went down around 7 pm last night. Late this morning, Gawker Media started posting on more spare-looking tumblr sites that were set up when the sites failed. Now, Nick Denton just wants to get the word out.

"If we're the indestructible cockroaches of the media world, now's the time to show it," Mr. Denton wrote in an staff email (full text below). 

BuzzFeed also started posting to a tumblr when their site went down last night, but has since rebuilt the site. "BuzzFeed is up and we expect it to remain up," BuzzFeed Press Manager Ashley McCollum emailed us this evening. "We're no longer operating off the compromised data center."

We're back up on Tumblr. But need to advertise the fact that we're still functioning. (Servers notwithstanding.).

Here's how you can do your bit. Go to our sites' Facebook and Twitter feeds and share the best stories you find with your own friends and
followers.

It's important not only to keep going -- but also to make a public show of that resilience. And what better way than to draw attention to our ability to pull ourselves together under any circumstance short of the apocalypse.

If we're the indestructible cockroaches of the media world, now's the time to show it.

"In a nutshell, it appears the emergency backup power did not kick in when Con Ed shut off power," Thomas Plunkett, Gawker's chief technology officer, emailed us last night. Gawker servers are at Datagram on Whitehall Street, which also hosts BuzzFeed and some Huffington Post servers, explained Mr. Plunkett. 

Karma's A Nice Person Sometimes: Recently let-go, widely-read, and widely-liked Village Voice staff writer (and, full disclosure, a former co-worker of this writer's) Camille Dodero was snapped up by Gawker as a writer there. The site's editor A.J. Daulerio on his estimable new hire, who starts September 24th:

"She's the tits."

Direct quote. [@AJDaulerio]

Drew-Hoo: New York Times multimedia editor Andrew DeVigal is leaving the paper for an "interactive studio" in Portland. Fence-jumper. [Tumblr]

From Reuters to Rock: Reuters senior media correspondent Yinka Adegoke is going to Billboard as Deputy Editor. [Billboard]

She Don't Want Your Life: Daily Beast columnist Michelle Goldberg apparently got into a pretty heated exchange with Varsity Blues actor Jon Voight.

Voight simmered for a moment and then said, “Take it easy there, shorty.” As Goldberg looked on in amazement, Voight sprang out of his low-slung chair. “Let’s just stand up, how tall are you?” he demanded, hovering over her a tad menacingly. 

She's basically Jonathan Moxon. As opposed to spending absurd amounts of money, starting fights at the RNC is not, in fact, the worst editorial strategy. [The Daily Beast]

Teach Me How To Shupak: NY1 "Rail and Road Report" morning celebrity and erstwhile Observer Media Power Bachelorette (Class of 2011) Jamie Shupak made a video with someone from the NY Daily News about How To Ride The Subway. Not sure she's actually an expert on this, per se, but if there's going to be one, it should be her. [YouTube]

Huffington Post Labs Exactly as Scary As It Sounds: While she might not be attaching giraffe parts to reporters for new blogging limbs, Arianna Huffington does have something called "Huffington Post Labs" where they're conducting crazy news experiments. The first one involves the most popular sentences on the Huffington Post, which is basically what news on the internet will be one day: A series of popular sentences. [TechCrunch]

A Rich Legacy: Is it a coincidence that Frank Rich got on Reddit not a day after Barack Obama did? Better yet, is there a better moment in that entire thread than when answered a question from a young woman in love with his son, Simon Rich, who wanted a "good word" put in for her? Rich's answer:

"Get in line."

My answer: Nope. [Romenesko]

Not Afraid To Be Servicey: One of the few genuinely nice organizations we'd love to see survive for future generations of Internet, or media, or multimedia, or whatever it is: StoryCorps now has a KickStarter page everyone should give money to. Alternately, everyone should go do a StoryCorps. [KickStarter]

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That's the end of the day, here. Tips, story ideas, Varsity Blues DVD easter eggs? We want to hear all of them. Tell us everything you know. | @weareyourfek