Embattled Gawker loses top advertising exec

Troubled Gawker Media just lost its top ad executive.

Michael Kuntz, who was senior vice president of global sales and partnerships, is jumping to Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, to be its senior vice president of digital revenue.

Kuntz will be tasked with driving revenue gains across USA Today Networks digital assets that draw more than 100 million unique visitors a month.

Kuntz is the second top ad sales person to exit in three months. In October, Andrew Gorenstein, the president of advertising and partnerships, resigned as part of a reorganization of the business side.

The defections come at a tough time for Nick Denton’s gossip sites.

The company will go to trial in March to defend itself against a $100 million invasion of privacy suit filed by Terry Bollea, better known as the WWE star Hulk Hogan.

Bollea claims Gawker did him wrong when it aired in 2012 a video of him having sex with the wife of his then best friend.

More recently, journalist Ashley Terrill sued Gawker for $10 million, claiming it double-crossed her by failing to honor a pledge of confidentiality when she turned to its editors for help in a story she was working on about allegations of sexual harassment at Tinder.

Denton’s empire was also stung by backlash from a mid-July story that outed a married executive of a major publishing company who had allegedly tried to arrange a hook-up with a male escort.

Fearing an ad boycott, Denton quickly apologized and pulled the story.

In November, he announced the flagship Gawker.com site was quitting the media news and gossip coverage that had been its lifeblood and was turning to political coverage instead.

Traffic across Gawker Media’s several sites dropped 16 percent in December, according to comScore, from the previous year.