Dan Farber has been appointed editor-in-chief of CNET News.com replacing Jai Singh.

Jai Singh, senior vice president and editor-in-chief of CNET.com will be leaving the organization March 10, 2008. With more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist, Farber is one of the industry's most well-known and well-respected voices in the world of technology and new media. As editor-in-chief, Farber will lead CNET News.com in their award-winning coverage of the technology industry.

Previously, Farber was vice president of editorial at ZDNet, where he built ZDNet into one of the biggest voices in business technology. Farber also co-developed the ZDNet Blog Network, with more than 30 bloggers including some of the most authoritative and well-respected voices in the IT community. He joined ZDNet in 1996, and led the development of ZDNet's worldwide network of more than 70 technology-focused sites. Prior to joining ZDNet, Farber served as vice president and editor-in-chief at Ziff-Davis' flagship computing news publications, PC Week and MacWeek. He was also a founding editor at MacWorld and part of the editorial staffs of PC World and PC Magazine.

News.com has struggled in the past couple of years to keep up with fast growing tech news sites such as Techcrunch, which has reached similar traffic volume as News.com at a fraction of CNET's operating costs.

Mr Farber's challenge will be to revamp News.com's coverage and boost its readership while at the same time cut operating costs. At CNET's ZDNet, he successfully built a large network of bloggers into a profitable business group. The bloggers are paid according to the number of pageviews they receive.

Mr Farber told me earlier this year that he was looking for a new challenge. "Everybody is blogging these days, there is nothing new about it. I'm looking for something different to do."