The happy couple. (Photo via Nick Denton).

Gawker Media overlord Nick Denton is engaged, reports Confidenti@al, the Daily News gossip page. Mr. Denton proposed to his actor boyfriend, Derrence Washington, over the weekend, and they are planning on a wedding next May in upstate New York.

The Gawker owner also updated his Facebook page this morning to reflect his new relationship status.

“This is the one event even I wouldn’t gossip about,” Mr. Denton told Confidenti@l. “Nobody else compares. You know how guys wrestle with marriage, with all the possibilities they’re giving up. I’m not giving up anything."

But this is not the first time that Mr. Denton expressed his desire to tie the knot.

"Yeah, I do [want to get married]," Mr. Denton told New York magazine back in 2011. "I think straight couples have a schedule: You're together for two years and then there's the 'where is this going?' question, which wouldn't necessarily be good for everyone, but I think it's pretty healthy for relationships, for there to be a presumption that there is a decision to be made."

Guess Mr. Denton made that decision. Mazel tovs all around.

"A new stage play called The Future, imported from Britain to New York, deals with this question in a very personal way, via the most urbane of settings: the dinner party and its clash of personalities," says the review. Yes, very personal.

The review even mentions Mr. Denton's boyfriend. "Derrence Washington embodies all the potentials Senexate has to offer, as the lone brash American who likes money and fast cars." The Senexate is, apparently, the soma-like (remember Brave New World from high school?) drug that enables the characters to stay forever young and gives the play a plot.

Mr. Denton was so enthusiastic about the play that he hosted a cast party at his Soho home last Friday. Now that's commitment to the theatre!

Is this the future?

Nick Denton. (Photo from Facebook)

Nick Denton's  boyfriend, the actor Derrence Washington, had a new off-off Broadway play open last Friday. But apparently, the theatre didn't provide enough drama for Mr. Washington's ex, who has been harassing the couple. The love triangle has escalated to the point where the cops have been called, reports the Post.

While Mr. Denton is doing all the things that people in new relationships do--changing his Facebook status, introducing his new boyfriend to his friends, hosting parties to celebrate his new boyfriend's play, the jealous ex is doing all the things that jealous exes do (in movies at least). The caricature of an angry ex-boyfriend recently threw a brick through the window of the Gawker mogul's Soho loft.

Ah,  will the course of true love ever run smooth?

When the Post reached out to Mr. Denton for a comment on the situation, he used the opportunity to gin up some publicity and pageviews.

“After that Hulk Hogan sex tape on Gawker, I can hardly complain about intrusion into my private life!" he said in an email to the Post.

“Yep, love is messy," he added. Messy like a Hulk Hogan sex tape?

Last night, Gawker's Nick Denton was forced to entertain a group of about 30 reporters and editors who are in town for a Wall Street Journal organized digital training program all by himself because his expected co-star, Buzzfeed co-founder Jonah Peretti, was a no-show. On Twitter, Mr. Peretti had a rather interesting explanation for  standing up Mr. Denton.

“I didn't feel like talking to @nicknotned tonight, you really got to be in the mood for that guy," Mr. Peretti wrote last night.

When we emailed Mr. Peretti to inquire about the event this afternoon, he attributed his absence to a scheduling glitch rather than any distaste for Mr. Denton.

“Nick is great, who wouldn't want to spend time with him? The event host just made a scheduling mistake and the last minute fix was for us to do the talks on different nights which was the original plan,” Mr. Peretti wrote. “We are scheduling now, not sure if it is set yet.  And I was not in the mood for a surprise Lincoln-Douglas debate.”

Guess that makes Mr. Denton and Mr. Peretti the Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas of our time? Gawker and Buzzfeed are hardly the Illinois legislature, but we’ll let the comparison slide. Mr. Denton and Mr. Peretti certainly have way more twitter followers than either Lincoln or Douglas.

Mr. Denton ended up with an empty chair and, although he made the inevitable Clint Eastwood comparison, Mr. Peretti had some comforting words for the Gawker mogul.

“Clint Eastwood is a huge movie star, congrats,” he tweeted.

Luckily, Mr. Denton finds himself plenty entertaining. And at least he had WSJ editor Alan Murray to keep him company.

"Alan and I entertained the crowd--rather successfully I thought. Alan at least can handle me!" Mr. Denton emailed us today.

“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

Denton with Guardian US editor Janine Gibson

Gawker Media is eyeing an international expansion to harvest licensing revenue from its shiny, new commenting system, according to an internal memo sent out by proprietor Nick Denton Wednesday afternoon.

“Our international efforts warrant greater attention,” Mr. Denton wrote in the email, which delineated a handful of related job shuffles.

Gawker already has partnerships in Europe, Japan, Brazil and Australia, and Mr. Denton has deputized COO Gaby Darbyshire to cultivate its “embryonic” relationships in the Middle East, China and India. According to the memo, licensing accounts for 8% of Gawker Media’s revenue, but a “significantly greater” portion of after-tax earnings.

With Ms. Darbyshire thus occupied, Scott Kidder, most recently the head of editorial operations, will oversee legal, facilities, HR and employee development. He will also establish an “editorial back office” in Budapest, where Gawker’s technology development subsidiaries have been located—and sheltered from the IRS—since day one. (Mr. Denton has Hungarian citizenship.)

Social media manager Lauren Bertolini replaces Mr. Kidder in editorial operations, with a focus on overseeing community development on the site’s new discussion platform.

The proprietary commenting system, called Powwow, was launched in late April. It allows commenters to start and moderate their own threads while an algorithm spots and features the best discussions.

“Most new jobs at the company will be tied to the discussion platform,” Mr. Denton wrote.

Even Gawker’s New York offices will enact some small-scale colonization. The company is “examining a move of Operations upstairs to the fourth floor” and making room for all the hires the new commenting system requires.

“It remains our goal though to move to a larger premises with a full through-floor so all departments can be back within sight (or spitting distance) of each other,” Mr. Denton wrote.

Full memo below.

I hinted earlier this month on announcing Ray and Erin's promotions that there was another leg to this reshuffle. (Yes, it was too extensive to get in place all in one single go.)

Our international efforts warrant greater attention -- and that means a shift in responsibilities for Gaby Darbyshire and a cascade of job moves affecting Scott and others.

Currently, licensing provides some 8% of revenues -- but a significantly greater portion of after-tax earnings. That's pretty normal for a US-centric content company at our stage of development.

But software companies such as search engines can easily make 50% of their revenue overseas. As our language-independent discussion technology platform becomes more important, so will the international business.

As some of you know, we are expanding beyond our existing partnerships in Europe, Japan, Brazil and Australia. Our embryonic relationships in the Middle East, China and India will require much more cultivation -- and the bulk of Gaby's focus.

To take on responsibility for people development, finance, facilities and legal, Scott Kidder is moving back into the Operations department. Like Ray and Erin, he is on the operating committee.

Scott will retain responsibility for payroll and other editorial HR duties. And he is leading the effort to establish an editorial back office in Budapest. But above all Scott intends to revamp employee training and development -- across both editorial and other departments.

Helping Scott with office operations: Julia Alvidrez, newly promoted to Operations Manager. Julia will in particular oversee any reconfiguration of the office and real-estate searches.

We are examining a move of Operations upstairs to the Fourth Floor -- and an expansion of the area given up to Technology to accommodate new hires for the development of the discussion platform. It remains our goal though to move to a larger premises with a full through-floor so all departments can be back within sight (or spitting distance) of each other.

Taking over other editorial operations: Lauren Bertolini, whom most of you know as our social media manager. Lauren's primary focus will be community development: encouraging editorial participation in discussions; the sharing of those discussions on social networks such as Facebook; and the recruitment of outside contributors to our platform.

That's a sign of the future: most new jobs at the company will be tied to the discussion platform.

Event management will move over to Ray's group within sales -- and with that function, Julia Schweizer. Editors will still be expected to drive events for their sites, putting their contacts and status to work for the benefit of the titles. But it makes sense to consolidate the organization of those events and give sales full awareness of sponsorship opportunities that might arise even from editorially driven events.

All these changes take effect on June 1. And that should be that for a little while!

Nick

Naturally, Gawker published that legal threat (alongside an old picture of Bill O'Reilly with topless women, of course). Entertaining as it is, we've taken the liberty of annotating the best parts of Fox's legal letter to Gawker, right here:

1. Yeah, right. Adorable! But basically a sign that says—to Gawker, at least—"DON'T FORGET TO PUBLISH." These notices hold absolutely no legal bearing, and in the event the law firm would attempt to prove malice on the part of the publisher of said legal threat letter (Gawker), all Gawker has to prove is that the letter is newsworthy. If that. Judging by the six-digit counts on each of Gawker's Fox Mole posts, one could reasonably assert that this letter is, in fact, newsworthy.

2. Ronald M. Green, Litigious Legal Machine. If Ronald M. Green sounds familiar to followers of Fox's media troubles—or the troubles of Powerful Men in Media—he is! Green's page for the firm lists (boasts?) of his association to Bill O'Reilly as legal representation. What it doesn't note: Some of the cases Green has worked on for O'Reilly, including but not limited to the sexual harassment claim a producer filed against O'Reilly, which was settled out of court before the world got to hear the evidence in the case. He also represented Cablevision/MSG chairman James L. Dolan and The Garden in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by former Knicks executive Anucha Browne Sanders after she claiming she had been sexually harassed. A jury found in her favor to the tune of $11.5M, $3M of which came out of Dolan's pockets. Also noted on Green's bio page from his firm? A position he wrote for The New York Law Journal entitled "The Employer's 'Sue First' Strategy: In high stakes litigation, 'preemptive strike' has produced results." If you thought Fox News was calling up My Cousin Vinny from the bullpen, think again: Green is their "Lights Out" guy, and he will no doubt take this thing to some inevitable conclusion. Don't place your bets yet, though: Handicapping odds is contingent upon on what further action he has planned, if any. Then we'll open the pool.

3. Covered Bases. The funny thing about legal threats is how many copies you end up getting. New York City's bike messengers owe the litigious lawyers of their fair city a debt of gratitude for giving them, like, half their business.

4 and 5. Scare Quotes. In legal paperwork, scare quotes are often used to precede the paraphrasing of a term throughout the rest of the brief; this isn't that. This is just a funny use of scare quotes.

6. 'Likely.' As in, "we haven't yet figured out exactly what about this is illegal, but it's surely something" or "probably, so you should be scared." Pretty standard.

7. 'Should.' As in, "this isn't actually a cease and desist, though we're going to vaguely allude to some sense of obligation, whether or not there's a law against it." Pretty standard.

8. Niceties. These are always enjoyable to read; they always act as amusingly macabre punctuation points, like someone telling you to watch your shirt for blood immediately after having stabbed you in the gut.

In other words, get out the popcorn: This has nowhere to go but up.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

"More additions...soon," he added.

Mr. Juzwiak currently writes for the arts section of The Daily, but even iPad have-nots are well-acquainted with the one-time Toddlers in Tiaras judge from his role in Jezebel's Pot Psychology and the steady drip of "Winston" cat videos he provided Gawker.

Since Mr. Daulerio's arrival in January, Gawker has added Deadspin's Emma Carmichael, as a managing editor, snagged contributions from Deadspin's Drew Magary and Congolese dictator/GQ.com contributor Mobutu Sese Seko, and said goodbye to "half-assed" apologist Seth Abramovitch, political epithets editor Jim Newell and gaysplainer Brian Moylan. (Update: Gawker also let Lauri Apple go.)

In a January State of Gawker memo, Gawker Media boss Nick Denton told writers that their annual review process had been ramped up from the "usual corporate kabuki theater."

"As I hinted above, a focus on extraordinary talent was key to the annual reviews," he wrote. "We looked not just at an individual’s audience appeal but at their reputation among colleagues and contribution to the site’s reputation."

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_

This one, released two hours ago, is already no different.

The Observer was just forwarded the memo, in full. It reads (favorite-parts-emphasis ours):

From: Scott Kidder
Date: Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 4:29 PM
Subject: 2012
To: edit@gawker.com

I'm sending this out on behalf of Nick, who is currently favela paintballing in Brazil:

***

“For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that, A players. People said they wouldn’t get along, they’d hate working with each other. But I realized that A players like to work with A players, they just didn’t like working with C players. At Pixar, it was a whole company of A players."

Sorry, yeah, that's from the most quoted man of 2011, Steve Jobs. And it's conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley. But I've got to confess: the Apple boss' homily inspired a more rigorous than usual review of editorial at the end of the year. Superior writers, videographers and other content makers want to work with their own kind and for their own kind.

That's you, in case you didn't realize. Look at the esprit de corps of Deadspin under AJ. It's the golden team of sports journalism. Look at the obscene array of talent at Gawker right now. Our sites have assembled the strongest collection of journalistic talent on the web today. Sure, we know how to play the web game like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post. We measure. We hone headlines. We sell stories. Sometimes we oversell. But -- and this marks us out -- we believe that the best web content optimization strategy is something as old as journalism itself: the shocking truth and the authentic opinion.

We'll spill the truths that others gloss over to protect their access to sources or to conform to political correctness. Original thought (or Campfire groupmind) is muffled less. Think of Matt Buchanan's stoned Friday evening truth bomb or Deadspin's reporting of the Penn State scandal (more 2011 scoops at the end of this memo). There's a new catchline on the media kit: Whatever we think. Whatever we know. That's what we'll publish. And that willingness defines not just our pitch to advertisers but our editorial mission.

Okay, enough institutional self-congratulation. This renewed recognition of editorial flair: What does it mean for you?

1. The annual review process. As I hinted above, a focus on extraordinary talent was key to the annual reviews. We looked not just at an individual's audience appeal but at their reputation among colleagues and contribution to the site's reputation. And these evaluations were more than the usual corporate kabuki theater. As part of the exercise, we have triggered some 20 promotions, reassignments and (yes) departures across the 8 sites. The latest change: Stephen Totilo is taking over as editor-in-chief of Kotaku, announced earlier this week.

2. Retention. The company has to appreciate talent with more than nice words. It's no wonder that new ventures such as The Daily look first to Gawker Media when staffing up. We should not wait for a poaching expedition to pay someone what they deserve. I apologize if that has been the case and will do better in 2012. During this review, we have delivered raises and promotions in recognition of achievement and ability, and we will continue to do so.

3. Career development. In the past, writers might have seen a stint at Gawker Media as a step toward a cushy job at a magazine or some other part of the journalistic establishment. But traditional prospects for journalists look murky now, and the old-line media look much less appealing. At the September all-hands meeting, one question came up often: what career path can Gawker offer? Back then, I said that people could grow their roles by growing their audience; Jessica's position at Jezebel is much more significant, for instance, than was her role as Gawker's lead writer in 2005. But we can also provide career development through internal promotion. When we've been looking to fill positions, it's been striking how much stronger our in-house talent pool is than the writers outside. We've never been ones for the big-name press-release-ready hire. We never will be. Three-quarters of our sites -- Kotaku, Gawker, Jezebel, Deadspin, Gizmodo, Lifehacker -- are led by editors who built their careers within Gawker Media. That's the career path.

4. Goals. Some people will note I've said little about individual traffic numbers. Don't relax just yet: the numbers remain important. But they've always been components of a larger goal: the site's sustained overall appeal to its audience. A site like Deadspin has long used a mix of contributors, some drawing the mass traffic with dong shots, some appealing to a smaller and more influential set of readers. That is a mix we'll see more of. If the site as a whole is growing in both audience and reputation, we can afford for some writers to take time off from the news grind to work on a story or opinion piece that will transform the debate or win the internet. It's more satisfying both to writers and readers that way. Relentless and cynical traffic-trawling is bad for the soul. Yes, I just said that.

5. Discussion. There's one big technical development that underlies this shift: Pow-Wow. The new comment system (coming in the spring) is designed to promote intelligent discussion. And there's no better way to spark intelligent discussion than by publishing an intelligent article. We plan to make the new discussion areas civil enough to encourage authors, experts and celebrities to come in for open web chats. But writers should feel the comments are a place that you can develop your points with your sources, tipsters and friends. You should be looking forward to seeing the reaction to your article, not avoiding toxic commenters. So we'll radically overhaul the comment system technically to keep interesting conversations from being derailed. And we'll reduce the pressure to churn out throwaway blog items. In return, you bring your best information and insight to the original article and the conversation that follows.

***

More big stories from 2011:
The DIY Wizards of San Quentin [Gizmodo]
Why Is China Building These Gigantic Structures In the Middle of the Desert? [Gizmodo]
How to Break Into a Windows PC (And Prevent It from Happening to You) [Lifehacker]
Facebook Is Tracking Your Every Move on the Web; Here's How to Stop It [Lifehacker]
Married GOP Congressman Sent Sexy Pictures to Craigslist Babe [Gawker]
The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable [Gawker]
Can You Tell The Difference Between A Men’s Magazine And A Rapist? [Jezebel]
Fashion Industry Salivates Over Creepy Photos Of 10-Year-Old French Girl [Jezebel]
The Modern Warfare 3 Files: Exclusive First Details on the Biggest Game of 2011 [Kotaku]
New Nintendo Console Debuting At E3 This June, Launching In 2012, More Powerful Than Xbox 360 and PS3 [Kotaku]
Why did your zodiac sign change? We asked the astronomer who started it all [io9]
10 Psychological States You’ve Never Heard Of — And When You Experienced Them [io9]
The Somewhat Romantic Story Of Mark Sanchez And A 17-Year-Old Girl [Deadspin]
The Truth About Race, Religion, And The Honor Code At BYU [Deadspin]
Exclusive: This is the 2014 Chevy Corvette [Jalopnik]
How The Detroit News Sold Its Soul [Jalopnik]
Lindsay Lohan's Playboy Shoot Leaks Online [Fleshbot]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek