More fallout from the changes at Time Inc: Ned Desmond, the longtime head of Time Inc’s digital efforts, is leaving the company after 22 years. The announcement was made internally at the company earlier today, and is embedded below.

A separate Time Inc interactive unit didn’t make a lot of sense, as various brands—and the newly formed units within Time Inc—take over the responsibility for their own digital destinies. As the memo says: “The time has arrived to move all the digital responsibility to the new teams in our new Business Units, where, to no surprise, many of the key leaders are folks Ned brought into the company.”

Memo after the jump

To:      Time Inc. Employees

From :  Ann Moore and John Squires

Re:    Staff Announcement

As a consequence of the organizational changes outlined yesterday, our longtime Time Inc. colleague, Ned Desmond, President of Time Inc. Interactive, is leaving the company.

Ned is leaving after 22 years with Time Inc. and having had one of the more distinctive careers we’ve seen. He distinguished himself as a correspondent for TIME in Asia for nearly a decade, serving as TIME bureau chief in both New Delhi and Tokyo, and then left to dabble in technology in Silicon Valley. He then returned to Time Inc. as a senior correspondent at FORTUNE under John Huey, and was later charged to start eCompany Now magazine and website, eventually to be named Business 2.0. After three years of hard labor in the midst of the tech blow out, John convinced him to leave his beloved northern California to run Time Inc. Interactive.

That was six years ago, and it’s bracing to recall how much ground Ned, his excellent TII team, and the company as a whole have covered in that short time. We went from being a digital backwater, or “black hole” as one Time Inc. notable once called it, to joining the highest ranks of digital media with great properties like People.com, CNNMoney.com and SI.com, to name a few. Time Inc.’s digital leadership under Ned has been extraordinary. Our websites now receive more than 26 million unique visitors each month and we are one of the top 20 largest online media properties in monthly unique visitors, page views and time spent per user.

Ned played a leading role in creating the vision for our digital future while at the same time literally building that future by hiring many of our key digital leaders, developing more compelling consumer experiences on our sites, championing the use of metrics and audience development, raising our technology smarts, and wiring our businesses into the digital powerhouses at AOL (NYSE: TWX), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and elsewhere. In a way, Ned and his TII team succeeded so well at it that, well, there’s not much revolutionizing left to do. The time has arrived to move all the digital responsibility to the new teams in our new Business Units, where, to no surprise, many of the key leaders are folks Ned brought into the company.

We’re sorry to see Ned leave but he’ll always be remembered for his vast contributions in making Time Inc. a leading digital player.

Please join us in thanking Ned for his many contributions to Time Inc. and wishing him the very best. 

A.M.            J.S.