The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT) has appointed Denise Warren, SVP and chief advertising officer of the company, as the GM of NYTimes.com, adding to her current duties. She fills the position left vacant by Vivian Schiller, who joined NPR on Dec 1 as the new CEO.

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Warren will manage all business operations for NYTimes.com, and will report to Martin Nisenholtz, SVP for digital operations. Warren will also continue to lead all ad sales efforts for NYT Media Group, reporting to Scott Heekin-Canedy, president and GM, The New York Times.

—David adds: Aside from having to fill Schiller’s role, which had its shares of hits and misses, Warren takes on the roles of setting direction of the company’s advertising efforts and NYTimes.com during a time of enormous challenges. On the ad front, spending is slowing sharply at all newspapers and the NYT is by no means immune. Online advertising is slowly making up a greater share of revenues, but the 10.2 percent gain in web ad dollars in Q3 could not offset the general 14.4 percent decline in advertising. Building ad revenues has been difficult enough this past year, but with the increasing deterioration in the wider economy showing no sign of stopping, keeping revenues from falling too far already looks like a gargantuan task. Add to that the increasing encroachment of the WSJ into ad categories like luxury, an area the NYT previously faced little newspaper competition, and Warren’s list of issues to deal with becomes much tougher. What she has going for her is the aggressive stance the paper has taken to experimenting on a number of digital initiatives. In addition to text alerts, adopting Twitter early on and creating its iPhone app, this week’s decision to give aggregated content a more prominent place on the home page has given NYT a fairly solid foundation for one day offsetting the losses on the traditional publishing side.

Photo Credit: The New York Times