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N.Y. Times denies Gawker allegation

The New York Times is denying Gawker founder Nick Denton's assertion that they move their reporters to different beats to appease advertisers.

”The New York Times moves people around from beat to beat in order—and you know this because you wrote the story—in order to satisfy advertisers sometimes,” Denton said.

His remarks, reported by our colleagues at Capital New York, were made in a staff meeting Tuesday at Gawker, held in response to the firestorm that followed the website’s publication of a post that outed a married media executive for allegedly calling on a male escort, and the subsequent removal of the post.

“They won’t actually remove a journalist, they won’t fire a journalist; they’ll actually just put a weak journalist on the beat so that the coverage isn’t quite as toothy as it would otherwise be," Denton continued.

"It's too bad that Mr. Denton is trying to damage others to get out of his own scandal," Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy wrote in an email when asked about Denton’s remarks. "The New York Times does not make decisions about assignments or beats based on advertisers."

The meeting yesterday, held in the wake of the resignations of two top editors from the site, got heated at times.

Denton said that Gawker loses money "all the time" from advertisers who object to items the site publishes.

The assertion did not sit well with some Gawker staff.

"Make this into an advertising company then! Say what it really is! It’s not a place for journalism!" features editor Leah Finnegan said to Denton.

Denton said it's just the way the industry works.

"There are dirty deals being done all over the place," Denton said. "Your attitude, your naïveté when it comes to that and then outrage when you discover that actually that’s how the world works, it’s sort of natural and it’s sort of a function of where we are as a company."

Hadas Gold is a reporter at Politico.