The web levels the playing field, allowing individuals to compete with larger corporations, largely through the smaller players making dirt public and launching viral marketing campaigns around issues. Because there is a publisher publishing every opinion and angle, it is easy to discount just about everything, especially attempts for new market participants to become remarkable.

It may be a new year, but we’re still talking (well, some of us are anyway) about an old issue: namely, the idea of paying writers based on the traffic they get.

The focus of the debate right now is Gawker, where Nick Denton has apparently started paying his bloggers based in part on how many views their posts get. This one has been around for awhile, but now it’s official thanks to a memo on (Gawker-owned) Valleywag.

Scott Karp makes a good point in a post about Nick Denton taking the helm at Gawker again (something I also wrote about on earlier). It’s pretty much the same thing I’ve been saying over and over when I talk to companies — including media companies — about blogs and social media. Let me say it again: Blogs are just a publishing system.

According to the one-man investigative team known as Brian Stelter — formerly known as the guy behind the blog TVNewser, who beat the pants off most of the media reporters at the major dailies while he was still in school — the new editor of Gawker is none other than the founder of Gawker Media, the secretive and unpredictable Nick Denton himself. Stelter says he has it confirmed through several sources.

Ex-Rocketboom host Amanda Congdon won’t have her contract renewed with ABC, after a year of working with the network.

Nick Denton of Gawker Media , one of the first successful bloggers, recently made some changes to his blogging empire. Apparently editors at Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo and Gridskipper were moved or replaced.

An assortment of personnel moves and the dumping of a pair of poorly performing blogs under the Gawker Media umbrella will take place for a series of reasons, the first being a fear of an advertising downturn.

In stage two of George Clooney’s war on the blogosphere, the heralded producer of Academy Award smug (see South Park’s snarky send up) has launched a spam attack against online celeb gossip rag Gawker. It all began with a silly little Google Maps mashup.