Dean Baquet

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Say what you will about Jill Abramson, but she gave the New York Times enduring gifts with the hires of Jake Silverstein and Deborah Needleman, editors respectively of the Magazine and the T Magazine. They’ve both done a lot of excellent work early in their tenures.

Her successor, Dean Baquet, amateur proctologist, is a talented person with a huge job ahead of him at the venerable and wobbly news organization, and he may yet call Mike Bloomberg boss because such a transaction makes a lot of sense financially. In a new Spiegel interview conducted by Isabell Hülsen and Holger Stark, Baquet addresses the technological “Space Race” he’s trying to win–or at least not lose. An excerpt:

Spiegel:

Digital competitors like BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post offer an extremely colorful mix of stories and have outperformed the New York Times website with a lot of buzz.

Dean Baquet:

Because they’re free. You’re always going to have more traffic if you’re a free website. But we’ve always admitted that we were behind other news organizations in making our stories available to people on the web. BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post are much better than we are at that, and I envy them for this. But I think the trick for the New York Times is to stick to what we are. That doesn’t mean: Don’t change. But I don’t want to be BuzzFeed. If we tried to be what they are, we would lose.

Spiegel:

In May, your internal innovation report was leaked along with its harsh conclusion that the New York Times’ “journalistic advantage” is shrinking. Did you underestimate your new digital competitors?

Dean Baquet:

Yes, I think we did. We assumed wrongly that these new competitors, whether it was BuzzFeed or others, were doing so well just because they were doing something journalistically that we chose not to do. We were arrogant, to be honest. We looked down on those new competitors, and I think we’ve come to realize that was wrong. They understood before we did how to make their stories available to people who are interested in them. We were too slow to do it.

Spiegel:

The report was disillusioning for many newspaper executives because the Times is widely seen as a role model when it comes to the question of making money on the web. The report, instead, pointed out that the Times lacks a digital strategy and the newsroom is far away from a “digital first” culture.

Dean Baquet:

First, the Times is and has always been a digital leader. The report only cited some areas where we fell down. Second: Half of the report is critical, and half of it has ideas for things you can do to fix the problem. A lot of things have been done already.

Spiegel:

What has changed?

Dean Baquet:

We have, for example, built a full-bodied audience development team that engages with our readers through social networks. The team has been in operation for three months now and we already have a pretty consistent 20 percent increase in traffic.

Spiegel:

How does this influence the work of your journalists?

Dean Baquet:

It used to be, if you were a reporter, you wrote a story and then you moved on to the next one. We were used to people coming to us. We waited for them to turn on our website or to pick up our print paper and see what we have. We now understand that we have to make our stories available to our readers. A lot of people get their news from Facebook or Twitter and we want to make sure that they see some of our best stories there, too. We do this more aggressively now than we did before.•

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You have to wonder what the brand new New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, who was poached from Texas Monthly, must think of Jill Abramson’s abrupt ouster. He was personally courted for the job by the erstwhile Executive Editor, and the two meshed on a vision for the future of the glossy publication at a time when some believe the periodical-within-a-periodical redundant with what the legendary paper has become in the paper-less age. He moved his family thousands of miles to work for the institution and not just Abramson, but it helps to have an ally at the top of the masthead as Hugo Lindgren, his predecessor, learned when he was removed by Abramson after being tapped by Bill Keller. Because of his high level of talent and because the company’s new lead editor, Dean Baquet, was involved in his hiring, Silverstein will likely be fine, but it goes to show you how crazy the business has become, even at the top, in this worried age of technological disruption. If we were living in an era when newspapers were flush and the Times was profitable, it’s hard to imagine this change would have been made. But all bets are off now. The pressure is immense and the patience short. Even formerly plum jobs are pretty much the pits today, just like the rest of them. 

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From Ken Auletta at the New Yorker blog:

“As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. ‘She confronted the top brass,’ one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was ‘pushy,’ a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. [Arthur] Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson had also been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, having spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, accounting for some of the pension disparity. (I was also told by another friend of hers that the pay gap with Keller has since been closed.) But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. A third associate told me, ‘She found out that a former deputy managing editor’—a man—’made more money than she did’ while she was managing editor. ‘She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.’

Sulzberger’s frustration with Abramson was growing. She had already clashed with the company’s C.E.O., Mark Thompson, over native advertising and the perceived intrusion of the business side into the newsroom. Publicly, Thompson and Abramson denied that there was any tension between them, as Sulzberger today declared that there was no church-state—that is, business-editorial—conflict at the Times. A politician who made such implausible claims might merit a front-page story in the Times. The two men and Abramson clearly did not get along.”

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From David Carr and Ravi Somaiya at the Times:

“The New York Times dismissed Jill Abramson as executive editor on Wednesday, replacing her with Dean Baquet, the managing editor, in an abrupt change of leadership.

Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of the paper and the chairman of The New York Times Company, told a stunned newsroom that had been quickly assembled that he had made the decision because of ‘an issue with management in the newsroom.’

Ms. Abramson, 60, had been in the job only since September 2011. But people in the company briefed on the situation described serious tension in her relationship with Mr. Sulzberger, who had been hearing concerns from employees that she was polarizing and mercurial. They had disagreements even before she was appointed executive editor, and she had also had clashes with Mr. Baquet.

In recent weeks, people briefed on the situation said, Mr. Baquet had become angered over a decision by Ms. Abramson to try to hire an editor from The Guardian, Janine Gibson, and install her alongside him a co-managing editor position without consulting him. It escalated the conflict between them and rose to the attention of Mr. Sulzberger.”

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