John CookLess than two weeks after Matt Taibbi’s sudden departure, today we learn of another high-profile bail-out from Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept: John Cook Is Leaving the Intercept to Return to Gawker at the End of the Year.

Greenwald’s post about Cook’s departure is empty by-the-numbers PR-speak, revealing nothing. Which is odd for a company supposed to be dedicated to a new radical kind of transparency. Reading between the lines, though (“my decision to leave was painful… the last year hasn’t been easy…”), it sounds like this was a bit of a nightmare job.

But didn’t John Cook just put his byline on a piece at The Intercept about Taibbi’s resignation, saying all the problems had been worked out and everything was fine?

Greenwald still insists that financier Pierre Omidyar does not want to exert editorial control, of course — but it doesn’t exactly look good when your editor in chief suddenly bails out.