Industry Moves: Time Inc’s Longtime Digital Head Ned Desmond Leaving
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
Certainly that rare memo on a layoff that had that guts to be complimentary. Still, whatever digital smarts he had, Desmond rubbed many people the wrong way with his arrogance and brashness. I'm sure he'll land on his feet, and having joined the company when retirement was still a guarantee, he'll be collecting a nice permanent pension whenever he hits that magic 55-year age, if he hasn't already.
omg….
the fact that they put this line in there…."In a way, Ned and his TII team succeeded so well at it that, well, there’s not much revolutionizing left to do."
should tell us all they still really don't know what they are doing!!!!!