NBCNews.com is beefing up its staff. The biggest move is naming Hillary Frey the site’s new editorial director. Frey comes to NBCNews.com from Yahoo! News, where she served as editor-in-chief since July of 2012. Prior to her time at Yahoo!, Frey was managing editor of Adweek.

Other notable hires:

• Danielle Friedman has been named senior editor. Friedman comes to the site from Newsweek/The Daily Beast.
• Tracy Connor and Erin McClam have been named senior writers. Connor joins the site from The New York Daily News; McClam joins from the AP.
• Rachel Rique has been named senior planning editor. She was most recently operations director at vente-privee USA.
• Hasani Gittens and Megan Friedman have been named news editors. Gittens comes to NBCNews.com from The Daily; Friedman from Time.com.
• Ben Popken and Matthew DeLuca have been named staff writers. Popken had been with Consumerist; DeLuca with Newsweek/The Daily Beast.

Yahoo! News continues to expand its journalism team. Virginia Heffernan joins as a national correspondent covering culture and politics from a digital perspective. She will also explore how our daily lives and decisions are shaped by emerging technology and behavior.

“We could not be more excited about Virginia joining the growing Yahoo! News team,” said Hillary Frey, managing editor. “Lots of us here are long-time admirers of her writing—from her earlier TV writing at Slate, to her work at The New York Times and beyond— so bringing her on is truly a thrill. No one understands the intersection of politics, video, technology and culture the way Virginia does.”

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Virginia wrote op-ed columns on digital culture for The New York Times. Prior to that, she wrote “The Medium,” a weekly column about Internet culture, for The New York Times Magazine.

“It’s a fascinating time in news, and Yahoo! is out front, leading the shrewdest, most inventive developments in digital media,” said Heffernan. “The company has hands-down the most intelligent concept of what news ought to mean now, online and everywhere. It’s a huge privilege to be working with such a talented team and I can’t wait to get started.”

She will be based in the New York City offices, reporting to Frey.

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Olivier Knox, most recently a Congressional Correspondent for Agence France-Press (AFP), has been named Yahoo News’ first White House Correspondent. According to The Cutline, Knox has worked at AFP for over 10 years covering politics and, for a majority of his time there, the White House.

At Yahoo News, Knox will report to Chris Suellentrop, the site’s Politics Editor.

“I am thrilled to be joining the team covering politics at Yahoo News and truly honored to serve as the first White House correspondent,” Knox told The Cutline. “It’s a great opportunity.”

Knox will be based in Washington and his first day is February 13.

Chris Suellentrop is leaving his position as Editor of The New York Times Magazine to become Deputy Editor of Yahoo’s news blogs. Chris Lehmann, Editor in Chief of the blog collective (which inlcudes The Cutline, The Upshot, The Envoy, The Lookout and The Ticket), said Suellentrop’s background will be beneficial for the site.

Suellentrop told The Cutline he hopes to bring more long form writing to the collection of blogs. “Online readers have a huge appetite for long-form journalism. There’s no reason Yahoo News can’t swim in that pool.”

Suellentrop’s first day is August 8th.

Yesterday, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch complained that News Corp.’s content was being “stolen” by search engines like Google and Ask.com, and hinted that as soon as all his publications go behind a pay wall, he would force Google to remove them from their site’s directory.

And even though it makes little to no sense to take links to your pubs off of Google, today the giant corporation is playing along, telling Murdoch he is free to leave whenever he wants.

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