Yesterday Gawker expressed bafflement regarding Russ Smith’s assertion in The New York Press that Gawker Media has been sold to The New York Times Company for $32 million. “As this is utterly ridiculous and unequivocally not true,” Gawker wrote, “we imagine Smith intended the piece as some sort of quasi-parody.”

But Smith, as unhinged as he most certainly is, may be onto something. A well-placed source inside the Times sent me a screenshot of an in-house mockup of Gawker redesigned to conform to the look, feel, and editorial tone of the Times Company’s flagship website. It’s not a pretty thing: Something is definitely lost when the snarkiness of Gawker is filtered through the bland, establishment-friendly tone of the Times. Let’s hope this deal doesn’t actually go through—it would mean the end of Gawker as we know it. Click on the logotype below to see the rest of this top-secret design.

Stay Free!, the fine Brooklyn-based nonprofit magazine edited by my excellent pal Carrie McLaren, has just launched a blog called Stay Free! Daily. The blog will be maintained by a stable of about half a dozen contributors. Stay Free! comes out twice a year and covers American media and culture from a lefty perspective. It’s great.

Carrie often creates satirical ads and other parodies for the back of the magazine, and I’ve appeared in two of them.