Wendy Warren named editor of Philly.com

A rising star at the People Paper has been tapped to manage online content for the

Daily News

and the

Inquirer

.

Daily News assistant managing editor Wendy Warren, 37, has been named vice president and editor of Philly.com.

"She's a terrific journalist and a great leader, too," said Brian Tierney, chief executive of Philadelphia Media Holdings, which owns both papers and Philly.com.

"We could have hired an executive- search firm and looked all over the country, and I'm absolutely confident I wouldn't have found anybody better than we have in the building."

Tierney noted that Philly.com had 42 million hits from Web surfers in April, a one-third increase from April 2007.

"With that kind of explosive growth, we don't want to lose sight of the journalism that anchors the content," Tierney said.

Last year, Warren ran the Daily News' multimedia project to cover the mayor's race, The Next Mayor, in collaboration with WHYY and the Committee of Seventy. The project won several awards for journalistic excellence.

Warren said she's looking forward to "taking the journalism that gets done at this company - by the two newspapers, our other publications, and at Philly.com - and catapulting it online.

"I think when you saw the re-design [of Philly.com], you could see that this is an organization that's willing to completely change, to shake everything up," Warren said. "I think that's necessary online. I think we have to push for surprising, exciting, excellent content."

Daily News editor Michael Days broke the news of the well-liked Warren's departure at a newsroom meeting yesterday.

"In her eight years at the Daily News she has distinguished herself in all that she has tackled," Days said. "Her online initiatives, in particular, demonstrated her enviable ability to work with a myriad of personalities and institutions to both produce and maintain must-read work."

Warren will report to Philly.com President Eric Grilly, who said the Web site will benefit from the "wealth of experience and knowledge" she brings to the job.

Before joining the Daily News in 2000, Warren was the business editor and a business writer at the Allentown Morning Call, where she was a Times-Mirror Journalist of the Year in 1998.

Originally from Roanoke, Va., Warren graduated from James Madison University in central Virginia. *