Online managing editor Meredith Artley will be leaving the LA Times to take a job at CNN.com. LA Observed has memos from Artley and editor Russ Stanton about the move. Stanton has high praise for Artley, as evidenced in the excerpt below:

For the past two years, Meredith has done a spectacular job leading our efforts to expand the audience for our world-class journalism via the Web, and the results -- both locally and globally -- speak for themselves:

-- Our site traffic, as measured both by page views and unique visitors, has more than doubled. And over the past year, latimes.com has been the fastest-growing website among the nation's largest newspapers.

-- We expanded and upgraded our Web staff, retrained our print staff and then integrated the two into one newsgathering operation serving several media.

-- We have won a host of accolades for our Web work, including two Overseas Press Club Awards, a Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Award and several nominations from the Online News Assn.

Photo found at LATimes.com