'BusinessWeek' Editor Resigns

No one said regime change wasn't messy. A week after it was announced that Bloomberg would be buying BusinessWeek from McGraw-Hill, the magazine's editor in chief, Stephen J. Adler has resigned.

"It was hugely important to me to help find the right home for BusinessWeek and to work closely with our business-side colleagues to ensure that staffers would be provided appropriate benefits under any circumstance," Adler told staff in a memo reproduced by Tom Lowry on BW's On Media blog. (It's worth noting that the name of the blog no longer appears to be "Fine on Media," after its creator, Jon Fine who's somewhere in China right now.)

"Now that these goals have been accomplished, I’m considering other opportunities, and I believe it makes sense for a new owner to move forward with a new editor."

The New York Post's Keith Kelly is framing Adler's departure as a major crisis. "There's chaos at the top of BusinessWeek," Kelly wrote. (Supply your own thunder sound effects.) In addition to Adler's departure, Kelly also claims that executive editor Ellen Pollock "will likely also exit," and that John Byrne, who heads up the magazine's website, is moving to San Francisco. "Nobody knows what he's doing," a "flabbergasted insider" told Kelly.

One outside observer was less flabbergasted than he was coolly sarcastic: David Carr of the New York Times took to his Twitter account (hurray, future!), and tweeted, "[G]ee, that didn't take long."

Adler will stay on at BusinessWeek until the Bloomberg deal is completed in December.