So says The Nation:

Gawker.com is a gossip blog best known for mocking Lindsay Lohan and generally lowering the level of discourse in the New York media world. But starting on December 4 the website put snark aside and helped instigate one of the most unlikely and successful labor campaigns of recent years. The sight of young, educated workers in the seismically unstable media industry using spontaneous online organizing to cope with innovative forms of corporate exploitation and disrespect throws a challenge to the labor establishment. Some see a new social movement being born.

Now we’ve heard it all.

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Here’s one we haven’t heard before: CNN talker Larry King grills his interviewee subjects too hard. TV Guide must think there’s something to the charge, since it published the following missive in its reader mailbag section this week:

Larry King the loose-lipped liberal managed the most inappropriate act a talk-show host can do: offend queen of nice Marie Osmond! He ambushed her during an interview by asking about her underage son in rehab. Kind should apologize for this. After all, her son is a minor and deserves some privacy.

So says reader Steve Sacco, of Newark, NJ. Callers, do you agree?

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“Comedienne Joan Rivers unleashed a foulmouthed tirade in front of the Queen and Prince Philip at the 79th Royal Variety Performance - swearing 13 times in seven minutes,” reports the Daily Mail. “The potty-mouthed American star, 74, well-known for her crude stand-up routine said in one rant: ‘It’s been a s****y day and everyone is stealing my jokes.’”

Rivers can next be seen tonight on QVC hawking jewelry. Hey, a girl’s gotta work.

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Little did anyone know that when Montel Williams showed up in Savannah, Georgia on Friday to promote the drug industry’s program to help people afford prescription drugs, the talk show host would end up threatening to “blow up” some local reporters, according to the Savannah Morning News.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the threat was apparently triggered by the following question, posed by a high school intern working as a reporter: “Do you think pharmaceutical companies would be discouraged from research and development if their profits were restricted?”

“Williams, who has multiple sclerosis and is a paid spokesman for the industry’s Partnership for Prescription Assistance, abruptly ended the interview shortly after that question was asked,” according to the paper. ”Later in the day, the reporter went to a local hotel to do a feature on gingerbread houses displayed there. Williams, who was at the hotel for a separate event, believed they had followed him there. According to the reporter and two of her colleagues, Williams approached them and said, ‘Don’t look at me like that. Do you know who I am? I’m a big star, and I can look you up, find where you live and blow you up.’”

Poor Montel. The MS is really getting to him.

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Love it:

It’s Master Lodwick day here at CDC (Calacanis dot com). Here’s the most accurate description of Gawker Media I’ve ever read:

Gawker’s premise is “people are bad”. It acts as if all humans are inherently awful. Any achievement is framed as an accident; a distraction from the achiever’s underlying depravity. This worldview is directly at odds with our city’s best and brightest. Nick, it won’t be easy to recruit someone better than Emily and Choire; as the months march on, the pool of creative youngsters who are willing to turn themselves into professional assholes will shrink. If you would like to reverse Gawker’s premise and turn it into something else entirely, we should talk. A publication that celebrates excellence instead of negating it could be a big hit in the near future.

In fact, this is better description of Nick Denton than Gawker itself. Nick clearly was not loved enough as a baby, and was frequently teased as a child I’m told. He was odd and awkward as a young adult, and even today his cool facade only covers up 80% of his true need: to be loved–by anyone. Read more…

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“Whatever Gawker originally set out to do, it kind of did, and now it just feels over. I would love it if it just fell off the face of the earth,” departing editor Emily Gould tells WWD today.

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Editors Emily Gould, Joshua David Stein and Choire Sicha, right-hand man to Nick Denton, quit the Gawker empire suddenly last week, and Denton’s new pay-per-pageload philosophy has dramatically riled the editorial sides of the company’s fourteen blog sites.

“Choire’s departure as managing editor, and that of his blogger protégés, will obviously be a complete pain,” Denton told the NY Times. “But we’ve been through it before, three times, and this change of the guard does give us the opportunity to accelerate the transformation of Gawker from cute blog to fully-fledged news site.”

Their departures come just weeks after popular editor Alex Balk left for Radar and associate editor Doree Shafrir left for the Observer.

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