By Steve Kupferman

Mathew Ingram speaks at last year’s TEDxTO. Photo by J. Adam Huggins and Aaron Rodericks, courtesy of TEDxTO.

Mathew Ingram, whose job as communities editor at the Globe and Mail consisted of ushering the one-hundred-and-sixty-six-year-old newspaper into the age of social media, announced on Twitter this afternoon that he would be resigning his post to pursue a new job with GigaOM, a technology news blog, thereby casting in his lot with the new media world he has spent years advocating (and reporting on, before he became an editor) for his old employer. Ingram began working for the Globe in 1994, and assumed his current role in late 2008.

GigaOM is the flagship blog of the the GigaOm Network, which describes itself as “a leading provider of publications and events for the technology and entrepreneurial markets worldwide.” The Network provides content to the websites of a number of major news outlets, including The New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Salon.
In a post announcing Ingram’s hiring, Om Malik, founder of the GigaOM Network, wrote: “I have been trying to convince Mathew to come and help us realize our dreams for some time. But his dream was to be the G&M’s online communities editor, to help that publication embrace social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook. So we waited.”
Patience was evidently rewarded. Following Ingram’s announcement of his latest career move on Twitter, the torrent of well-wishes began almost instantaneously―and, at the time of this writing, has yet to yield. (In typical fashion, Ingram has been replying to individuals, though it must, in this case, be a time-consuming exercise in speed-tweeting.)
During Ingram’s time as communities editor at the Globe, the paper underwent a number of forward-looking changes, including a total redesign of theglobeandmail.com and the launch of a policy wiki. (During this time, the paper also initiated a partnership with Torontoist, which sees some of our content linked on the Globe‘s Toronto hub.)
During his speech at last year’s TEDxTO, which we covered, Ingram—also a co-founder of Toronto’s mesh conference—spoke about the importance of trust in the mainstream media. He called trust a “competitive advantage” and implied that it was one of the few remaining things separating established newspapers from web-based upstarts (like ourselves). Ingram’s decision to leave his job at a media mainstay to write for a blog that was founded in 2006 seems like a vote of confidence in the credibility of web journalism. For obvious, selfish reasons, we’re all for that.