Gawker Media honcho Nick Denton issued an edict this morning: headlines for his sites running on his Kinja system will now be auto-truncated to 70 characters. He's doing this to appease Google and Facebook. Apparently, the company couldn't identify a technical solution yet to issue different headlines to different venues. Most publishers send out different headlines to Facebook, Twitter, their sites and for Google. (For instance, there's a couple free WordPress plugins that do this, just FYI.) The sites will also shorten summaries on sites, like here, to convey more information.

Let's see how today's Gawker headlines stack up at 70 characters!

• ‘Religious Freedom’-Fighting NC Lawmaker Opposes [...]

As a Catholic, I'm not buying this. Popes don't just quit because they're tired. What's going on here??

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) February 11, 2013

When the most trusted man in America says something like "What's going on here?", then something is most certainly going on here. Popes, after all, do not "quit" like some deluded star of a network situation comedy. Popes "quit" in the way the mythological first pope, Saint Peter, gave up the duties of his office: by upside-down crucifixion. Or, more generally, death. As Joseph Ratzinger is not technically dead, he is the pope until death, unless he believes he is mightier than God [...]

You know, with the redesign of any web property comes reader outrage, anger, threats of leaving and even some actual leaving. That's normal! Sometimes it's effective in shifting an audience, or getting a new one. Sometimes it's good for the community to have its say, and work it out on its own. But the comments on this Gawker post are not, I don't think, par for the course for a website after a redesign.

Now, I don't want to beat a dead horse, but this is the internet, and beating a dead horse is an Olympic sport around here. So for those of you seemingly out of the loop about this Gawker v 4chan nonsense, here's a bit of context.

Gothamist, a metro website company, founded in 2003, now has 13 city-specific websites, which reach 2.7 million unique readers a month, according to Quantcast. For a long time, in my opinion, Gothamist was stubborn about growing as a business. Its publisher, Jake Dobkin, did much of the business himself, and didn't think the math worked out to have full-time ad salespeople. More recently, that math has apparently changed, and now the goal is to have as many ad salespeople as can support themselves. 16 million pageviews a month is, in the web business, a totally decent amount of inventory to sell. And for a larger media company that [...]

Hey, you think the economy is bad or something?

Is Twitter your job? We have maintained in the past that it is not. A year later, we think that more and more media employees are engaged in the practice of using their Twitter accounts to promote not just their work, but their workplaces. That's true even with the transition of Jim Roberts from @NYTJim to @NYCJim, as he left the New York Times to become the executive editor of Reuters Digital. (His Twitter is still chock-full of Times links, though!)

How much Twitter work is working? We looked at a work-week's worth of tweets at three publications: BuzzFeed, Gawker and Business Insider. Just how often were [...]

Last week, Gawker Media's swank SoHo office had no water. Today, the employees that actually come to the office to work on a Monday morning discovered that they had no Internet. That's rough, for an Internet company. (BuzzFeed's internet was also out this morning, though now restored, not that really anyone there would have known, because who could face their awful, slow, impossible elevators on a Monday morning?) But really the question is: What will the third cataclysm of Gawker Media be?

I just got search warranted at 6:30am by a very polite crew from the DA's office. Took my iPhone, laptop, some old notebooks.

— Joe Muto (@JoeMuto) April 25, 2012

Gawker's Fox employee mole and brain surgeon Joe Muto had a big morning, with a small army from the D.A.'s office seizing his computer, phone and "notebooks." (Notebooks!) Muto says he is being accused of grand larceny. Clearly he doesn't have a lawyer or he wouldn't be tweeting about this.

Recently a news organization published a photograph of a rather recently dead body. The former person in question photographed had been murdered and presumably the news outfit felt that a murder on its local turf had some news value. The victim's family and friends were about ten kinds of furious. Meanwhile, written coverage of the murder and its circumstances was vigorous and regular on a number of New York City-based websites, including Gothamist and the Times, in large part because it took place in the East Village. Year-to-date, there have been four murders in the East Village's Ninth Precinct, though I couldn't tell you what the other three were. [...]

The titanic battle between 4Chan and Gawker seems to have shifted in 4Chan's favor, with many of the Gawker media sites available only intermittently today. Can't we all GET ALONG? Seriously, if I miss today's Gawker etiquette piece on "How To Blow Your Nose On The Subway (For Gays)" because of this I am gonna be pissed.

Matt Cherette is 25 and lives in Grand Haven, Michigan, about fifteen minutes from his parents' house. He traveled to New York in the second week of February and while he was here, he signed the paperwork for a job at Gawker.TV. He would be their night coordinator. This was an opportunity to actually get paid for the sort of diligent content repurposing that he's been doing for free, for years, on the LiveJournal-hosted gossip community Oh No They Didn't.

While he was in New York, he came to a party thrown by his new boss, Richard Blakeley, at Destination Bar, on Avenue A. The Tennessee-Vanderbilt game was [...]

There's a segment of the journalism and media-product-making world that believes that paying sources for their exclusive version of events is a great business technique. It's competitive, it's efficient and it's not usually terribly expensive. (Unless you are talking about pictures of Angelina Jolie's babies, in which case it's very pricey-in 2008, People and Hello! together paid $14 million, to charity, for pictures of the Jolie-Pitt twins.) Over the weekend, Gawker paid an acquaintance of the insane balloon boy's family-I'm not even going to use their names, if that's okay?-to tell his story. It was pretty interesting, and damning, if not entirely conclusive.

"Do you really think you’re better than the porn industry, beauty pageant industry? At least porn has the decency to admit it’s built on the backs of amateurs and screws everyone over. Meanwhile three-year-olds are wearing dentures so they can have that perfect smile and you make them pay for the privilege of treading your filthy middle-school auditorium stages." —Miss Delaware has been "de-throned" for doing the wrong kind of self-branding promotional videos.

The great menace in headlines in 2011 was that either every headline was "11 Ways to X" or that it was "Y Happens to Z [SLIDESHOW]." You know, whatever our pals at Business Insider and Huffington Post's Celebrity Sideboob's page were doing. Well, guess what, we all got used to it, and now it barely registers as tacky or grabby, except when it's over the top. Sure: promise me 11 things, I will at least read three of them. Fair's fair.

The menace before that was the "How" headline, which is so hard to avoid. "How X Became Y." "How Apple Something Something'd." "How Your Mom Became Your Dad." That [...]

I was all excited for the Fox News mole to tell people about the keystroke-logging and remote screen-monitoring that goes on at News Corp but I guess the tech caught up to him before he caught up to the tech: "They knew that someone, using my computer login, had accessed the sources for two videos that ended up on Gawker over the past few weeks," he wrote last night. Well of course they did! At the Post, people wouldn't even open emails that they thought would get them in trouble, and they'd just call you back from cell phones from outside. This is after all a [...]

Anthony De Rosa pointed out last night this striking similarity in real estate and scale and concept between the new New York Times opinion web page and the new beta Gawker design. Is this what people want their web to be? It strikes me as an anti-Craigslist, an anti-Google. It's a magazining of web content beyond anything we might have expected. It's attractive! But it's also a whole lot less.

/b/b/b/– That's all, folks!

Last night I had a dream about Nikki Finke-just in passing. Like, she was at a party or something, and we had a conversation about toast. She looked great! But I awoke with a strange sympathy for her. In particular, I am thinking of some recent Gawker posts about her-some of which don't add up entirely.