Yahoo News editor-in-chief Megan Liberman will leave the company when the upcoming merger with Verizon becomes official, TheWrap has confirmed.
“For now, I just want to say thank you,” Liberman said to staffers in an email obtained by CNN. “It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with each of you. Before coming to Yahoo, I had been fortunate to work with incredibly talented journalists and do consequential work, but I have never been prouder in my professional life than I have been of leading this team and of the work you have produced.”
The deal between Yahoo and Verizon is expected to close before June 30, when the second quarter of 2017 comes to an end. A Yahoo spokesperson told CNN that Liberman’s decision to leave was made on her own.
“I wish the new company all the best going forward,” Liberman told TheWrap in a statement.
Liberman joined Yahoo in 2013 after previously working at the New York Times.
Verizon, which acquired AOL in 2015, agreed to purchase embattled Yahoo’s core internet business for about $4.8 billion in July — eight years after Yahoo rejected a $45 billion offer from Microsoft.
Verizon was able to get a deal on its Yahoo purchase earlier this year, after revelations of two massive data breaches last year gave the telecom giant the opportunity to renegotiate a lower price. Yahoo had struggled in recent years, as its suite of services were surpassed by offerings from the likes of Google and Facebook, and its media ambitions — which included signing Katie Couric to a multimillion-dollar deal and broadcasting the first-ever NFL game solely aired online — never really gained a foothold.