Nearly 10 months after Gawker Media boss Nick Denton pulled a Cheney and appointed himself editor of his flagship blog, he's about to step down. More interestingly, we hear that Denton plans some personnel moves throughout his 12-blog empire, and will likely add staff to some of his best-performing sites -- like gadget site Gizmodo and video game site Kotaku -- and may lay people off at some of his weaker titles. That would echo the move he made in April, when he ditched three of his titles altogether, and predicted that "there's a cold wind coming."

Denton, via IM (as always) declined to comment on the moves, except to boast that he's got a great replacement lined up for himself at Gawker: "We had way more interest than we've ever had from journalists at magazines and newspapers. Though that may owe more to the plight of print than Gawker's growth over the last nine months."

We gather that the mystery hire was present at the party Denton hosted on the rooftop of Gawker HQ in Nolita last week. But that doesn't say much, as a good swath of the New York media world was there (see below).

Obligatory traffic stat: Gawker is set to do about 23 million page views this month. That's a site record, and is up 3x from last December, when Denton started running the site himself.

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Gawker party photo via Nick McGlynn

See Also: Denton To Fix Gawker Himself
Nick Denton "Pruning" Gawker Media, Ditching Three Sites