Cityfile has been sold to Nick Denton’s Gawker Media, in the company’s first-ever acquisition.

The site, which chronicles notables in New York’s media, finance, and politics circles, will be folded into Gawker.com.

The purchase price for the company was not disclosed.

Denton promptly fired his editor-in-chief of 18 months and installed the founder of Cityfile, Remy Stern, in the job.

“I’ll put this as plainly as we would report any other masthead ouster: I am being canned,” Gabriel Snyder wrote in a memo to staffers, saying that he had turned down the opportunity to stay on in a new management job.

Stern launched Cityfile in the summer of 2008, after spending two years at Radar’s second incarnation under Mort Zuckerman and Jeffrey Epstein.

Reports on its traffic volume vary. Stern, citing Google Analytics, said Cityfile had 200,000 unique visitors in January. ComScore said it had 77,000.

Whatever the true number, it was enough to attract Denton, who said his own Web business, which encompasses Gawker, Lifehacker, Jalopnik and several other sites, continued to grow right through the recession that has ravaged traditional media.

Denton said that Gawker Media, which shed some struggling sites last year, had revenue growth of 22 percent in 2009 and has looked at other acquisition targets.

“For the first few years of Gawker Media, the business press had one abiding preoccupation: when are you going to sell out?” said Denton in a memo announcing the acquisition to staff. “Today we’re giving the M&A gossips something else to talk about.”

The turnout of another top editor — Denton re-assumed the role himself after bumping aside Choire Sicha in 2008 — doesn’t do much to dispel the notion Gawker churns and burns its way through staff.

“Being editor of one of our sites is definitely a high-pressure job,” Denton said. “But most of our top editors have been with the company for three or four years, which is an eternity in Internet time.” He pointed out that quite a few have worked for him more than once.