For a few days, I waited for the other shoe to drop after Gawker’s John Cook pretty much destroyed Deadline Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke. Then I realized I was being an idiot–I was being naïve–in thinking it would matter.

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Yet another stage of the New York Times’s (NYT) exploration of paid content options has come to light via Gawker, which has posted the text of two potential content packages, labeled “Silver” and “Gold.” It’s clear these are hypothetical options; Gawker quotes a Times spokesperson as writing them that “It’s very early in the process. We are still in the data collection phase.”

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Everyone’s coverage of the uprising in Iran has been Twitter-centric, for obvious reasons. But CNN, in an apparent attempt to look like they have real, non-Twitter newsgathering capabilities, has been regurgitating Twitter posts and attributing them to unnamed “sources.”

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Nick Denton is sitting amid the rows of screen-staring digital workers in the fourth-floor walkup that serves as Gawker headquarters, having neglected to build himself a private office.

“I would do it, but I don’t want to be mocked by the blogs,” says the company’s founder, retreating to the loft’s only semiprivate space — a pair of old couches next to a table with boxes of canned soda piled underneath.

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Gawker Media impresario Nick Denton, one of the more vocal Cassandras of media collapse last fall, got a surprise this spring when things turned out to be, well, not so bad. Mr. Denton told us earlier in the year that sales were actually up double digits, and it appeared marketers’ reactions to the recession were “more strategic” than he thought.

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When I read the news on TechCrunch that Valleywag’s longtime editor, Owen Thomas, was leaving the gossip site, I wondered whether there was a bit of schadenfreude in this reporting. After all, TechCrunch’s founder, Mike Arrington, was a constant target of the Gawker Media blog and once famously ejected a Valleywag photographer from a party he was co-hosting simply because of the publication the photographer worked for.

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The creator of the brilliant television series The Wire today asked Congress to legalize monopolistic collusion by newspapers. Only they can really cover City Hall, he said. Apparently he hasn’t been there in a while.

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For the Web’s cognoscenti, the lolcats fad is so over. I Can Has Cheezburger, the site that sparked captioned-cat-picture mania, launched in January 2007. The online world’s early adopters learned about the phenomenon that February, when Boing Boing first linked to the site. Over the next few months, lolcats showed up in Gawker, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and Time. Last October, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, the site’s founders, published “I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun,” a book that spent 13 weeks on the New York Times’ paperback best-seller list. Lolcats are now even showing up on hipster soda bottles. Is there anyone left in America who hasn’t had enough of these cat photos appended with ironic, allusive, peculiarly spelled captions?

Yes—lots of people. More than two years after its launch, I Can Has Cheezburger is still having cheeseburgers. Not only hasn’t it faded, the site is bigger than ever: People keep sending in new pictures, new people keep discovering the phenomenon, and every day traffic grows a bit more. In the last year, according to the traffic-monitoring firm Compete, visits to the site more than doubled.

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Bear with me as we recap last week’s 100-yard dash of media industry financial woe before breasting the tape of eternal doom. First comes ITV with its 40 percent profit decline, 600 redundancies and regional closures, then Channel Five making one in four people redundant–saving almost as much money as Channel 4 will gain from Kevin Lygo halving his £1m pay package. In print, things are no less unappealing. The ABCs for national newspapers recorded almost universal sales decline, with no sector growing and the Daily Sport (yes, it is still going) withdrawing from the audit altogether. In magazines, Arena closed, and even on the internet Gawker’s founder, Nick Denton, has folded his blogs together, proclaiming that “micropublishing is dead.” Wherever you look, it is clear that the media industry is in dire need of quantitative tightening.

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The news that Google (GOOG) is placing ads on Google News has sent a renewed wave of hand-wringing through the newspaper industry. How dare those Googlers make online news a profitable business!

Of course, Google is planning to keep most of that profit. If Larry and Sergey plan to share anything more than links with the newspapers whose headlines it displays in Google News, they haven’t signaled their intentions.

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It’s 1996, and you’re bored. What do you do? If you’re one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you’d do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are–”Welcome.” You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name (you win, pimpodayear94).

Then you load up Internet Explorer, AOL’s default Web browser. Now what? There’s no YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, or Gawker. There’s no Google (GOOG), Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. A few newspapers and magazines have begun to put their articles online—you can visit the New York Times or Time—and there are a handful of new Web-only publications, including Feed, HotWired, Salon, Suck, Urban Desires, Word, and, launched in June, Slate. But these sites aren’t very big, and they don’t hold your interest for long. People still refer to the new medium by its full name—the World Wide Web—and although you sometimes find interesting stuff here, you’re constantly struck by how little there is to do. You rarely linger on the Web; your computer takes about 30 seconds to load each page, and, hey, you’re paying for the Internet by the hour. Plus, you’re tying up the phone line. Ten minutes after you log in, you shut down your modem. You’ve got other things to do—after all, a new episode of “Seinfeld” is on.

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Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. After hackers took down SoapBlox, a one-man blog-hosting company which runs local political Web sites, a silenced liberal commentariat found out how true that was.

SoapBlox grew out of Scoop, the software used on DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas’s left-of-center superblog. Paul Preston, its developer, found himself running 25 different sites–the likes of My Left Wing, Blue Hampshire, West Michigan Rising, and Swing State Project. (All politics is local!)

And yet SoapBlox remained a one-man band. So when still-unidentified hackers infiltrated SoapBlox’s servers, causing them to be taken offline, Preston despaired.

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It’s more than a rumor: The great Silicon Valley gossip rag experiment has come to a humbling conclusion.

Two and a half years after launching Valleywag, blog magnate Nick Denton has decided to fold the site into Gawker, which covers the media business. For the past month, Denton has been saying to everyone who will listen that online advertising is undergoing a sharp slowdown as the economy continues to tank, and Web publishers are going to get nailed.

After recently paring the Valleywag staff down to two, Denton is now keeping only one–Editor Owen Thomas, who will write as many as a dozen daily posts about Silicon Valley gossip as a Gawker columnist. “Valleywag’s traffic isn’t enough to pay for two writers, even with Ketel One ads on every page,” writer Paul Boutin wrote in a post explaining the move. Boutin’s last day is Dec. 1.

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Lots of interesting debate about this week’s Pulitzer Prizes and what they say about the newspaper industry. On Gawker, Nick Denton very smartly says that “the newspapers’ Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, U.S. newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the Internet.”

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