Departing Newsweek.com Editor: ‘Very Pleasant’ Buyout Process

This morning, we broke the news that Newsweek.com editor Deidre Depke, a 12-year vet of the magazine, was one of the 130-plus staffers taking a buyout. We caught up with her by phone to ask about her departure and the mood at the gutted mag.

“I didn’t [expect to leave],” she told us. “The idea came to me at the last minute. It was a natural point of transition because we had relaunched the Web site in October and traffic’s been excellent. Newsweek was very agreeable and very pleasant [when I said I was leaving].”

Was Depke surprised by the number of staffers who took buyouts? “It was very up and down,” she said. “One day, a lot of people were going and the next day no one was.”

Depke’s taking the summer off to work on a couple book proposals and “go to the beach.” Eventually, she’d like to “stay in the Web space, but move away from news and day-to-day journalism.”

Any interest in starting a Tina Brown-esque news aggregation site? “I think it’s a constricting marketplace,” Depke said. “The new startups are interesting but there’s a certain amount of shaking out that will happen over the next few years. It’s going to be difficult.”

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