NICK DENTON — I am, says Jacob Weisberg, doing a "Cheney" — heading the search committee for a new managing editor of Gawker, and choosing myself. Thanks for that. Yes, Brian Stelter had the story right. The site won't change much: it will remain focused on media gossip and pop culture; Alex Pareene will blog the breaking news; Maggie Shnayerson will continue to embarrass the magazine industry and permalancer-abusing media conglomerates such as Viacom; and Sheila McClear will cover book publishing. We'll be adding some new contributors over the next few weeks. To begin: Richard Morgan, who'll focus on the TV networks; Nick Douglas, a Gawker Media veteran, as our early warning antenna for Youtube clips and other pop culture phenomena on the web; Richard Lawson, better known as the commenter lolcait, will be running the site's new photo caption contest. Oh, and there's a surprise guest, this afternoon at 2pm, in the comments. After the jump, other new year changes at Gawker's sibling titles, if you're interested.

Dear Journalists: Lucas Grindley, Operations Manager of HeraldTribune.com ("southwest Florida's information leader"), would like you to get paid like bloggers. Specifically, like us! Summing up a largely boring, wonky, Poyntery debate about the value of reporters and information and CPM, Grindley decries Nick Denton's pay model, as described by noted internet expert David Brooks, as a dangerous idea that "may favor sensationalism" (quelle horreur!). Then he decides the most fair model for our brave new media landscape is to give your content providers a set salary with page view bonus structure built in. Which sounds familiar! As Grindley says: "The point is a bonus system doesn't hurt anyone. But it might help retain top talent while also increasing page views and audience." Also possible: existential crises and mass resignations. Talent are a sensitive bunch.

At last, I've received a real-life, actual Beacon message — the controversial Facebook ad format that reports on your friends' activities elsewhere on the Web. The news flash? My boss, Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, is going to see Will Smith thriller I Am Legend. This ruins my arthouse-film image of him. Damn you, Mark Zuckerberg!

The trick to running a gossip blog is to reject most of the rumors you get. Otherwise, no one believes anything. You quickly learn to spot the gullible chatter, the obvious attempts to plant a story, the too good to be true. Well, usually. We blew it big three times this year by trying too hard for the scoops.

The New York Times reports that Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media and my boss, will take over as editor of Gawker.com, his flagship and our sister site, on January 2. My first reaction to the news: Well, good. This should keep him busy.

Last night, the D.C.-based Atlantic magazine celebrated 150 years of thought at the Kimmel Center Loading Dock at N.Y.U. In a striking display of awful judgment, the VIPs (Arianna Huffington, Moby, the Mayor) were allowed (forced) to mingle on stage. The poors sat in chairs in the auditorium and watched. Jared Kushner was either wryly funny or a dick. Porn queen Robyn Bird went unrecognized by Robert DeNiro and Boykin Curry claimed he doesn't rent his island paradise to whores. God, 'Ad Age' even turned against local goddess Patti Smith. Richard Blakeley was there to tell us what social apartheid looks like. That's satirist P.J. O'Rourke trashing the party from the stage, by the way. Welcome to the social disaster of the season!

When we first began to cover the many close relationships between flauntrepreneur Scott Jones's ChaCha search engine and Indiana University, the Indiana Herald-Times was one of the few local newspapers to closely question the relationship. Steve Hinnefeld of the Herald-Times was even following Valleywag's coverage, and came to similar conclusions: Although nothing legally wrong occurred, IU officials' failure to disclose their ChaCha ties was suspicious. However, since then the newspaper has provided the issue little attention. Why?

These days, a startup raising $1.5 million hardly seems noteworthy, so I was inclined to dismiss the news that Curbed Network, a New York-based blog franchise, had brought in that modest amount. This despite the fact that Lockhart Steele, Curbed's cofounder, is a friend and helped recruit me to Valleywag when he worked at Gawker Media, and Nick Denton, Valleywag's owner, is one of the investors in this round. No, I was more intrigued by the name of another investor: Zach Nelson, the Larry Ellison protégé who's CEO of NetSuite, the Web-based software company which has filed to go public. How could these two have possibly connected? A quick reading of the social graph revealed only one candidate: Brooke Hammerling, the hyperconnected founder of Brew PR and Valleywag's original Snacky Flack. The coast-swapping Hammerling says her career as a yentapreneur began when she invited Steele, a baseball fan, to an Oakland A's event hosted by Nelson. Hope you got a cut, Brooke.

Glaring Omissions reproduces tips received from readers in the last week that weren't covered on Gawker, either by accident (it happens!) or by design (it happens more often, particularly in the case of ad hominem Internet biliousness).

"Have you planned anything for your last day?" asked Gawker emperor Nick Denton the other afternoon. "Jessica set a very high bar when she left, and you need to exceed it." Nick was referring to former Gawker editor Jess Coen's departure day, when she famously took the opportunity to excoriate Joe Dolce for being a douchebag. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the only people I managed to infuriate during my tenure here at Gawker were my co-workers. (As far as I know; no one else bothered to write in.) However, there is one person that I'd like to share a couple of stories about on my way out the door: Nick Denton. Nick, here's one last self-referential post just for you. I know how much you love them!

Our video bots Nick and Richard Blakeley lurked in the stairwell of Nick Denton's apartment building, asking departing guests what they thought of the party last night for "The Gawker Guide To Conquering All Media," which is changing the face of literature. Hampton Style editor Deb Schoeneman thought up a great joke about how it was "better than Cats." But own-minds power couple Jakulia Allodwick are "just glad it's over." The glare of the spotlight burns!

Even if you weren't invited to tonight's party for Gawker's book at our publisher's apartment (which you weren't), you'll still be able to see where the man lays his laregish head. We'll be streaming a live v-cast from a hidden camera in Nick Denton's pad starting at 7 p.m. It promises to be as fun as Kid Nation. You can start now though! We've installed the camera in our office already. We're camwhores! It is soooooo 2003 in here!

"Someone in our art department knows someone at Campari," shrugged a Radar staffer when asked why Radar was co-hosting a party at the Campari gallery in Soho. "Hey, where's Balk?" I rolled my eyes at him. "So are you really upset about him leaving?" the Radar staffer persisted. "Yes, he's like a dadbrother to me," I told him honestly. "But I'm sure he'll have a great time working for you guys. He loves this kind of thing." The Radar staffer was just perspicacious enough to realize that I was being sarcastic. He shook his highball glass, which contained Campari. "Hey, free drinks." Laurel Ptak took photos so you can see just how wrong this scene is.

Even on YouTube, Internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis dogs the every step of Nick Denton, the owner of this blog. A promotional video for a new book from Gawker, a sister site to Valleywag, lists an interview with Calacanis as one of its related links.

Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, the owner of this site and my worthy predecessor as its editor, has weighed in triumphantly on the battle of the gadget blogs, declaring his Gizmodo site the winner in its heated competition with Engadget, the rival site started by founding Gizmodo editor Peter Rojas and now owned by AOL. The last time I covered this fight, I was working at Business 2.0, and an ostensibly neutral party. And so I got a fusillade from all sides. Scarred from that experience, and hardly neutral now, I'm not going to comment, save to observe that in the days to come, you're sure to hear an elaborate, exhausting point-counterpoint from Gizmodo and Engadget about international licensees, traffic-counting methodologies, and so on and so forth. Trust me, you won't want to hear it. And anyway, I'm more interested in my boss's obvious, embarrassing gaffe.

Last night saw New York's geekiest gather at something called NYC Tech Meet-Up, an event which we will not even pretend to understand. Or care about—save for the fact that Thomas Plunkett, Gawker Media's tech master, made some sort of presentation about something or other that he and his army of supergay IT warriors do behind the scenes to make your reading experience that much more manageable. Portfolio seemed to enjoy the performance—but they didn't get the goods. Unfortunately, we did.

If the idea of a musical featuring a duet between Nick Denton and Arianna Huffington doesn't appeal to you, you're obviously not Simon Dumenco's editor. Hey, Simon, don't quit your seven million other day jobs. [AdAge]

Phil Weiss crops up in today's New York mag with a write-around profile of king of all media Matt Drudge, who could not be found anywhere. (It does contain pretty much everything you might need to know about Matt, except where he is and if he's gay or not and why there might be Spanish overheard at what might or might not be his house.) This is becoming something of a trend at New York. In the hopper over there, that we know of, there are forthcoming stories on former Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, a story sort-of-maybe about our boss Nick Denton, and a story about New York Observer owner and Jersey boy-king Jared Kushner; each subject is, when we last heard, variously barely or sort-of not-at-all participating. Do Adam Moss and his band of boys just crave rejection? Is there a self-help book for this?

Inc. magazine is digging into the mystery of who's running TheFunded.com, a website which lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists. Writer Max Chafkin makes four guesses: Gawker Media publisher and Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton; Digg founder Kevin Rose; Blogger and Twitter founder Evan Williams; and blog blowhard Jason Calacanis. Asked by Chafkin, Calacanis denied being "Ted," the mysterious man behind the site. A curious stance, since until recently, Calacanis was eagerly attempting to take credit for TheFunded.com. Never one for subtlety, he told friends of his plan to leak a rumor to Valleywag that he was behind the site. Alas, no, Jason: You only wish you were clever enough to come up with an idea like TheFunded.com.