Nancy Gibbs to Leave TIME After 32 Years

Nancy Gibbs sent the following note to TIME Staff Tuesday night. She first joined TIME in 1985 and became TIME’s Editor-in-Chief in 2013.

Team TIME:

In the fall of 2013, when I became Editor-in-Chief, more than half of you were working somewhere else. You came to help us tell great stories in brand new ways: When we all set out together, we had never been nominated for a Primetime Emmy, or done a live broadcast from the International Space Station, or convinced three refugee families to let us spend an entire year telling the story of their exodus from a war zone, or shot a dozen covers on an iPhone. Readers noticed. We started out with a digital audience of about 25 million; it is now 60 million. In the past four years, we built Motto and TIME Labs, launched Red Border Films and LIFE VR. We are among the biggest of any news brand on Instagram, have more than 12 million Facebook followers and took our most ambitious journalism from the Kazakh steppes to Westeros to the Oval Office.

Our success came from both talent and teamwork. TIME’s culture of collaboration has made it the privilege of my life to work here. I found some of my greatest teachers and my best friends—and as it turned out, my husband, who is all three. He is the only person I will cite here, because there are just too many people to whom I owe too much. Suffice it to say that every day—or just as often, late at night—something happened here, some act of kindness or courage or genius, that reminded me why I am so grateful to call you my colleagues.

TIME has thrived in a state of constant change, and so it’s part of its life cycle that the time to change has come again. As of today, I will step down as Editor-in-Chief, but I will remain to help in the coming months with the next reinvention and support the immensely important work you all do.

I hear from readers every day about the value they place in our fairness, our attitude of critical optimism, our faith in the possibility of progress, even as we follow Walter Lippmann’s highest law of journalism, to “tell the truth and shame the devil.” And as excited as I am about writing my own next chapter, I will never stop being your most devoted reader.

Nancy