Today Salon announced the promotion of Kerry Lauerman as editor in chief of Salon.com. Joan Walsh, the editor in chief since 2005, is stepping down from editorial management to write a book. Joan will remain editor at large, and continue to blog for the site on a regular basis and continue with her many television appearances representing Salon. Kerry is an extremely talented editor and I’m very pleased to see him take the reins.

Here is the full text of our announcement:

SAN FRANCISCO – November 8, 2010 – Salon Media Group (SLNM.OB) announced today it is promoting Kerry Lauerman to take over as editor in chief of Salon.com. Joan Walsh, the editor in chief since 2005, is stepping down from editorial management to write a book. She will remain editor at large, blogging for the site regularly.

Lauerman first joined Salon in 2000 to become its Washington Bureau Chief, and has run virtually every editorial department at Salon. In 2008 he founded Open Salon, the site’s blog network, which garnered a National Magazine Award nomination in its first year, and last year became Salon’s executive editor. Before joining Salon, Lauerman was investigative editor at Mother Jones; managing editor at the late Forbes ASAP; and a story editor at the New York Times Magazine.

“It’s a huge honor,” said Lauerman. “I can’t imagine working with a better staff, or with a smarter, more engaged audience.”

“Salon has experienced excellent audience growth over the last year, introducing a redesigned website, sharpening its political coverage but also expanding its lifestyle and cultural coverage. Kerry has been an important part of that effort. I have every confidence Salon’s growth will continue under his leadership,” said Richard Gingras, CEO of the Salon Media Group. “We’re also pleased that Joan will continue as one of Salon’s most eloquent voices and insightful political commentators.”

Walsh took the reins as editor in chief in February 2005, and focused and defined Salon as a leading news and opinion site. Most memorably, in April 2006, Salon.com published a large collection of 279 photographs and 19 videos taken at the Abu Ghraib prison site; the publication was attacked viciously by conservative critics, but lauded by civil liberties experts and academics. Walsh also emerged as Salon’s most prominent spokesperson, appearing regularly on cable news shows discussing national politics.

While continuing her political commentary for Salon, Walsh will work on a book, “Indivisible,” an indictment of the fear-based politics that splits Americans and holds the country back, illustrated by her own Irish Catholic family’s political and economic odyssey, from the election of John F. Kennedy through the backlash against Barack Obama. It will be published by John Wiley and Sons in early 2012.

“This has been the best job I’ve ever had and it’s hard to leave it, but I’m lucky to be able to hand the reins to Kerry,” Walsh said. “Right now my heart is in reminding Americans that we grow as a country when we pull together, and we fall behind when we fear one another. I’m watching us give up on our great genius for cultural mixing and optimism about the future, at the time we need it most.”

Everyone who enters the Pulitzer Prizes believes they deserve to take home the prize — as we did, for example, when we nominated Mark Benjamin’s exemplary investigation into Arlington National Cemetery’s shocking failures. Although we didn’t win, we still have reasons to be proud.

This year — the first time we decided to fully identify as a news site and enter the Pulitzers instead of the National Magazine Awards — the Pulitzer Board acknowledged our hard-earned place in the media universe by inviting two of our staffers to its nominating juries: editor Joan Walsh helped select the finalists for the commentary category; and our book critic Laura Miller spent much of the past year keeping tabs on the best novels (which she also does, naturally, for Salon) so she could help winnow the thousands of nominated titles down to a mere three. Short of winning, being closely involved in the Pulitzer process is something to be awfully proud of, too.

It took us a little longer than predicted in my last Inside Salon post, but the revised Salon home page is now live. Below “the fold” you’ll find a chronological list of stories, with the option to see them sorted by section. For the latter, simply click on the “By Section” tab at the top of the list. As long as you haven’t disabled cookies in your browser, the cover will remember your preference and show you the stories whichever way you choose — By Date or By Section. This change was the most frequent reader request since we launched the new site.

Happy reading!

Since the launch of our latest redesign, the most common complaint has been the lack of an easy way to specifically locate and read the most recent Salon content. As alluded to in previous Inside Salon posts, we’ve been working on two options for these readers:

1) All Salon. As the name suggests, All Salon presents all of our stories in chronological order, much like a blog. We’re fortunate to have a lot of readers who simply want to read what we publish, and this makes it extremely easy to dive in. The page also includes lists of the latest wire stories (more on that below), the most popular Salon stories, and recent editor’s picks from the Open Salon blogging community, making it a robust landing page. If you love All Salon, bookmark it — and we’ll also be placing a link in the site navigation ASAP.

Welcome to the Salon Store — a new Salon feature that we hope you will find engaging, entertaining and a useful extension of what Salon is all about.

The Store’s mission: to offer a collection of products that reflect what always interests us at Salon — startling creativity, soul-pleasing utility, interesting ideas, unique perspectives and sometimes just the profound wackiness of our culture.

Why do we think the interests of Salon and its audience translate into products? Because, in various ways, things matter to all of us. They make statements, they offer solutions, they express or create emotion. I think of Salon as a place — a destination, a community — that is defined chiefly by an evolving set of shared interests. So we think it will be fun, interesting and appropriate to identify products that reflect those interests and showcase them on Salon. And we are particularly interested in your feedback about the products we offer as well as others you think we should be offering. We’d like your participation not merely as purchasers but as curators along with us.

After several weeks of beta testing — pulling people into the beta site through various means — we’re ready to show the world the new Salon. We’ve made countless changes and improvements to the site, and the feedback has been uncommonly (though of course not entirely) positive, but we still have a lot of work to do. There’s an old saying that a good home is never done, and we feel the same way about a good Web site. But at this point, we’re ready to open it up to the broader audience of our readers.

We’ll be gradually moving all of you into the new site over the coming days. So if you’re still seeing the present Salon, you’ll soon begin seeing the new one instead. Or, if you want to see it now, click here. We hope you’ll love it, but as previously noted, we want to hear your feedback whatever it may be. Thanks again to everyone who’s taken time to offer feedback so far, and thanks for reading Salon.