Mike Nizza (pictured?), the biggest Wu-Tang fan in the history of the New York Times, is leaving the paper in order to bring da ruckus to The Atlantic's web projects. His boss, NYT digital editor Jim Roberts, closes the staff memo on Nizza's departure by quoting a Gawker comment. With his exit, the Times loses a rebel, who makes more noise than heavy metal. Nizza will be remembered for that old loco style from his vocals—Bill Keller couldn't peep it with a pair of bifocals. We saw this moment coming, though. Mike was a vandal. Too hot to handle. Now, he's saying Goodbye like Tevin Campbell. Full memo below:

In a couple of weeks he'll be taking a job with Atlantic Media, which publishes the Atlantic magazine and the National Journal. Mike will be a senior editor and will create and launch new Web sites and online features for the company. As many of you know, Mike was instrumental in the development of nytimes.com. He started here in 2000 and quickly rose through the ranks of producer and senior producer before becoming an editor in 2006. I first met Mike when he was running the home page early that year and saw immediately what my predecessors had seen in him: a well-tuned understanding of the news; an unparalleled depth of knowledge of the Web and the many resources it offered; and a quick agility with technology. Mike was instrumental in the site redesign in 2005 and 2006, and his ability to creatively manipulate the coding on the page gave us great flexibility to produce bold designs for the big breaking news stories of the day. But Mike knew he could contribute more to the report, and when the job of running The Lede blog opened up in the spring of 2007, he was quick to raise his hand. The rest is history. On Day One, the awful massacre at Virginia Tech occurred, and Mike turned the blog into a gripping, running account of the developing story … for three straight days. Yes, we had used the blog format to provide live coverage of baseball games and for a few hours of a congressional hearing, but Mike's Virginia Tech report blazed a completely new trail and thoroughly complemented the conventional news stories. With his minute-by-minute updates, he presented material from news conferences, eye-witness accounts, blogs and other materials that he sifted from the Web. The collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis gave Mike another chance to provide users with a deeper and fast-paced approach to a breaking news story, and when Hurricane Ike plowed through the Texas a couple of weeks ago, Mike was at it again, providing an unending stream of posts that culled reports from our own correspondents, from local news sites and a seemingly unending stream of Twitter updates. But Mike also found ways to fulfill the original promise of The Lede, exploring stories that spiraled off in new directions. He wrote about modern-day pirates, Tasers and outer space. He could be equally comfortable writing about global famine or Rachael Ray. Mike also kept us in touch with pop culture. Amy Winehouse made frequent appearances in the blog. And it wasn't a surprise to find Keith Richards or Snoop Dogg. Gawker even took approving note of Mike when he made it clear that he was a HUGE (his word) fan of the Wu-Tang Clan. That prompted one Gawker reader to comment: Wouldn't it be great if they started to credit him as "Fo Shizza Mike Nizza"? We will miss him. Jim Roberts