Some truly game-changing news on the Washington media scene tonight: POLITICO has hired Susan Glasser, the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, to serve as editor of new long-form journalism and opinion divisions -- a move the editors call "the largest expansion of our company in three years."

"This next stage of POLITICO’s growth has two main components. The first is to add magazine-style journalism to our newsroom – the kind Susan has produced masterfully throughout her career," editor-in-chief John Harris and executive editor Jim VandeHei wrote in a memo to staff Sunday night. "Like all our journalism, these stories will aim to take full advantage of our digital platform and the enormous audiences available to us there. Susan will also oversee special glossy editions of this new POLITICO magazine, stocked with profiles, investigative reporting and provocative analysis."

"The second major component of this new enterprise – and Susan’s mission here – is to add vitality and impact to POLITICO’s daily report by marshaling the best outside contributors to produce analysis, argument and first-person perspectives on the news of the day. We imagine this content as melding the best of several traditional platforms – newspaper op-ed pages, for instances, or Sunday Outlook and Week in Review sections – and revitalizing them for contemporary times. The key to doing this successfully is to have a relentless editorial mind setting the agenda, with a creative sensibility for driving the conversation in Washington and beyond."

Glasser, who Harris and VandeHei credited with "transforming Foreign Policy magazine into a fascinating and indispensable publication," has previously served as an editor at Roll Call and The Washington Post. She will join POLITICO in July and will serve as "a core member of our leadership team, editing and managing a new POLITICO magazine online and in print. She will direct a stable of reporters, editors and support staff in producing daily, conversation-driving opinion and analytical pieces, making our website all the more indispensable to readers." She will also continue to write on foreign policy and national security.

*In a memo to staff on Sunday night, Glasser said she was "honored and humbled to have the chance to work with such an inspiring group of colleagues and contributors, and immensely proud of our incredibly hard-working, brilliant, and collegial team here that has managed this feat."

The full memo from Harris and VandeHei, which was just sent to staff:

We are thrilled to announce today the largest expansion of our company in three years – and a new POLITICO leader to guide this effort.

Susan Glasser, the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, will be joining us next month as a top editor charged with creating and running new editorial divisions that produce deep, magazine-style journalism and in-the-moment opinion pieces. She will also continue to write on foreign policy and national security.

With the encouragement of our publisher, Robert Allbritton, we will be investing substantially in this effort and hiring a number of new senior-level writers and editors. Best of all, we will continue to grow every other part of the organization while adding these new layers of coverage.

This is a big moment for all of us. Susan, among the most respected thinkers and editors of her generation, will be a core member of our leadership team, editing and managing a new POLITICO magazine online and in print. She will direct a stable of reporters, editors and support staff in producing daily, conversation-driving opinion and analytical pieces, making our website all the more indispensable to readers.

We see Susan as central to the evolution of this newsroom, and we want to share some of the thinking that brought Susan into the POLITICO fold.

The two of us think of POLITICO’s life span in several stages. The first was the initial launch of our publication in 2007 – proving that this new media age presented an amazing opportunity to cover politics and Washington in a new way. The second chapter was the launch of Pro three years ago, which reflected our determination to make POLITICO the capital’s dominant news organization on policy as well as politics. It also reflected our belief that POLITICO’s business model must rest not just on advertising but also on subscriptions and events.

With Susan’s help, we intend now to tackle a fresh challenge: embracing what we see as a coming renaissance in long-form journalism, as readers search for distinctive work that cannot be easily cannibalized or commoditized.

This next stage of POLITICO’s growth has two main components. The first is to add magazine-style journalism to our newsroom – the kind Susan has produced masterfully throughout her career. Like all our journalism, these stories will aim to take full advantage of our digital platform and the enormous audiences available to us there. Susan will also oversee special glossy editions of this new POLITICO magazine, stocked with profiles, investigative reporting and provocative analysis.

The second major component of this new enterprise – and Susan’s mission here – is to add vitality and impact to POLITICO’s daily report by marshaling the best outside contributors to produce analysis, argument and first-person perspectives on the news of the day. We imagine this content as melding the best of several traditional platforms – newspaper op-ed pages, for instances, or Sunday Outlook and Week in Review sections – and revitalizing them for contemporary times. The key to doing this successfully is to have a relentless editorial mind setting the agenda, with a creative sensibility for driving the conversation in Washington and beyond.

Susan has just that sort of mind – and she has a track record of achievements to prove it. Nearly 20 years ago, Susan at a very young age was one of the most successful editors ever at Roll Call (VandeHei was among her reporters). She edited the Washington Post’s Outlook section during one of the best runs in its history – it has rarely been more provocative or essential. In recent years, she has been the author of one of the premier media success stories around by transforming Foreign Policy magazine into a fascinating and indispensable publication in print and online. She has an extraordinary knack for finding interesting ideas, and assembling the right mix of editors and reporters who can make those ideas happen.

We have brainstormed with her often over the years and always left with a conviction that Susan should be part of our leadership team. Now, she will be.

Susan will join us in July, after she finishes up some considerable responsibilities still pending at FP. Some of the most specific questions about the expansion of our newsroom may have to wait until her arrival, when all of you get a chance to know her and discuss ideas together. Susan is very respectful of the talent we have in our newsroom and the publication we have built, so people who have proposals will find her eager to listen.

Already, we can say this much about this new venture: Susan’s operation will not be a separate island. She wants and we expect her to be fully integrated within POLITICO. There will be no person more essential in creating a seamless relationship between our existing organization, and these new coverage areas, than Danielle Jones, who has been the critical force in the continued growth of our newsroom since she became deputy editor–in-chief at the start of the year.

Susan will report to us and work closely with Danielle, Bill Nichols and Craig Gordon, all of whom are committed to helping this new project succeed. And Susan will participate fully with this group and with Chief Operating Officer Kim Kingsley to help us as we map out our larger strategy for the future.

While Susan will rely heavily on outside contributors for the magazine, there will be a number of openings both to transfer people currently at POLITICO, as well as to make a number of high-impact hires. We are also eager to leverage the talent we already have in our newsroom to make the magazine a success. This is great news for everyone: The beat reporter looking to spread his or her wings, for example, might wish to propose a magazine piece for Susan or a sabbatical-style period of working with Susan for a defined period.

The decision to recruit Susan and back the kind of journalism she will bring is a direct reflection of the injunction given to us by Robert Allbritton and Fred Ryan – an order to keep thinking ambitiously about how to extend the POLITICO brand, deepen the impact of our journalism and grow the business.

We hope all of you feel as enthusiastic about this as we do. Susan and the rest of our senior team believe that high-impact, magazine-style journalism is not a throwback to the past – it is a genre that is even more essential in today’s hyperkinetic news environment. It is a style of reporting and a mind-set about illuminating what matters most that has a brilliant future, as some distinguished traditions adapt to take advantage of the vast storytelling possibilities presented by technology.

If we have learned one thing in the past seven years about what works in media, it is this: Success means producing distinctive, high-value journalism, something that isn’t being done by others or can be done better by us. High-value journalism can be in the moment – it can be a whiteboard from one of the policy teams that gives Pro subscribers the real-time intelligence they pay for, or it can be a deeply reported enterprise project, like the digital books we published with Random House on the 2012 campaign. In short, it is excellence – not workaday, commodity journalism – that readers demand and reward.

We have the utmost confidence that Susan and this new enterprise will help take POLITICO to new levels of excellence. And we have never been more excited to be in journalism, and at POLITICO.

We're anxious to have all of you meet Susan, and you'll be invited to a happy hour with her later this month, before she arrives at work. As we emphasized at the last round of staff meetings, our best ideas come from you, so we'd love your suggestions for this promising new phase of POLITICO. We'll both be around the newsroom all day, so please drop by or shoot us an email with any questions. Thank you for your hard, smart work, which has brought POLITICO to this enviable juncture.

John, Jim

*UPDATE (10:27 p.m.): Glasser sent the following memo to Foreign Policy staff on Sunday night:

Nearly five years after we started building the new Foreign Policy together, I have decided to leave FP to pursue an unexpected and exciting new opportunity to start Politico magazine, which will appear daily on the web as well as in print. I do so filled with great admiration and pride for all that everyone here has accomplished in growing FP into the leading digital-era destination for international affairs.

This is an incredibly tough decision: I have been honored and humbled to have the chance to work with such an inspiring group of colleagues and contributors, and immensely proud of our incredibly hard-working, brilliant, and collegial team here that has managed this feat. From its guerrilla launch in January 2009 after just six weeks, the new FP.com last month reached its biggest audience ever, with 4.4 million unique monthly visitors and counting. Most importantly, we've worked together to grow the ambition, impact, and definition of Foreign Policy, to embrace original reporting, hard-hitting accountability journalism and just plain old-fashioned scoops about the making of foreign policy alongside world-class insight and analysis from the best collection of bloggers, columnists, and contributors around.

Together, we’ve made FP into a unique home for those who care about the world, and those who shape it, publishing world leaders and Nobel Prize winners alongside powerful ground truth from the world’s kill zones and award-winning photography. When Hillary Clinton decided to pivot to Asia, she announced it in the pages of FP. Our annual Top 100 Global Thinkers year-end issue has become one of FP’s marquee features as well as a successful annual event drawing dozens of the thinkers to Washington. And of course, there are those war dogs and Vladimir Putin’s hairless cats…

It was hard to know what exactly would happen back in 2008, when Don Graham made the decision to have the Washington Post Company buy FP from its longtime excellent owner, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. But Don’s vision and commitment to journalistic excellence led to the construction of a new Foreign Policy that grew to include not only its print magazine but a new website as vibrant, exciting, and interesting as the subjects it covered. And we’ve been so honored at the recognition this project has received, including the Overseas Press Club award for online general excellence as well as three National Magazine Awards for digital excellence and 10 overall nominations, including for Magazine of the Year, the industry’s highest honor.

When we started this project, we joked that "the world is not a boring place" and throughout this great team has proven that reading about it doesn't need to be either. I am confident that under the leadership of FP CEO David Rothkopf and the wonderful team here, FP will continue to thrive, and look forward to doing anything I can to help in its success. I plan to remain at FP through June to help in the transition.

With great admiration and thanks to everyone, Susan

UPDATE (10:48 p.m.): Foreign Policy CEO David Rothkopf issued the following statement:

Susan has been instrumental over the years in helping to build Foreign Policy into the thriving, internationally-respected media organization it is today. We're grateful for her leadership and all of her tireless efforts to expand Foreign Policy's multi-award-winning coverage in both print and online, and we wish her the best as she moves on to pursue new career challenges.