Editor & Publisher editor Greg Mitchell didn’t know the venerable trade magazine had been sold until stories began appearing on the site last Thursday. In fact, he was so surprised by that that he initally thought it was a glitch. He didn’t know he wasn’t being asked to continue with the magazine until later.

Writing at The Huffington Post, Mitchell explains how it all went down—without him:

It was a bit puzzling last Thursday afternoon when a Twitter feed indicated that new stories were going up on E&P’s shuttered web site. It didn’t take long for my email box at home to start filling up with media queries — was it true E&P was back in business? Congrats and all that. I told them: damned if I know. Might have just been a glitch. It was impossible that a sale could have gone through without me knowing about it. But the stories kept going up.

Finally, about three hours later, I got a call at home from Duncan McIntosh, the publisher of Boating World and FishRap News and front-runner for the takeover, who confirmed that the contracts for the sale had been signed but unfortunately I would not be part of the re-launch.

McIntosh, Mitchell said, had previously told him three times that Mitchell’d be part of the new mag. And Folio reported that McIntosh called the editorial direction of the mag “right on course.”

For more sordid details, read the original post: all we can say is that it’s incredibly sad when a publication loses a third of its reporting staff and when it loses two journalists as respected and talented as Mitchell and Joe Strupp.