“Please join me at Michael’s Restaurant on Wednesday, July 25, in raising a toast to TVNewser’s Brian Stelter, as he sets out to leave the confines of the blogosphere for the print world,” writes Mediabistro.com founder Laurel Touby, who’s not exactly having a bad week herself.

“But,” Laurel continues, “every ending is a new beginning, and I’ve got some very exciting news to share. I’ll be unveiling the next TVNewser - who will be taking the blog in new and exciting directions. Stay tuned — you’ll have to be at the party to find out who it is (I’m inviting only 100 people, so you’ll be among the first)!’

All of which would ordinarily be pretty damn exciting except for one small thing: we already know who the next TVNewser is.

You see, the mysterious “guest editor” of TVNewser (who is, presumably, training at the heels of a certain Brian Stelter at this very moment) has been sending out emails all around town, which just happen to contain his full name.

But before we reveal the somewhat anticlimactic results of our top-secret detective work, let’s travel back in time to one month ago, when Rachel Sklar’s enigmatic (and surprisingly prescient!) post first whet our appetite with a couple of careful hints.

“Per Touby, wrote the all-knowing Sklar, “the candidates include…a famous TV columnist with umpteen years of experience…an executive producer at MSNBC [and] a former managing editor of Cablevision.”

And while we had no trouble IDing the unceremoniously demoted Gail Shister as the famous (former) tv columnist and no interest in unmasking the former managing editor of Cablevision,* something told us not to overlook that MSNBC producer, whom, we thought to ourselves, might, just might, be almost-qualified enough to take over some college kid’s not particularly lucrative after-school job.

It turns out our instincts were correct.

Meet the new TVNewser: Chris Ariens, a 37 year-old former MSNBC producer who currently lives in Hoboken with his dog Nibbles** and enjoys long walks on the Jersey shore.

Oh, but do us a favor and try and act surprised when you hear the news at Michael’s next Wednesday, okay? After all, you don’t want to be known as ‘”that guy who ruined everything and pissed off nouveau-riche millionaire-slash-alcoholic, Laurel Touby,” now do you?

*Because it sounded boring
**Okay. Fine. We made up the part about Nibbles in an effort to make him seem more wholesome and family-oriented