Geoff Manaugh. (Photo credit: Patrick McMullan).

Gizmodo, Gawker media’s tech blog, is getting a new editor and a new focus. Geoff Manaugh, a former senior editor at Dwell Magazine and contributing editor at Wired UK, will take over at Gizmodo. Mr. Manaugh will bring BLDGBLOG, his architecture and design website, along with him.

“We've hired Geoff Manaugh, one of the very coolest writers on design and technology, as EIC,” Gawker owner Nick Denton told us. “He's a big deal in his field. The only non-architect to lecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture.”

In what seems like a significant shift in focus from gadgets to design and ideas, Paleofuture, a blog about the history of the future, will also be brought in under the Gizmodo umbrella. Matt Novak, the editor of the website, which has been hosted by the Smithsonian, is also coming over.

But according to Mr. Denton, the shift is not really that dramatic.

“Gizmodo has always had more interest in design than specifications,” Mr. Denton said. “But it's increasingly clear that design -- of software and hardware -- makes the difference in consumer technology. And that technology is infusing systems from from urban infrastructure to the thermostat.”

The tech blog, which lost editor in chief Joe Brown to Wired back in February, recently hired Motherboard’s Adam Clark Estes and Fast Company’s Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, and is staffing up further. According to Mr. Denton, the site will hire six new staffers in the next few months—positions include writers covering architecture/urbanism, art/new aesthetic and design/branding. More expectedly, they are also looking for a San Francisco-based tech reporter and consumer electronics editor.

And like most of Mr. Denton’s projects right now, it’s really all about Kinja, Gawker media’s new publishing platform.

“The publishing system is optimized for discussion -- not just around text posts but images,” Mr. Denton said. “So that's another reason for this drive: design journalism is all about discussion of imagery. We have a publishing and discussion platform designed for that.”

Adam Clark Estes (Image via Twitter).

Adam Clark Estes is leaving Vice and The Atlantic Wire for Gizmodo, Gawker Media’s gadget blog. Mr. Estes gave notice on Friday at Vice’s Motherboard blog, where he was an associate editor, and The Atlantic Wire, where he was a contributing writer.

"I'm sad to leave both places but couldn't be more excited to get started at Gizmodo," Mr. Estes wrote via text. He will start in mid-May as a senior writer. 

Gawker overlord Nick Denton confirmed the hire this morning.

Gizmodo, which is still without an editor in chief (former EIC Joe Brown left Gizmodo to return to Wired in February and has yet to be replaced) switched over to the new Kinja format today.

Before going to The Atlantic Wire, Mr. Estes did stints as the social news editor and the citizen journalism editor at The Huffington Post and was an editor of IvyGate. Mr. Estes, who has bipolar disorder, also wrote about dating while manic for The Cut last summer.

Pogue's Phone Goes Rogue: New York Times technology columnist and living Times standards exemption David Pogue has lost his iPhone! He is a known fan of Apple products (and has also written some books about how to make the most out of them) but Apple has yet to respond to this crisis in the form of a Black-Ops Phone Recovery Delta Squad. Instead, it is the Gawker Media blog Gizmodo: Nerds With Attitude™ since 2002—that roguish buyer of secondary market iPhones and Apple's Public Enemy #1—that has come to the rescue. Lo and Behold, with the forces of Apple, David Pogue, Gizmodo, and The Police-Surveillance State, this crisis has been resolved amicably. [Gizmodo]

Power Editor Eats Proper: The Editorial Director of Fairchild Publications, Peter W. Kaplan, has a grapefruit—the august King of the Citrus Family—and coffee, black—really, the only way it should be consumed— for breakfast every morning. Someone get this man a serrated spoon. [BonAppetit]

Most Disturbing First Sentence 2012 Nominee: Former xoJane beauty columnist and current VICE columnist Cat Marnell, shine on, you crazy diamond. Shine on. Readers, you've been warned. [VICE]

Televised News Still Not Up To Sorkin Standard: Either cable news networks or their viewers are too stupid to understand the LIBOR scandal. [Huffington Post]

More Than Enuffington: The Huffington Post's tablet magazine went from "$1.99 a month" to "Free-Ninety-Nine a year" in just five issues. [Capital New York]

Local Paper Makes Administrative Changes: Lady and man leave jobs, man to take lady's previous job. Rumors about other man assuming newly-created fake position are thus far unconfirmed. [New York Observer, @George_Gurley]

Peacock Just Don't Give a Care: All your noise about how awful NBC's coverage of the Olympics has been? Your petitions and your blog posts and your Tweets? Sorry, but NBC could care less. They think this thing has just been going gangbusters. [All Things D]

Young People To Eat Old People, Who Will First Eat The Young People's Words: What's the future of the Observer's dining desk look like? How about: Someone trying to figure out what this 17 year-old editor-in-chief of his own food magazine is doing correctly, and shamelessly replicating it so they don't trample us on the way up. [Chicago Reader]

Ever Upstream: Habitual gambler and erstwhile Portfolio blogger Felix Salmon offers his keen-eyed commentary on the events of the day. [Felix Salmon's Tumblr]

Brooks and Robbers: Former Murdoch lieutenant Rebekah Brooks was formally charged with doing scandalous things to produce scandalous news. [BNO News]

New York Post Brass Snubs Hard-Nosed Underling: When the Post's Media Ink columnist Keith Kelly called this writer at his desk this afternoon to discuss various administrative comings and goings, he was helpfully referred to speak with the actual parties about whom he had inquired. We also took the opportunity to learn from Kelly that The Daily's Editor-in-Chief and New York Post executive editor Jesse Angelo sat next to Kelly as a plucky young Post-ie, and yet, Mr. Kelly was not, in fact, invited to Angelo's wedding (but Maury Povich was?!). He had to learn about it from the paper's Administrative Weddings section. [Page Six] 

Local Newspaper Makes Further Administrative Changes: New York Observer managing editor Michael Woodsmall has been rotated out of the local weekly newspaper's softball lineup against The Nation tomorrow night, for which he provided some terrible excuse about having to go watch Ichiro Suzuki play against his former baseball organization, the Seattle Mariners, later in the evening in The Bronx, at Yankee Stadium. Observer alumnus and 2011 Media Power Bachelor Nate Freeman has been rotated into the lineup as his interim replacement, but his fielding position has yet to be decided. De facto Observer softball captain Daniel Edward Rosen declined to comment on the lineup change.

Please send your tips, legal threats, unused Williams-Sonoma Gift Cards, internal memos, nominations for 2012's Media Power Bachelors, and conspiracy theories about the inventor of Formsping.Me right here.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Brian Crecente— the longtime editor of the company's video game site Kotaku, and one of the longest-serving site-leads in the history of the company—is out. Mr. Crecente has been with the company for seven years.

He notes in a post today:

Much has changed from when I started more than seven years ago at Kotaku, two months after its launch. The site was an unknown, an unpronounceable off-shoot of Gawker Media with a readership of 10,000. I was a full-time newspaper reporter, spending those early days covering gaming for Kotakuand my afternoons and evenings writing about homicides, serial killers, gang-bangersand raging wildfires for the Rocky Mountain News.

Over the years, Kotaku's community grew to more than five and a half million readers.

Stephen Totilo, Kotaku's managing editor, will be promoted to Mr. Crecente's old job.

Meanwhile, Joel Johnson—previously placed over Mr. Crecente as Kotaku's editorial director, which was prior to a number of stints around the network, including the editor-at-large of Gizmodo and one as the founding editor of The Consumerist (back when it was still a Gawker Media holding)—is now going to be an editor-at-large for the blog network's auto fetishist site, Jalopnik.

Ray Wert, the site's editor, emailed to explain:

"Joel'll be bringing over his talent for feature and review development. In the new role, he'll be mixing his love of motoring with his love for gadgets and video games to help us build the next generation of auto enthusiasts."

Ideally, one would imagine, this building of enthusiasts will not involve publicly noting Jalopnik's readers as "very stupid." As he once did with Gizmodo's.

We've also heard from multiple sources that Mr. Johnson was a leading candidate for another job that almost poached former Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio before he decamped to the top spot at Gawker.com, the editor gig over at ANIMAL NY.

A source explained that Mr. Johnson turned down the prospect in favor of his new role at the company, which includes working on "special projects" for the blog network (to which we might add, that's what Oppenheimer said).

Mr. Johnson responded, confirming his role in the "special projects" without giving away any specfics:

Bucky [Turco, Animal NY founder] is a pal and I've talked to them about their plans for Animal, but I actually made [Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton] a promise I'd stick around for a full year when I came back, so I'm not making any decisions about anything in life until March. (And I may actually stick around Gawker another year? Who knows.) This is actually the one time when Gawker put someone on "special projects" that doesn't mean being put out to pasture.

Cheery! Also, emphasis ours. Know any more about Gawker Media's special projects? We'd love to hear it.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

We suspected that publishing was probably not trying to sabotage its largest online retailer but we double-checked in case Gizmodo was actually on to something. "There seems to be some content in the post that’s wrong," Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf, told us last night after we e-mailed him a link to the Gizmodo complaint. "It’s a problem with Amazon not with Random House."

This is what the Gizmodo post looked like yesterday:

Now, I get it. This was mostly likely a publisher restriction. Amazon has been working so hard to push features into the Kindle, it would be foolish to kill that added value. But shame on you, Amazon, for going along with this. And double super secret shame on you for not better warning me that you were quashing my ability to easily read this book on multiple devices when I bought it. Look, Amazon, if some idiot at Knopf (and make no mistake: this is idiotic) wants to shit on your customers, you have a duty to tell us there is a turd on the way.

This is what it looks like now (it's all crossed out, for those of you whose web browsers aren't picking it up):

Now, I get it. This was mostly likely a publisher restriction. Amazon has been working so hard to push features into the Kindle, it would be foolish to kill that added value. But shame on you, Amazon, for going along with this. And double super secret shame on you for not better warning me that you were quashing my ability to easily read this book on multiple devices when I bought it. Look, Amazon, if some idiot at Knopf (and make no mistake: this is idiotic) wants to shit on your customers, you have a duty to tell us there is a turd on the way.

Conclusion: publishers do not want to ruin the Kindle.

Uncharacteristically for a Gawker Media property, the site had the decency (or prudery...or legal discomfort) to remove any "identifying features."

You may remember that Gawker Media was recently embroiled in a controversy over their publication of crime scene photos.

But the TSA story is a pretty big tease. The images are just a bunch of blurry pixels in the shape of a human—without a hint of nudity.

Fortunately, there is a more powerful scanner that produces images much more, um, newsworthy. Have a look!

A year ago Endgadget and Gizmodo, the respective tech blogs of AOL and Gawker, were fairly even in terms of traffic. That trend held until about January of this year, when AOL even briefly took the lead.

But 2010 has been all Gawker. It passed AOL in February and proceeded to more than double its traffic in April thanks to a lost/stolen iPhone 4 prototype and a police raid on the offices of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen.

Since then, Gawker has maintained its lead while AOL has stayed flat. A new tenor of coverage has come to dominate in technology news. Gizmodo turned a boring gadget preview into a multi-week soap opera. As last week's Angelgate saga showed, buying Techcrunch would allow AOL to have a voice in the more tabloid style tech journalism that increasingly drives pageviews online.

But did Apple order the raid? One source for the story seems to think so:

"It's the iPolice," said Steve Meister, a former Los Angeles County deputy district attorney. "This whole thing appears, rightly or wrongly, to be law enforcement doing the bidding of a private company."

REACT was chartered in 1997 to fight crime against high-tech companies in the Bay Area and receives funding and staff from the FBI, Secret Service and different local, state and federal agencies. The rest of the budget is covered by a $2.3 million from Santa Clara County, which generates income from taxes on California's $100 billion tech industry.

Checkbook journalists versus tax-windfall thugs is the West Coast's answer to New York Times reporter versus Eric Holder.

“He intends to honor his commitment of confidentiality to his source or sources,” Mr. Kurtzberg [Risen's lawyer] said. “We intend to fight this subpoena.”

The subpoena comes two weeks after the indictment of a former National Security Agency official on charges apparently arising from an investigation into a series of Baltimore Sun articles that exposed technical failings and cost overruns of several agency programs that cost billions of dollars.

The lead prosecutor in both investigations is William Welch II. He formerly led the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, but left that position in October after its botched prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska.

We're not surprised that the author of a book called The Secret History doesn't plan to tell a grand jury where he got his information. We would be surprised, however, if he paid anyone a dime to talk.