Topix Appoints Chris Tolles as Chief Executive Officer

Topix Appoints Chris Tolles as Chief Executive Officer

Current Executives Shift Leadership Roles as Topix Transitions from Aggregator to News Community and Top 20 News Site

Topix (http://www.topix.com/) announced today that longtime marketing executive and member of the founding team Chris Tolles has been appointed the role of CEO. He succeeds Rich Skrenta, who has led Topix since he founded it five years ago. Tolles worked closely with Skrenta to transform Topix from a news aggregator into the largest news community on the web. Skrenta played a key role in laying out the new executive structure to capitalize on the next phase of growth and will continue to serve on the Topix board and as an advisor to the company.

Following its successful product launch in April, Topix cracked the Top 20 most-visited news and information properties for the first time, according to May 2007 Hitwise data. The site, which hosts local news forums in all 32,500 U.S. ZIP codes recently hit 10 million forum posts, and has more than 1,500 community editors across the United States.

“On the heels of this successful transition, Chris is the right guy to lead the business in this next phase, which is very sales and marketing intensive,” Skrenta said. “We’ve given people the ability to connect to their local community through Topix, and I look forward to supporting the company, and Chris, as an active board member.”

Tolles joined Topix in March 2004, prior to the launch of the site. He and Skrenta have a decade-long history of building companies and large-scale projects inside big companies. The two first worked together at Sun Microsystems on security and encryption products. They were also on the founding team of NewHoo, which was acquired by Netscape in 1998, and re-launched as the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org.

“Rich and I have a long history of working together, building companies and building teams, so I was thrilled when he approached me with the opportunity to take the reins at Topix,” Tolles said. “This is an exciting time for Topix. We’ve already built the best localization technology in the world and are going to focus on the next phase of growth by driving more traffic, building our brand and developing sponsor and advertising partnerships that will take us to the next level.”

Tolles brings 17 years of industry and entrepreneurial experience to the CEO position. Prior to Topix, he co-founded and was the Vice President of Marketing at Spoke Software, an enterprise social networking company. Tolles was also a Director of Marketing at AOL/Netscape and served in a variety of sales and marketing roles at Sun Microsystems. He graduated from the University of California at San Diego with degrees in Computer Science and Economics.

“We’ve been pleased with Topix’s performance, and are looking forward to working with Chris to capitalize on revenue opportunities around the impressive audience growth,” said Tim Landon, President of Tribune Interactive and board member of Topix. “We’re very excited about Chris stepping up as CEO, and where Topix is headed.”

About Topix

Topix is the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to the information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city. A Top 20 online news destination (Hitwise, May 2007), the company links news from 50,000 sources to 360,000 lively user-generated forums. Topix also works with the nation’s major media companies to grow and engage their online audiences through forums, classifieds, publishing platforms and RSS feeds. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Topix LLC is a privately held company with investment from Gannett Co., Inc., The McClatchy Company and Tribune Company. For more, visit http://www.topix.com/.