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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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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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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Gawker Media boss Nick Denton is “rationalizing” his blog business by spinning off three underperforming sites: Wonkette, Gridskipper and Idolator. “There’s a cold wind coming,” says Denton, via IM. “We need to focus on our core titles.” The move will leave Denton with 12 sites, including science fiction site io9, launched in January.

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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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Jordan Golson can’t be happy: Nick Denton has cut the amount of money he gets per thousand page views to $6.50 from $9.75. That’s a 33% pay cut, on a per-page-view basis. What about on an absolute basis?

Well, the page-view rate is set on the basis of the previous quarter’s page views. Total Q4 page views were 9,132,723, while Q1 page views rose 34% to 12,234,604 . The 33% cut matches the 34% rise in page views, right? Er, no.

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