Guardian.co.uk’s head of editorial development Neil McIntosh is leaving after nine and a half years to become editor of the European edition of WSJ.com. Breaking the news on his blog completetosh.com this morning, the Scot said: “WSJ.com has been making great strides of late, including an impressive redesign unveiled just as the current crisis took hold last month. The team there is working to create something outstanding around one of the biggest stories of the time, and it’s a huge thrill to be asked to take the helm in Europe.” McIntosh will be based in London and says he will be involved in special global projects with the paper’s New York head office. He is now working out his notice and starts in the new year.

Speaking to paidContent.co.uk today, he said: “With the current financial climate being what is at the moment, I can’t imagine a more interesting place to work.” He said it was too early to be drawn into specifics on his plans for the site or its business model—“we simply haven’t got that far yet”—but he spoke of his excitement at working with reporters at both WSJ and and Dow Jones (NYSE: NWS) Newswires, what he called “the most incredible reporting operation…but because it’s a newswire we don’t see it”.

—Relaunch and traffic growth: “It’s just relaunched a redesigned website last month and you can see the potential. And traffic is going great guns: I saw something recently showing it had doubled in the last year - and that’s as well as 900,000-plus subscribers”. His role at WSJ.com will again be development-based, making improvements and working on new projects as well as overseeing the editorial operation.

—Guardian achievements: McIntosh cites the development of blogs, audio and video as an every-day part of Guardian News and Media’s (GNM) operations as being among his proudest achievements. He was a senior part of a team that saw the Guardian gain and for many years retain the title of Britain’s biggest online newspaper in terms of web traffic, amassing 23 million unique users in August according to ABCe, with 62 percent of that audience coming from overseas and particularly America.

But there will be a whole different set of challenges for him now. Though GNM is run as a commercial business, it is owned by the Scott Trust which was founded with the sole purpose of safeguarding The Guardian’s future and editorial independence. The Journal, now part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire, has no such guarantees.

Disclosure: ContentNext Media is a wholly owned subsidiary of GNM.

• Guardian.co.uk Et Al Still Dependent On Print Siblings