Well, score one for the Gray Lady. Brian Stelter, our TVNewser blog wunderkind, is leaving the friendly confines of the mediabistro.com server farm for the New York Times.

Here's the Times memo:

Colleagues,

You read about him on the front page of The New York Times last November, in "The Kid With All the News About the TV News." Now you'll read him in The New York Times.

Brian Stelter, the TVNewser blogger, is joining the Times next month as an 8i reporter to cover the media world for NYTimes.com and for the paper. He will report to media editor Bruce Headlam, and will work closely with Business Day reporters and with our friends in Culture, including television editor Steve Reddicliffe and reporters Bill Carter, Jacques Steinberg and Ed Wyatt.

Brian's blog, as Julie Bosman reported in that page one story, "is read religiously by network presidents, media executives, producers and publicists." He started the blog in 2004 during winter break, and soon was hired by Mediabistro.com to keep writing it. He made it a must read by getting scoops about the comings and goings in the business. So dedicated was Brian to his blog that he updated it — posting an item about NBC News — between interviews with Times editors in our building recently.

His hiring underscores the expansion of our efforts to integrate what we do online and in the print edition. Working with Bruce and our Culture colleagues, Brii will help shape our media coverage on the Web. And, like Michael de la Merced, who was brought on to write for DealBook but has been a major contributor to the paper's coverage of financial news, Brian will do both; indeed, we expect many of his online postings to become news stories.

Brian, who grew up in Damascus, Md., about an hour west of Baltimore, just graduated from Towson University with a degree in mass communications and was the editor of the student newspaper, The Towerlight. He has worked as a summer intern at the NPR radio affiliate in Baltimore, and at The Gazette, a weekly newspaper in Germantown, Md., and served as a page in the United States Senate.

Blogging on TVNewser, running the student paper and going to school didn't leave him a lot of time for extracurricular activities, but when he has free time, Brian is a frequent traveler, semi-serious photographer and amateur film critic. He also reads a lot of nonfiction and, of course, watches TV.

Please join me, Bruce and Sam Sifton in welcoming Brian to the pages of the Times, as a reporter this time.

Larry

Congrats, Brian. You will be missed.

NOTE: We're looking for Brian's replacement, a full-time TV news "obsessive" — here's the job listing.