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Gawker Media to undergo major redesign, restructuring

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Gawker Media’s big company-wide redesign, a year in the making, will finally come out of beta on January 3. It will the biggest event in Gawker Media history, for all three arms of the company—editorial, sales, and technology. It’s a concerted attempt for Gawker Media to stop being a blog network and start being something much more ambitious. And while that will be most immediately visible in the way that the blogs look, a massive change is taking place on the sales side, too: Chris Batty, Gawker Media’s semi-legendary head of sales, is leaving the company.

Gawker Media has had more than its fair share of staff turnover, of course. Much of it, especially at the Gawker flagship, has been detailed obsessively in the press. But above the editorial fray, the executive team has been constant all along: Denton, the owner and CEO;Gaby Darbyshire, the general counsel and COO; Tom Plunkett, the CTO; and Batty, the VP of sales and marketing, working alongside the VP of sales, Gabriela Giacoman. Batty’s departure marks the first visible fracture in this team, and is a sign of just how far-reaching Denton’s changes really are.

This is a monster post, so I’ll put the rest below the fold. The stuff about Batty and Gawker Media’s revenues comes near the top, the stuff about corporate structure and valuation is near the bottom.

Gawker Media’s new format—which can be previewed, in slightly glitchy form, atbeta.gawker.combeta.lifehacker.combeta.kotaku.combeta.deadspin.combeta.jalopnik.com,beta.gizmodo.com, and beta.fleshbot.com (that last one NSFW, obvs)—leads with one big story. That story is presented on the home page in full, complete with outbound links, meaning that the redesign will be the first time in years that Gawker Media sites will have outbound links on their home pages.

Full story: The new Gawker Media