Jai Singh, the founding editor of News.com and editor-in-chief of CNET's news and reviews websites, is leaving to worry about his health and "ponder what's next," he told colleagues in an email. He was replaced by Dan Farber, a CNET blogger. Farber has much to do. News.com's news judgment has gotten laughably out of sync with its audience. Contrast this array of headlines on February 9 with Techmeme's selection. Techmeme's algorithm, sensibly, focuses on the Microsoft-Yahoo battle. CNET's editors? Religion and digital fantasies. I'd pray, too.

This just in: A tipster tells us Jai Singh, a senior vice president at CNET and the founding editor-in-chief of News.com, has quit. Dan Farber, currently editor of CNET's ZDNet opinion site, will take over News.com, but there's no word on replacements for Singh's other roles.When Singh launched News.com for CNET in 1996, his reporters had trouble getting their calls returned. PR flacks, unused to the idea of online news, ranted about supposed violations of embargoes. It was, in short, a rule-breaking, trouble-making font of real and valuable information. Singh's achievement: News.com has become part of the mainstream media establishment. His downfall: Young readers now view it as such, as boring and dutiful as the tech trades it made irrelevant.

It began as farce; now it ends in tragedy. CNET is abandoning Consumating, the dating site it bought in December 2005. It has since lost interest in maintaining the dating site which Ben Brown launched as a satire — something to do with its top line being a parody of actual revenues. Consumating's official shut down is March 15. Feel free to publicly mourn.

CNET, under pressure from activist investors trying to win board seats, has posted strong numbers, with revenues of $125.5 million, up 11 percent in the fourth quarter compared to last year. This quarter's revenues are expected to rise 2 to 7 percent. We think that's unduly pessimistic: Natali Del Conte's show just launched. [PaidContent]

The last time I got loaded with Natali Del Conte, it was at Moose's in San Francisco, and alcohol was involved. So I had to ask: For her new online-video show for CNET, Loaded, will the videoblogger drink on camera, as Kevin Rose does on Diggnation? "I'm not ruling it out," says Del Conte. Good! Because her debut episode, while slickly produced, had way too many screenshots. I watch Web pages get loaded all day long as it is.

"If people no longer consider CNET or Gamespot authoritative and unbiased they will no longer visit. We do not wish to alienate our losers for some shitty, negligible ad buy." — commenter cheradenine, who claims to work at CNET in ad sales, on how much the company values its audience. [Valleywag Comments]

News flash: CNET's "ad sales team carries more weight than the editorial team," writes Alex Petraglia, editor of Primotech, a videogames-news site. In the wake of Gamespot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann's firing, should anyone find this shocking? No. But in an attempt to jump on the Gerstmann story, Petraglia has posted a long-winded rant about a new ad campaign plastered all over the Gamespot website.

Buried news in a long post by Amadeo Plaza at Gamer 2.0: CNET allegedly sells placement of articles, not ads, on the front door of its GameSpot site for about $3,500 per week. He's not saying advertisers can buy an article — rather, they can pay to have an article placed prominently on the front door. Imagine the makers of Cloverfield paying The New York Times to move its review of the movie to page A1 and you get the idea. I'm supposed to opine here about the evil advent of adverjournalism and its corrupting influence on my so-called career. But at $500 a day to override CNET's editorial judgement, my overwhelming reaction is that GameSpot is selling itself too cheap.

Jeff Gerstmann, the ten-year CNET GameSpot veteran believed to have been fired for negative reviews of advertisers' games, is now rumored to be starting another site with GameSpot founder Vince Broady. 1UP editor Sam Kennedy buried the news in an endless thumbsucker about the influence of advertisers on game reviews. No word on how the new site's ad-dollars-versus-reviews-quality policies will be any different from the rest. Jeff?

NATALI DEL CONTE — I'm busy getting ramped up here at CNET TV but over the break, Owen and Paul asked me to post about what it's been like to be a woman in Silicon Valley. So here's my take. I don't dare speak for all women, but I can speak for myself. And don't worry, I wouldn't dare say anything as banal as "men don't take me seriously because I'm pretty." I can't imagine a more boring sentiment. I will say this though: Since transitioning from print to video, I do receive just as many viewer emails about my hair, makeup, and clothes as I do about tech news:

This week's Valleywag Friday at Moose's in North Beach doubles as a going-away party for CNET's new TV star Natali Del Conte. She moves to New York next week. Be sure to dress rock-star, because StyleDiary.net entrepreneuse Patricia Handschiegel will roll in from Los Angeles with her posse. Natali has to leave at 7 p.m. sharp, so don't be late. Drinking and crying will carry on until closing time. Gossip and handbag advice for all!

Facing investor takeover, three of CNET's top executives received severance packages with three-year terms, according to filings with the SEC. What it means is that if the execs get fired in the next three years, they get a whole lot of "compensation and benefits." Hedge fund Jana Group is trying to take control of CNET and revamp its management. [Yahoo Finance]

What's the difference between a blogger and a journalist? Nothing, says CNET's Rafe Needleman. But he's concerned that Gizmodo's sophomoric prank, using a TV remote control to turn off video screens at the CES 2008 gadgetfest, will get bloggers disinvited to the event next year. After all, CES only grudgingly started accrediting bloggers to the show. The only problem with Needleman's thesis?

Senior editor! Natali Del Conte's first posts from CES lack the excitement of the show floor, but they do have, well, Natali. Here's another, and another. Suggestion to NDC: Get out in the crowd and give your viewers a you-are-there feeling. Is Calacanis there? Ask him one question — doesn't matter what — and let the camera roll.

Like one of those brave chimpanzees NASA sent to space before humans, CNET's Caroline McCarthy today took to the heavens aboard the inaugural flight of "BetaBlue," JetBlue's new onboard Wi-Fi service. It's supposed to allow passengers access to email and IM via their BlackBerrys and Yahoo accounts.

Wow, and we thought last week sucked. Googler Larry Page is marrying the Chiclet-toothed Lucy Southworth tomorrow, but no one has posted photos of the lucky couple yet, so as far as we're concerned, it didn't happen. The week's other near-misses that were nonetheless hits:

Mom, make him stop! As hopefully the last 3,500 words on Gerstmanngate, Newsweek's N'Gai Croal ponders What It All Means. Look, if you want to spend a half hour revisiting The Godfather, Almost Famous, Wu-Tang Clan and George Bernard friggin Shaw in the post-Metacritic era all applied to some game reviewer getting fired, knock yourself out with Croal's meandering rumination on why GameSpot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann was fired shortly after publishing a negative review of an advertiser's game. For the rest of us, I've trimmed the references to Faust.

Was CNET's firing of GameSpot editor Jeff Gerstmann a bizarre special case? Isn't it hard to believe Gerstmann was axed to appease an advertiser? Not at all, says a game reviewer who claims he's been pushed out by advertisers twice.

Users of LiveJournal call it "defriending." As terrible as it sounds, defriending's not really that bad; it just means you're bored with someone and don't want to hear about their issues anymore. Or share yours with them. That, in essence, is what Six Apart, the San Francisco-based blog-software company, has decided to do with LiveJournal, the online community it acquired from Brad Fitzpatrick in 2005. Andrew Anker, Six Apart's vice president of chopping the company into little bits for convenient and lucrative disposition corporate development, orchestrated the sale of LiveJournal to Sup, a Russian media company which already runs a localized version of the site. With the sale, Anker and the rest of Six Apart's team are letting LiveJournal know, as gently as they can, that they're just not interested in its problems.