Here are few Monday stories you may have missed:

• Nick Denton outs Brian Williams as an obsessive Gawker reader (even on weekends).
• Sarah Lacy says her new site covering Silicon Valley startups is not beholden to the investors who funded it; Ryan Tate disagrees. She also says being a woman didn't affect fundraising. "I experienced zero sexism during the process of raising money for PandoDaily."
• Cindi Scoppe, the editor who wrote The State's short-lived endorsement of Jon Huntsman, expresses her regrets to the Guardian: "It is rather like having gone through a courtship for some period of time and finally making love with a man, for him to suddenly turn around and say, 'you know what, I think I'm gay'."
• The first buyouts of 2012 are at the Chicago Tribune. The year's first layoffs were in San Diego, Lawrence, Kan., Connecticut and Virginia.

24/7 Wall St.
The financial news site 24/7 Wall St. has come up with a list of the 25 most valuable blogs (perhaps more aptly, aggregators and news sites) based on revenue, profits, market differentiation and "founder risk," or the harm that would come if the founder left. Gawker is by far the most valuable, followed by Drudge. Business Insider is valued at $45 million; the editors at 24/7 Wall St. write that its "mix of in-depth financial and business analysis and gossipy and sophomoric content has more than doubled the site’s audience in a year." Mashable, which has expanded without the help of outside investors, is valued at $39 million. Of Glenn Beck's The Blaze, valued at $24 million, 24/7 Wall St. writes, "The site’s greatest asset may also be its greatest weakness – its identity is inextricably linked to that of its founder." The Huffington Post, which AOL bought for $315 million, is not on the list. || Related: The Huffington Post's brand is worth $358.6 million compared to $156.3 million for AOL (Forbes.com) (more...)

Slate.com
After being called "a big immature baby" by Gawker in a 2007 post, journalist Katie Roiphe was surprised to receive a book-blurb request from a Gawker writer who was "a big fan" of her work. That had Roiphe wondering if she misunderstood the site:

If you are pumping out autopilot schadenfreude all day long, maybe there is nothing personal in it. The rage, the dissociated nastiness, floats through the ether and attaches itself fleetingly to a subject, but really, taking it personally is like being annoyed at the wind for messing up your hair.

Her problem with Nick Denton's site is that "it's all tone, no content, and the tone itself is monotonously unvaried -- namely the sneer. ...The highest form of keeping people honest demands more wit, more precision, more specificity, more sharpness. If you make fun of everyone in the same register, in the same tone, it begins to be a little generic."

What Gawker staffers saying about her screed:
* Investigative reporter John Cook tweeted: "My mom tells me "you're no Nabokov" enough as it is. Now I have to hear it from Katie Roiphe?"
* Media writer Hamilton Nolan's tweet: "Hahahahahahahahahaha." (He wrote a post headlined "Shut Up, Katie Rophie" earlier this year. (I've asked Nick Denton for his reaction, and will post it if it comes in.)
> Roiphe has never used Twitter, although she says her daughter set up an account to give herself a follower
> Earlier: "We don't seek to do good" at Gawker Media, says Denton

Gawker
Hamilton Nolan was offered $130 to insert an advertiser link into his copy; the small marketing company making the pitch claimed to work with editors at Business Insider, Huffington Post and Technorati. Mario Ruiz, senior vice president for media relations at AOL, which owns Huffington, told me by email:

We have no knowledge of this company or its business model but we do not allow our editors, writers or bloggers to receive payments for editorial coverage, of course.

Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget also told Nolan he wasn't aware of any such arrangement.

The company, 43a, told Nolan:

We generally meet with resistance when dealing with editors, but bloggers aren't paid as well and most are willing to make some extra money.

What we suggest (as long as you think it won't get you into any trouble — we don't want anything that isn't beneficial for both parties) is trying to drop a link in the article, and seeing if the editor mentions it. If he does, remove the link, and we'll go our separate ways. If he doesn't, we'll pay you handsomely, and we can continue if you want to. We don't do this for every article, and there is a certain "under the radar" element to it, so you don't want to over do it.

Related: Motorola, T-Mobile deny being part of blogger payola scheme (Forbes) | Reporter sues HuffPo, NY Times for alleged plagiarism of Abramoff investigation

Business Insider
Nick Denton has lost his bet with Rex Sorgatz that Gawker Media Network's traffic would recover after dropping when the sites were redesigned. Traffic to all Gawker sites had to be above 510 million monthly page views on Oct. 1 for Denton to win; he fell short by 10 million page views, so he owes Sorgatz $100, writes Noah Davis. Sorgatz tweeted, "I am giving my $100 to a charity called AOL." Denton responds, "Gawker Media monthly pageviews hit 510m -- but four days too late for my bet with @fimoculous. Argh!" Denton would have won if the bet had been settled on Sept. 1 -- the site had 515 million page views in August.

Romenesko+ Letters
After reading Friday's Steve Hendrix-Bradford Noble email exchange, MSNBC.com's Bob Sullivan wrote to Romenesko+ about the Daily Mail and Gawker picking up his story on a laid-off lawyer who's now a stripper. "The Daily Mail copied it, we’ll say, extensively," he writes. "Gawker did much the same." Sullivan adds: "It’s all the worse because the story was 100% anonymous to protect the woman from future repercussions. In my case, the DM simply added a photo of a random stripper, which I thought was particularly tasteless." (more...)

The Awl
A Gawker Media employee tells Choire Sicha that Nick Denton's pep talk at the Crosby Hotel Wednesday night "amounted to showing a chart of upward linear growth and telling us it wasn't good enough." The staffer adds: "But what do you expect from Nick -- is he going to go around and rub everybody's shoulders?" Sicha -- a former Gawker employee -- writes:

Nick was asked if he would do the infamous redesign differently if he could do it over again. "No," he said—saying that, what's the point in having an independent company if you can't do things that are radical and make screw-ups? (While the company's competitors are, he said, hide-bound and risk-averse. That is true.)

More meeting highlights:
* "When will I get a raise?" someone asked Denton. His response: "You'll get a raise when you're promoted."
* Denton announced the company was absolutely not for sale.
* Denton didn't relent to a top editor's insistence that Gawker Media was an editorial property, and not tech company.
* There's been a hiring spree of late, because each Gawker Media site is expected to grow "quite incredibly" over the next year.
> From a 2003 Poynter post: Nick Denton's blog empire slowly builds

There’s about a month left until Nick Denton and Rex Sorgatz can settle their bet about whether the Gawker redesign hurt traffic. If the wager were based on August’s traffic, Denton would win, as Gawker Media’s page views hit 515 million.

Denton tweeted Tuesday night, “Gawker.com page views hit all-time high: 19.1m in last seven days.” It isn’t only page views that have rebounded from the February dip after the new design; unique visitors are up, Denton told me by email. Just after the redesign, the site had 1.3 million uniques per week; that number has increased 54 percent to 2 million uniques.

The network as a whole has also recovered, Denton says. Post-redesign, the network had 7.8 million uniques a week. In the last seven days, the sites had 9.8 million unique visitors. And that was before Gawker published its latest story on Fox host Bill O’Reilly and his wife. (more...)

Newark Star-Ledger | Gawker.com | Asbury Park Press
Just hours after Gawker and the New Jersey ACLU sued to see records of Gov. Chris Christie's communications with Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, the governor's office released what it called a "supplemental response" to the request. The new letter said the administration wasn't backing down from its claim to executive privilege, but officially disclosed that a meeting with Ailes took place. Christie said he expects the lawsuit to be dismissed. "There are no other documents between me and Mr. Ailes at all," he tells the Star-Ledger. "My understanding now from my staff is that they’ve been contacted and told the suit can be dropped." Gawker's John Cook says: "We have no earthly idea why Christie would go so far as to invoke executive privilege to keep one lousy schedule entry, concerning a dinner that had already been reported, secret."

Frank Corrado, a Wildwood lawyer working with the ACLU, said his organization and Gawker would withdraw the lawsuit if the Christie administration would certify in court that the calendar entry was indeed the only document that would fit Gawker’s expansive records request.

Read the Gawker/ACLU filings