Topix, a leading news community on the internet, is transitioning from a news aggregator to a news community and “top 20 news site”. As a part of this transition, Topix.net has appointed Chris Tolles as Chief Executive Officer.

Chris Tolles is a longtime marketing executive and a mamber of the founding team of Topix. He succeeds Rich Skrenta, who has led Topix as CEO since he founded topix five years ago. Chris Tolles has worked closely with Rich Skrenta to change Topix from a news aggregator into the largest news community on the internet today. Rich Skrenta has played a major role in laying out the new executive structure–primarily to capitalize on the next phase of growth of Topix. Skrenta will continue to serve on the Topix board and as an advisor to Topix.

Chris Tolles originally joined Topix in March of 2004, before the official launch of the website. He and Rich Skrenta have a long history of building companies and building large-scale projects inside big companies. Chris Tolles and Rich Skrenta were on the founding team of NewHoo, which was acquired by Netscape in 1998, and re-launched as the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org.

Chris Tolles has seventeen years of industry and entrepreneurial experience. Prior to joining Topix, he co-founded and was the Vice President of Marketing at Spoke Software, which is an enterprise social networking company. Chris 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.