Last year, local NBC news affiliate WRC/NBC4’s web site got a major facelift. Gone was the relatively dull NBC4.com, and in its place was a nationally-launched web site template, in this case nbcwashington.com, that’s trying to be both a home for the news content of WRC, as well as its own online brand, offering aggregated and exclusive content on top of the station’s regular stories.

Michael Calderone over at the Politico broke the news today that D.C.’s original foul-mouthed political blog, Wonkette, is leaving the Gawker media empire. Managing editor Ken Layne will personally take the helm of the newly independent Wonkette, as he confirmed in a post on the site today. There’s some pretty thinly veiled subtext in both the letter from Gawker publisher Nick Denton that Calderone posted, and in Layne’s announcement, that Layne and Denton disagree about…

Seems the folks over at Gawker can’t quite figure out to do with the staff of their political blog Wonkette lately. Late Friday afternoon, former Wonkette associate editor Megan Carpentier was fired from the position she took on just a few short months ago. The Huffington Post aptly sums up the merry-go-round, when last fall then-editors Alex Pareene moved up to New York to start writing for Gawker and Ken Layne stepped down to a…