The New York Times reports that Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media and my boss, will take over as editor of Gawker.com, his flagship and our sister site, on January 2. My first reaction to the news: Well, good. This should keep him busy.

Gawker listed the job two weeks ago:

It's no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories. And the new managing editor will need to hire and manage reporters, as well as bloggers. Gawker.com receives more than 10m pageviews per month. Think of Gawker less as a blog than as a full-blown news site. The right candidate will oversee Gawker's evolution.

A later post puts out a call for experienced print reporters to focus on original items. Denton fits the bill: When I first met him, he was covering Silicon Valley for the Financial Times.

Gawker likes to say the New York Times is just a fancy blog. With this change, is Gawker to become just a bilious newspaper? Whatever. Denton roughly doubled Valleywag's traffic before he handed this site to me. Maybe he's just eager to prove that wasn't a fluke.

(Photo by scriptingnews)

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