Tech columnist Vindu Goel (pictured) announced on his blog this morning that he is leaving the Mercury News after nine years to become the deputy technology editor at The New York Times. Goel, whose last day is April 1, announced his departure about a month after another Merc tech columnist, Dean Takahashi, quit to become a full-time blogger at VentureBeat. Goel said that while he had a good run at the Merc, he couldn’t “resist the opportunity to go play on the news industry’s equivalent of Broadway. If the Merc is the newspaper of Silicon Valley, the Times is the newspaper of the United States.”