Gawker media chief Nick Denton is selling D.C. media gossip site Wonkette to current managing editor Ken Layne and other investors, according to a source.

By phone, Layne just confirmed that the deal is happening, and said that more details would be announced today.

Also, Gawker media sites Gridskipper and Idolator will be spun off, too.

UPDATE: After the jump, and e-mail from Nick Denton about the deal.

I'm amazed we've managed to keep a lid on this news; that, given your

naturally gossipy natures, must be a first! We're spinning off three

sites: Idolator, Gridskipper and—this one may be a surprise—Wonkette.

There were indeed some rumors about Maura Johnston's music blog late

last year; they were true of course. For reasons that I'll explain

below, both it and our travel and politics sites have better

commercial futures outside Gawker than within. (Excuse the corporate

lingo: some of it is unavoidable.) But, first, the facts, which will

be hitting the wires later this morning, or as soon as you leak this

email. Go ahead!



* IDOLATOR is going to Buzznet, a music-focused web and social

network. Buzznet recently acquired Idolator's chief rival, Stereogum,

and received a big investment from Universal Music Group.

* GRIDSKIPPER isn't going far: it's being taken over by Curbed, the

network founded by Lockhart Steele, in which Gawker Media is a

shareholder.

* WONKETTE is being spun off to the managing editor, Ken Layne, former

founder of one of the web's very first news sites, Tabloid.net. The

title will become part of the Blogads network of political sites,

which includes Daily Kos, among others.



Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial

successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the

advertising than we did.



Music audiences are fragmented across genres; Maura's Idolator gave

Stereogum a good run, but a group with a whole array of music sites

will command more attention from record labels than we could. In the

case of Gridskipper, our urban travel guide, we could never match

Curbed in attention to city-specific content and advertising. As for

Wonkette: political advertisers are a strange breed; they don't come

through the same agencies our sales people deal with.



I'm relieved we've found pretty decent homes for the three sites, and

most of their writers, but we're gutted to lose them. Idolator's Pop

Critic's Poll was a tremendous coup—and Patric's bleeding-heart logo

for the site was one of my favorites. Gridskipper is so far the most

sophisticated travel blog: it entirely deserved its inclusion in

Time's list of the 50 coolest websites.



And Wonkette is one of the brands with which the company is most

associated; people will be shocked that we would ever part with it.

The political site has won an array of Bloggies and other awards; it

introduced the word ass-fucking into the dictionary of political

abuse; the founding editor's slippers are even on display in the new

media museum in Washington, DC. And Ken and his team have brought a

new liveliness to the site this election season—validated by the

record traffic of the last three months.



So why not wait, at least till the election? Well, since the end of

last year, we've been expecting a downturn. Scratch that: since the

middle of 2006, when we sold off Screenhead, shuttered Sploid and

declared we were "hunkering down", we've been waiting for the internet

bubble to burst. No, really, this time. And, even if not, better safe

than sorry; and better too early than too late.



Everybody says that the internet is special; that advertising is still

moving away from print and TV; and Gawker sites are still growing in

traffic by about 90% a year, way faster than the web as a whole. But

it would be naive to think that we can merely power through an

advertising recession. We need to concentrate our energies, and the

time of Chris Batty's sales group, on the sites with the greatest

potential for audience and advertising.



The dozen sites that remain represent some 97% or our 228m pageviews

per month, and an even higher proportion of our growth and advertising

revenue. (Key facts are below, in case anyone asks.) We'll be able to

devote more attention to breakouts such as Jezebel and io9, as well as

established titles such as Gizmodo and Kotaku, which are becoming

utterly dominant in their domains. And, then, once this recession is

done with, and we come up from the bunker to survey the internet

wasteland around us, we can decide on what new territories we want to

colonize.



Regards



Nick

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