The International Herald Tribune has announced that William Schmidt, most recently an assistant managing editor at the New York Times, has been named IHT's new top editor. Schmidt will be taking over for Martin Gottlieb who has been serving in the position on an interim basis. According to the release Gottlieb will be returning to New York from Paris to continue working on the integration of the two papers.

Schmidt has been at the Times since 1981 and in 1987 he was one of a team of reporters who shared the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of articles about the causes of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. He will move into his new position by the end of the year.