There’s chaos at the top of BusinessWeek.
Editor-in-Chief Steve Adler, who has held the job for five years, announced yesterday that he will leave in December when Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s company, Bloomberg L.P., completes its takeover.
Adler announced his departure in an e-mail to staffers yesterday evening.
“I want to help with the transition and pass the torch to the new editor — whoever that turns out to be,” he told The Post. “I’m not ready to talk about what my next steps are.”
Executive Editor Ellen Pollock, whom Adler recruited from the Wall Street Journal to serve as his deputy, will likely also exit.
Meanwhile, most staffers learned from a wedding announcement that John Byrne, the other executive editor and the head of Businessweek.com, would be moving to San Francisco. Byrne was married over the weekend to former BW staffer Katherine Rodler.
“It didn’t say he was leaving BW,” said one flabbergasted insider. “It said he was moving. Nobody knows what he’s doing.”
The McGraw-Hill Companies agreed to sell its troubled weekly to Bloomberg for a price reportedly between $2 million and $5 million, plus assumption of subscription and severance liabilities.
Norm Pearlstine, chief content officer of Bloomberg LP, and chairman-to-be of BusinessWeek, told staffers that there would be no “mass layoffs” and pledged that the magazine would remain a weekly.