Jill Abramson

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“I Don’t Want To Be BuzzFeed”

January 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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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“That Was A Big Tactical Mistake”

May 19, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

David Carr might be the best and most lucid writer working for any of the companies that remain in what used to be known as the “newspaper business.” I could read him endlessly. In his latest column, Carr scrutinizes the fiasco of Jill Abramson’s firing. The whole episode has been astoundingly tone-deaf on the part of management. When you live in a country where none of the 44 Presidents have been women, and one gender has always enjoyed clear advantage in salary, you have to realize that the abrupt dismissal of the first female executive editor because of “management issues” is going to be incendiary. Especially when you consider the notoriously difficult personalities of some of the men who’ve previously held that post.

Based on his intra-office reportage, Carr doesn’t believe Abramson’s firing was caused by a scuffle over pay inequality or other gender issues. And while Carr self-identifies as a “company man,” he’s also brutally honest about himself and everyone else. He clearly wrote what his research truly found. 

Questions Carr doesn’t address: Was Abramson paid less than her male counterparts of similar stature and tenure during her years at the Times? Are other women there compensated on par with men? While the Times certainly doesn’t want their salary structure wholly transparent, the company should form a panel of ten female and minority journalists and managers who are privy to the salary of every Times employee. This committee should meet with the publisher and HR at regular intervals to question what they see as inequities. Perhaps that would dispel the deep concerns some women working at the Times must now have.

From Carr:

“Jill rose as a woman in a patriarchal business and a male-dominated organization by being tough, by displaying superlative journalistic instincts and by never backing up for anyone.

Some might suggest that these traits are all in the historical job description of a man editing The New York Times, but Arthur concluded ‘she had lost the support of her masthead colleagues and could not win it back.’ I like Jill and the version of The Times she made. But my reporting, including interviews with senior people in the newsroom, some of them women, backs up his conclusion.

When he announced Jill and Dean Baquet’s appointment in 2011, Mr. Sulzberger was rightfully proud of his dream team, two talented journalists to lead the paper who were not white men. But while there may have been a dream, there was never a real team.

Jill did a six-month tour of The Times’s digital endeavors before assuming the editorship, and was publicly supportive of a recent groundbreaking report on innovation at The New York Times. But the report plainly stated that the paper was lagging in that area, and according to several executives in the newsroom she took some of its findings personally.

Perhaps that is part of the reason she tried to bring in Janine Gibson, a senior editor at The Guardian, as a co-managing editor for digital. That was a big tactical mistake, at least in terms of office management. Dean was not aware that Jill had made an offer to Ms. Gibson, and he was furious and worried about how it would affect not only him but the rest of the news operation as well. (All the talk about pay inequity and her lawyering up to get her due was a sideshow in my estimation.)”

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“The Two Men And Abramson Clearly Did Not Get Along”

May 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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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