Meet the New Valleywag: Ryan Tate

After terrorizing tech managers, Owen Thomas has decided to join 'em. Emerging from the shadows to replace him as the Valleywag is Ryan Tate, who's already relishing the idea of life in the sunshine.

Owen took the Valleywag reins from our overlord Nick Denton himself and has fiercely worked his Silicon Valley sources for gossip and scoops. In December, Valleywag was merged into Gawker, and when we tried to talk him into staying, he said he misses the management headaches of running his own site. He's keeping mum on his new gig, but we hear it involves the letters N, B, and C and will focus on Bay Area news.

As Gawker's night editor, Ryan lets me sleep easier at night. But it's time for him to rejoin the land of the living and the tech beat is a natural for him. Based in San Francisco, he started his journalism career at mags like Upside and Business 2.0 before the dot-com boom went bust. He joined Gawker last year from San Francisco Business Times. The night gig is by design one for a generalist, but he's come up with plenty of news at the intersection of business and media, such as Bloomberg's premature obituary for Apple CEO Steve Jobs and exposing the underbelly of Arianna Huffington's blog empire. Now part of the larger Gawker family, he'll still have room to write about his other areas of fascination, like military aviation shills and Fox News' slimy PR shop.

And that means there's a job opening at Gawker. I'm looking for a new night editor who's primarily responsible for keeping track of any breaking news after about 7 p.m. East Coast time, as well as getting a jump on the dawn's news stories. Since hours pretty brutal in the U.S., I'm especially interested in hearing from people who live in Australia or Europe. If you're reading this from overseas or are nocturnal by nature, email me.