Think things are bad in the media business? You ain't seen nothin' yet. That's the message Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, an online publisher whose properties include this website, lays out in a new essay now published on his personal blog. (A draft I saw was headlined "Publishers Are Sleeping Their Way to Extinction"; he has now headlined it "A 2009 Internet Media Plan." Denton never was much good at headlines.) Analysts project a single-digit increase in online advertising in 2009; we should be so lucky, according to Denton, who writes that a 30 to 40 percent decline in all advertising spending, online and off, next year — a scenario supported by analyses of economic recessions from Sweden to Indonesia. His conclusion? "Publishers should be planning for the worst, now." Here's what Denton's cost-cutting recommendations could mean for his own company.Get out of categories such as politics to which advertisers are averse. No more election coverage on Gawker! Renegotiate vendor contracts. So much for the bar bill at Joey & Eddie's. Consolidate titles. I will soon be writing Valleywag as a column for Gizmodo or Gawker, whichever will take me. Gabriel Snyder is a lovely young man. As is Jason Chen. I can't decide which one is more handsome and brilliant, really. Offshore more. And I will be writing said column from a newly affordable Iceland. Variable compensation. For less. More value for marketers. With more ads on it.

Hello layabout, TV-watching young people! Gawker is looking for a television-obsessed intern to sit around and watch TV to find newsworthy clips for social commentary. The job requires a good eye and the ability to sit. The schedule is flexible but requires a minimum of 15 hours a week over the course of 3 months. College internship credit available to those who qualify. Pay is less than minimal. Email Richard Blakeley at tvinternship@gawker.com with proof of addiction to television; no attachments please. Must be able to work from our NYC based office.

We would never sugarcoat someone else's layoffs. Why ours? Gawker Media, our publisher, has told me to cut Valleywag's costs, in anticipation of an advertising recession. In response, I have laid off associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West and reporter Melissa Gira Grant. They have all been doing excellent work, breaking stories and needling Silicon Valley. But our ultimate boss, Nick Denton, has decided he can't afford them. Paul Boutin and I will continue running the site. Denton's memo:

Click to viewKnow that old saying "keep your friends close and your enemies closer"? Former Engadget editor Ryan Block has put it into practice by tapping former Gizmodo editor Brian Lam — now the site's editorial director — to help advise them on their new gadget startup gdgt. In doing so, Block has ended — or at least set aside — a long-term gadget-blog rivalry which frothed with animosity. (Gizmodo, like Valleywag, is published by Gawker Media.) At times, the competition got dirty — like the time Block created an anonymous blog slamming Lam for a post about the iPhone.Block has since confessed to the stunt. In a post on Lam's hire, Block says "Brian Lam and I are actually pals outside of work — have been for years." But back in 2006, a tipster told Valleywag, Block created a blog called Boycott Gizmodo! and a Digg account with the same name that he used to promote blog's one and only post to Digg's front page. "The time has come to Boycott Gizmodo," reads the post. "Not only did Brian Lam and Gizmodo purposefully deceive long standing readers such as myself about the iPhone, they did a terrible job of covering their tracks." (Lam's post promised readers news about an "iPhone" device on a Friday, before the launch of the actual device — and then, on a Monday, revealed that Cisco owned a trademark on the term, long attached to speculation about an Apple cell phone, and had released an iPhone-branded product. The companies long since settled the matter, giving Apple rights to the iPhone name) We asked Block if he was the author of the blog. In response, Block told us, "Brian and I have always been friends who knew where to draw the line." Block also just published a confessional blog post titled "Bygones and rivalries," in which he confessed to authoring the "Boycott Gizmodo!" blog. He also offered another anecdote from a rivalry we're all going to miss.

The other night, Lockhart Steele, the ex-Gawker Media guy with the porn-star name, threw a lovely, cliquey little party in SoMa. Steele ditched the usual startup-founder blowhards for a pack of writers and editors — I had a national newspaper assignment before my first club soda. But things turned ugly when Wired covergirl Julia Allison traipsed in around 11 p.m. Instead of cheering her, partygoers whom I'd mistaken for grownups just minutes before took turns sniping about Allison behind her back: She's jumped the shark. She's not that pretty. Just look at her arm fat! Bonus hater points to the guy who mimicked Allison's trademark hand-on-hip pose — just out of her view.

"Thiel makes me sick!" read the note from Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton. His oddly personal declaration was prompted by a brief in the New York Post about former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel's success as a hedge-fund manager. Thiel will make an estimated $500 million this year running Clarium Capital, a hedge fund. (We reported this a few weeks ago, boss.) It hit me hard: Could Denton actually be jealous of Thiel?

Hey young people! Gawker Media is looking for television-obsessed interns (our current fabulous crew will, sniff, soon be leaving us) to sit around and watch TV to find newsworthy clips for social commentary. The job requires a good eye and the ability to sit. The schedule is flexible but requires a minimum of 15 hours a week over the course of 3 months (August-October, in this case). College internship credit available to those who qualify. Pay is less than minimal. Email Richard Blakeley at tvinternship@gawker.com with proof of addiction to television; no attachments please.

After reviewing our post "Tech's top 10 workspaces" commenter Dweezil complained that our choices were full of "to much modernism bullshit." Commenter Web2PointOhShit tore at everybody:

What makes for an appealing workspace? The envelopes they leave in your mailbox every two weeks. But after that, it comes down to design and amenities. Also, we like windows and brick. Lots and lots of brick. After spending some time on Office Snapshots, we present the ten best-looking offices in tech, below.

Nick Denton's new steampunk sweat shop on Elizabeth Street is the nicest in Nolita. (Full disclosure: I get to work there, and you don't.) Photos by Nick McGlynn

Gawker Media Publisher (and acting Gawker Managing Editor) Nick Denton just sent word around that he's sold three sites. April Fool's! Except for real this time! Maura Johnston's Idolator, the music industry gossip and news site, goes to Buzznet—the "music-focused web and social

network" that recently bought Stereogum. Gridskipper, the urban travel site, goes to Lockhart Steele's Curbed network. And Wonkette, Ken Layne's political news site, is now Ken Layne's alone. If you're looking for official comment from us, we think all three sites will be better off under ownership by people who actually care about their respective topics (even though no one should ever buy blogs). Denton's internal email is below, because he's off this morning and why not beat the Observer to running it?

Is Nick Denton going soft? Even his cutbacks are sentimental these days. In the old days, Denton, the publisher of Valleywag and 14 other Gawker Media blogs, would simply shutter blogs. These days, he worries first about finding them nice homes. Such is the velvet-glove treatment he's giving Gridskipper, Wonkette, and Idolator, his blogs about, respectively, travel, politics, and music. The three blogs amount to less than 3 percent of Gawker Media's traffic, he says. Fine, so why keep them around in any form? Silicon Alley Insider has the details on their new owners. More evidence of Denton's increasing namby-pambosity: Instead of threatening to fire leakers, he's encouraging us to post the internal memo announcing the move. Darling bossman, that's no fun. But also no reason to keep the memo from you, dear readers:

The week's not complete until bulldog-cute Mahalo chief Jason Calacanis writes in. Today JC emailed twice to call out a gaping hole in the much-discussed New Dentonomics of our 2008 Valleywag pay scale. His numbers are out of date; our new pageview rate for the second quarter is in, and it's $6.50 per thousand pageviews. But Calacanis spotted a bigger slap to the face than the CPM, one so big that Portfolio blogger Felix Salmon will have to do a whole 'nother post now to say he knew it all along. Can you guess what it is?

Jordan Golson, Valleywag's resident hypercapitalist, is distressed that he's not going to learn the terms of his pageview-based bonus — which, mind you, he'll likely earn on top of his $2,500-a-month base pay — until three days into the second quarter. The ginger whinger made me proud with a headline so sensational that it offended even my boss. But he disappointed me by wasting readers' time, taking a self-indulgent 542 words to get his point across. After the jump, a readable version of Golson's overwrought, underreported screed:

For some of the Web's more respected names, it's a really special day. They get to treat their readers and fans with the contempt they hide most of the year. Below, five pranks today that show just how much the Internet hates you. And I do mean you.

The rate that my employer, Gawker Media, pays its contract writers was adjusted tonight at midnight. The staff of this site has not been told the details of the new pay rate, but we do know that everyone at Valleywag is getting a per-view pay decrease. Senior management is promising the hit is only a "modest reduction." I'm told we'll find out the new pay plan by the end of the week. In the mean time, writers are getting a paycut, but are expected to continue working even though we don't know what we're getting paid. Read on for some background and an explanation of how Gawker writers are compensated.

Coincidentally, the Valleywag crew was chatting in Campfire about how much we loved a new site we'd discovered, Downforeveryoneorjustme.com, right before we had to use it on our own site. Some theories we came up with: Nick Denton, Gawker Media's owner and publisher of Valleywag, likes to bring down his sites occasionally just to watch how his editors deal with the unbearable pressure of not being able to write. As part of Jason Calacanis's new Valleywag charm campaign, Mahalo guides posted so many links to us that it brought the site down. Or, most plausibly, outraged Arthur C. Clarke fans launched a denial-of-service campaign against the unremarkable observation that the deceased sci-fi writer was an admitted pedophile.

Even though no one should ever buy a blog, David Hauslaib is selling Jossip and his three other blogs, says the New York Post. There's a rumor Condé Nast thought about buying, though a source from the publisher's parent company says hell no. And of course Gawker Media doesn't buy blogs, it just poaches their editors.

For the liberal-arts majors who still dominate the ranks of reporters, simple multiplication is a daunting task. Which is likely why Radar and Silicon Alley Insider have contributed 419 words about the firing of Gawker reporter Maggie Shnayerson, yet failed to answer the essential question: How much was she making? The answer is simple, based on publicly available information:

Mark Cuban was happy to sit with Deadspin blogger Will Leitch for an interview to go into GQ. (Deadspin, a sports blog, is owned by Gawker Media, Valleywag's publisher.) But then Cuban saw Leitch's subsequent post on Valleywag. "While I respect the magazine," Cuban writes on his blog, "I am not a fan of the site [Leitch] works for, or of its affiliated site that the blog ran on. I would not have done the interview had I known he would blog about it for this site." Which is too bad, really. We're normally fans of the outspoken, outrageous entrepreneur-blogger. Except when he engages in phony self-righteousness. "Is this ethical?" he asks.