At nine o’clock on the morning
of September 6th, Jill Abramson was riding the subway uptown from her
Tribeca loft. It was her first day as executive editor of the New York Times,
and also the first time in the paper’s hundred and sixty years that a
woman’s name would appear at the top of the masthead. Abramson described
herself as “excited,” because of the history she was about to make, and
“a little nervous,” because she knew that many in the newsroom feared
her.
Abramson, who is fifty-seven, wore a white dress and a black
cardigan with white flowers and red trim. Her usually pale complexion
glowed from summer sun, but there were deep, dark lines under her eyes.
As she entered the Times Building, she waved to the security officers
and greeted colleagues in the elevator, something that she had usually
been too preoccupied to do. The vast newsroom was quiet—the place does
not really come alive until about ten-thirty—but there was a hint of
apprehension. The few reporters at their pods silently watched their new
boss as she walked by.
Abramson put her purse down on a white
Formica desk that she occupies in the middle of the third-floor
newsroom. Someone had left her a sealed envelope with “Congratulations”
written on the front. It contained a cover note from a female editor at
the paper along with a laminated letter passed down from that editor’s
father. The letter was from a nine-year-old girl named Alexandra Early,
who wrote that she got mad when she watched television: “That’s because
I’m a girl and there aren’t enough girl superheroes on TV.” The cover
note to Abramson said, “Wherever Alexandra Early ended up, I hope that
she heard about your new job.”
Abramson had previously been the
paper’s managing editor, and many in the newsroom considered her to be
intimidating and brusque; she was too remote and, they thought, slightly
similar to an earlier executive editor, the talented but volcanic
Howell Raines, who had also begun the job right after Labor Day, in
2001. After less than two years, Raines was forced out, and his memory
is still cursed. So Abramson made a point of doing something that Raines
was unlikely to have done: walking over and calling out, “Good morning,
Metro desk!” Then she offered congratulations for a front-page story on
the admissions policies of New York private schools. In an e-mail to
the staff that day, she promised “to be out in the newsroom, a lot,
talking to all of you and listening to your ideas. . . . You’ll be sick
of me there will be so many brainstorming sessions, meal invitations and
small meetings.”
Once, it was preposterous to think that a woman could become the editor of the
Times.
When Eileen Shanahan, who went on to become a well-respected economics
reporter, arrived for an interview with Clifton Daniel, the
assistant
managing editor, in 1962, she hid her desire to become an editor. “All I
ever want is to be a reporter on the best newspaper in the world,” she
told him.
“That’s
good,” Daniel responded, as Shanahan told the story, “because I can
assure you no woman will ever be an editor at the New York
Times.”
Four
decades ago, women and minorities were second-class citizens at the
paper. According to Nan Robertson’s book “The Girls in the Balcony:
Women, Men, and the New York Times,” only forty of the
Times’
four hundred and twenty-five reporters were women, and this included not
a single national correspondent. There were no female photographers,
columnists, or editorial-board members. Not a single black journalist
rose above the position of reporter.
In the late
nineteen-seventies, after facing multiple lawsuits alleging
discrimination against women and minorities, the company became more
aggressive in promoting and recruiting staffers who weren’t white men.
By 2010, forty-one per cent of the editors and supervisors were women;
just under twenty per cent of all employees were minorities; and
thirteen per cent of supervisory positions were held by minorities.
This
June, the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., announced the
appointment of Abramson and of Dean Baquet, who is black, as the new
managing editor. Many who gathered in the newsroom that day were
thinking of this history. Not a few women cried. Susan Chira, an
assistant managing editor, says that she kept thinking that when she
joined the
Times, in 1981, many
Times women were “sad,
bitter, angry people who were talented but who had been thwarted.”
Editors openly propositioned young women. “I can’t believe how far we’ve
come. To see Jill take the mantle, I felt tingling. You have to praise
and savor when a woman can earn it through merit. No tokenism here. Jill
studied for this job. She earned it.”
The
first thing that people usually notice about Jill Abramson is her voice.
The equivalent of a nasal car honk, it’s an odd combination of upper-
and working-class. Inside the newsroom, her schoolteacherlike way of
elongating words and drawing out the last word of each sentence is a
subject of endless conversation and expert mimicry. When she appeared on
television after her appointment as executive editor, the blogger Ben
Trawick-Smith wrote, “Speech pathologists and phoneticians, knock
yourself out: what’s going on with Abramson’s speech?” He was deluged
with responses. One speculated that, like a politician, she had trained
herself to limit the space between sentences so that it would be hard to
interrupt her; another said she had probably acquired the accent in an
attempt to not sound too New York while she was an undergraduate at
Harvard. The writer Amy Wilentz, a college roommate of Abramson’s, has
said that the accent probably has something to do with trying to sound a
bit like Bob Dylan.
None of those accounts get it right, since
Jill’s sister, Jane, has the same unusual voice, as did their mother,
Dovie Abramson. The Abramsons lived at the Ardsley, an Art Deco building
at Ninety-second Street and Central Park West. Abramson’s father,
Norman, a prosperous importer of linen for dresses, was a physically
imposing man who did not graduate from college. He had an exuberant
personality and pushed his two daughters to excel. Dovie Abramson, a
Barnard graduate, read to her daughters—“Little Women,” poetry,
Dickens—and liked taking them to horror movies and the theatre.
The family so revered the
Times that at one point they had two copies delivered to their home. “The New York
Times
was our religion,” Abramson has said more than once. Dovie and Norman
were Adlai Stevenson idealists. In the 1960 Democratic primary, they
adhered to liberal principle rather than support the more moderate and
more electable John F. Kennedy. Dovie was a volunteer for William Fitts
Ryan, one of the first members of the House of Representatives to
denounce the war in Vietnam.
Jill idolized her sister, Jane
O’Connor, who is six years older, and the best-selling author of the
“Fancy Nancy” children’s books. The two sisters have the same cackle of a
laugh, and every year they go off alone on adventurous trips—to China,
Morocco, Budapest. “We both think we’re the smartest girls in the room,”
Jane says. Jill attended the Ethical Culture School, a private school
on Central Park West and a favored destination for secular Jews. When
she was allowed to go out without supervision, she went to see old
movies at the Thalia and the New Yorker. When Judy Garland died, she and
a friend took a bus to the Frank Campbell funeral home to soak up the
experience and observe celebrities. She went to high school at
Fieldston, a private school in the Bronx.
In 1972, Jill was
admitted to Harvard. “Our class was the first class that could choose to
live at Radcliffe or in Harvard Yard,” one of her classmates, Alison
Mitchell, who is now the
Times’ weekend news editor, recalls.
“Jill and I chose to live in Harvard Yard. It was an era when you walked
into the dining room and would not see another female. All of us who
chose to do that felt like we were feminists breaking into the male
world. A lot of women at Radcliffe thought we were sellouts and wanted
to be in the male world. But we felt like pioneers.”
As a freshman, instead of trying to join the
Harvard Crimson, Abramson wrote profiles and theatre reviews for the weekly campus paper, the
Independent.
“I thought of Jill as an artsy person,” her colleague Stephen Adler,
who is the editor-in-chief of Reuters, recalls. As a junior, Abramson
became the editor of the arts section, under Alison Mitchell. “I would
never have predicted she would become the editor of the New York
Times,” Mitchell says. “The people who thought they wanted to go into journalism and make connections went to the
Crimson.”
One of Abramson’s Harvard friends, Peter Kaplan, who is the editorial
director of Fairchild Fashion Media, says, “Jill always had a swagger.
It was as if she were in a romantic comedy. She had the same feeling
that Rosalind conveys in ‘As You Like It.’ In the last act, everything
would work out. She wasn’t like the other girls at Harvard. Most of my
crowd were either wonks or tough feminists who would chew your balls
off. But Jill was the witty cosmopolitan who gave running commentary
that was like a voice-over narration from a Billy Wilder movie.”
In
August, 1973, the summer after Abramson’s freshman year, her parents
rented a house on Nantucket, where Abramson worked in a cheese shop and
as a cocktail waitress. While they were there, Joseph Kennedy crashed
his jeep, leaving a young woman paralyzed. It was four years after the
Edward Kennedy tragedy at Chappaquiddick, and the accident provoked a
media frenzy. But Nantucket was fogged in, and press organizations were
desperate for details. A friend of Jill’s sister who worked in
Time’
s Boston bureau recruited Abramson to find out what happened. For the next three years, she worked as a stringer for the magazine.
But
journalism hardly dominated her time. In her sophomore year, Abramson
performed as an English flapper in Noël Coward’s “Hay Fever.” The
Crimson’
s
critic, Ruth C. Streeter, was unimpressed. “Jill Abramson vamps madly
in her part as the inane and brainless ingénue,” Streeter wrote, “but
her squeaky voice, exaggerated walk, and batting eyes quickly become
tiresome.” For Abramson, the highlight of the production was meeting a
classmate, Henry Little Griggs III, who played the piano between acts.
They became a couple. Griggs was a news junkie, shy but funny. He was
from an old-line Protestant family in Madison, Connecticut. Friends
describe him as easygoing and not as ambitious as Abramson. (Years
later, Griggs, who works as a public-relations consultant, enjoys being a
part-time country squire: lawn bowling with men several decades older
in Madison and collecting and displaying local postcards.)
Abramson graduated from Harvard and, after spending a year in the Boston bureau of
Time,
moved to Virginia, where she and Griggs worked for the gubernatorial
campaign of the Democratic populist Henry Howell. After Howell lost,
they moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where Griggs worked as a
political consultant. Abramson worked for an advertising agency, writing
ads for other Southern Democratic populists inspired by the 1976
Presidential victory of Jimmy Carter, including the Arkansas
gubernatorial candidate Bill Clinton.
In the 1980 Presidential
contest, Abramson returned to journalism, as a researcher for NBC’s
election unit. During the campaign, she met Steven Brill, who had
recently started an irreverent magazine on the legal profession,
The American Lawyer. In 1981, he hired Abramson as a reporter. Brill was a cantankerous boss, Stephen Adler, who also joined
The American Lawyer,
recalls. “The first story I edited was one of hers. Steve Brill wrote
on the top of it, ‘Really bad first edit.’ He’d often write, ‘Is English
your second language?’ ”
Abramson and Griggs married in 1981,
and have two children, Cornelia and Will. In 1986, Abramson became the
editor of another Brill-owned paper,
Legal Times, which was based
in Washington, where Griggs was a press representative for the American
Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Brill was an
exacting boss whose normal speaking voice was a shout. But he and
Abramson got along. According to Brill’s recollection, the two of them
yelled at each other only once. Abramson had fired a female employee,
who promptly threatened to file a sex-discrimination suit. “If you don’t
fight this case, I’m quitting,” Brill says Abramson hollered at him. “I
discriminate against stupid people, and she’s stupid.”
“Calm down,” he said. “I’m not settling.”
In 1986, Abramson published her first book, written with Barbara Franklin, a colleague at
The American Lawyer,
called “Where They Are Now: The Story of the Women of Harvard Law
1974.” It traced the difficulties that female lawyers confronted as they
encountered double standards and professional disappointment. The next
year, Norman Pearlstine, the managing editor of the
Wall Street Journal ,
decided that the paper needed to expand its coverage of the law. “As
managing editor, I had a rule to hire anyone who could last a year with
Steve Brill,” Pearlstine says. Abramson was invited to an interview with
the Washington bureau chief, Al Hunt, who agreed to see her only to
accommodate Pearlstine. Hunt expected a perfunctory meeting, but it
turned out to be “unlike any interview I ever had,” he recalls. “Jill
rattled off seven or eight fabulous story ideas that had never occurred
to us.” He added, “I’ve interviewed hundreds of reporters or editors for
jobs, and this easily was the most impressive and memorable.” Abramson
wrote many front-page investigative stories. In 1993, she was promoted
to deputy bureau chief.
While at the
Journal, she resumed a friendship with a
fellow Fieldston student, Jane Mayer, who is now a staff writer at
The New Yorker.
In 1991, they decided to write a book together about the Supreme Court
Justice Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, who, during his confirmation
hearings, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had sexually
harassed her. Thomas professed innocence, saying that he was the subject
of a “high-tech lynching.” Abramson and Mayer set out to determine who
was lying.
In their book, “Strange Justice: The Selling of
Clarence Thomas,” they conclude that Thomas had not been truthful. They
wrote, “If Thomas did lie, as the preponderance of evidence suggests,
then his performance, and that of the Senate in confirming him, raises
fundamental questions about the political process that placed him on the
court.” Thomas asserted that Hill was “the only person who has been on
my staff who has ever made these sorts of allegations about me.” But
Mayer and Abramson interviewed three women who detailed similar
instances of sexual harassment. The book was also critical of Democrats
on the Judiciary Committee, including the chairman, Joe Biden, who is
portrayed as being so eager to demonstrate to Republicans that he was
“fair” that he was unfair to Hill.
When the hearings ended, Abramson wrote Maureen Dowd, who covered them for the
Times,
a mash note. Dowd, who later became a columnist, sent back a mash note
of her own. Some years later, Dowd told Abramson that she was looking
for more women to join the
Times. “You know any sensational women out there?” Dowd asked.
“Yeah, me!” Abramson shot back.
Dowd reported this to the Washington bureau chief, Michael Oreskes, who invited Abramson to lunch. She joined the
Times in September, 1997, and in December, 2000, she was named Washington bureau chief.
This
began a happy period in Abramson’s life. She was the first woman to
head the bureau, and she proved both demanding and popular among most
reporters. At her first meeting as bureau chief, her deputy, Richard L.
Berke, recalls, she acted like a reporter. She shared information and
news tips with her staff. “I had worked in Washington for twenty years,
and I had never seen anyone who seemed to know everything that was
happening behind the scenes in Washington and seemed to have amazing
recall of stories from twenty years ago,” Berke said. Dowd was impressed
by her omnivorous curiosity: “If there was a lunar eclipse at three in
the morning that was best viewed from a bridge in Maryland, she wanted
to go.” Jeff Gerth, an investigative reporter, who became a confidant,
says, “She was a great team leader, a loyal friend, someone you’d want
in the trenches with you. But if you didn’t meet her high professional
standards you were not on her team.”
In September of that year, convinced that the
Times
had become lethargic, Sulzberger chose Howell Raines, a distinctly hot
personality who had been running the editorial pages, to succeed Joseph
Lelyveld, a preternaturally cool
Times lifer, as executive
editor. Lelyveld had pressed Sulzberger to choose Bill Keller, then the
managing editor, but Keller, unlike Raines, had not cultivated a close
relationship with the publisher. Raines became editor a few days before
9/11, and in the first months of his stewardship he seemed an inspired
choice. He galvanized the newsroom to perform in spectacular fashion,
and that spring the
Times won seven Pulitzer Prizes. This was Raines’s moment of triumph and pride; his downfall was not long in coming.
At
first, Mayer says, Abramson was excited, because Raines, who had once
worked in the Washington bureau and served as the chief political
correspondent, and who had won a Pulitzer Prize, was a proponent of
deeper political coverage and aggressive investigative reporting. But
soon he began to micromanage Abramson’s bureau. He routinely cut her off
at the daily page-one meeting to bark into the telephone that her story
ideas were lame and that her bureau lagged in post-9/11 coverage.
Gerald Boyd, who was the managing editor under Raines and his closest
deputy, wrote a memoir some years later in which he said, “I could read
Raines well, but I could not understand why he had a problem with her.
He complained that she was not dynamic enough and lacked glitz.”
When
David Sanger, who is now the paper’s chief Washington correspondent,
covered President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, with Richard
Stevenson, they reported that the President warned Saddam Hussein that
failure to disarm would lead to war. Sanger recalls, “Jill received a
call from Howell saying that we should say, ‘Bush effectively declared
war on Iraq.’ . . . We pushed back very hard. A declaration of war is a
distinct thing. We were not hearing that. Jill backed us up, and told
New York that a war declaration was not a correct interpretation.
Eventually, we won.” Raines now says that he was probably just exploring
different news angles. Within days, he summoned Abramson to New York
and chewed her out.
A senior editor who worked closely with
Abramson and Raines described their relationship this way: “Howell
believed she was failing as Washington bureau chief, and she felt he was
making it impossible for her to succeed.”
“It was the only time
she had a boss who was not thrilled to have her,” Abramson’s sister,
Jane O’Connor, says. Raines wanted to replace Abramson with Patrick
Tyler, a former colleague of his at the St. Petersburg
Times, whom he had recruited from the Washington
Post.
Tyler was named chief Washington correspondent and given an office next
to hers, which made him what the staff called “a shadow bureau chief.”
Raines says that first he offered Abramson the job of investigations
editor in New York. “I thought that would be a better fit for her
talents than Washington,” he says. Abramson does not remember this
proposal but recalls being offered the editorship of the weekly
Book Review. But she refused to leave her bureau.
By late 2002, Abramson was miserable, and considered taking a senior editing position at the Washington
Post. Finally, she recalled, “I came up to talk to Arthur” about the Washington
Post
job offer—and to tell him that she couldn’t continue to work under
Raines. It was, in effect, a polite ultimatum: he would relent or she
would leave. Traditionally, it was unusual at the
Times for an
editor to go straight to the publisher with a complaint, and even more
so for the publisher to say that he would intervene. Abramson’s trip to
New York prompted a phone call from Janet Robinson, the C.E.O. of the
Times Company. “I had heard that Jill was very unhappy and might leave,”
Robinson recalls. “I reached out to her and told her, ‘You’re doing a
wonderful job.’ She felt as if she were being strong-armed. I said to
her, ‘Over my dead body do you leave this paper!’ If I don’t support
people in this organization, women in this organization, I’m not doing
my job.” Robinson, too, talked to Raines, “as a peacemaker,” as she put
it.
Abramson told Robinson how difficult it was to work under
Raines. In May, 2003, Sulzberger invited Raines and Abramson to meet
with him in his office. He recalls opening this marriage-counselling
session by saying, “We’re not leaving this table until I have an
understanding of what’s going on between you two.”
That same
month, it was revealed that a young reporter named Jayson Blair had been
fabricating news articles. That scandal, combined with more complaints
from editors and reporters about Raines—many of whom believed he had
become disdainful of them—made Sulzberger realize that he needed to make
a change. “Jill was one of a number of my journalistic colleagues who
played a role in educating me about Howell,” Sulzberger says. “But, at
the end of the day, it was Howell who educated me about Howell.” The
crisis was consuming the paper and subverting its public credibility.
There was no time for repair. On June 5th, Raines and Boyd were forced
to resign.
Looking back on Abramson’s performance during the crisis, one would find it hard to argue with the assessment of a senior
Times
reporter in Washington who said that “she was a black belt” infighter.
“Howell clearly viewed Jill as the person who did him in,” an editor
with a position on the paper’s masthead says. Raines told me that that
“is clearly someone’s interpretation. It’s not based on conversations
with me. Indeed, my references to Jill have been few and not
condemnatory.” Then, like a prize fighter who cannot resist a brawl, he
took a swing, suggesting that she has a “vendetta” against him and that
it would be useful to inquire into “why she has such a bee in her
bonnet.” He also said that he wonders “why the new leaders continue a
war of personal retribution.”
After Raines left, Abramson became a
heroine to many in the newsroom. “Jill had been very courageous in
speaking out about Howell,” Susan Chira, whom Raines had exiled from the
editorship of the Week in Review to a lesser post, says. “A lot of us
were cowed by Howell.”
There are, however, critics of Abramson’s tenure as Washington bureau chief. They note that during this period the
Times
was duped into believing that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass
destruction. “She came in during a period where there were many
political and domestic stories that were all subjects she was
comfortable with,” a fellow-editor who wishes to remain anonymous
observed. “Then, after 9/11, the story changed—and she was not as
comfortable with foreign policy and intelligence.”
The most
prominent problem stemmed from the work of the correspondent Judith
Miller, who arrived in Washington soon after 9/11 and began reporting on
Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Abramson recalls that right
after 9/11 Raines said to her, “ ‘Judy is going down to Washington to
do some reporting and she has sources in the White House who will not
talk to anyone else.’ He also said, ‘She will win a Pulitzer.’ ” (Raines
says, “With the start of the Iraq war, I became concerned that the
bureau seemed reluctant to take ownership of the nuclear-arms story.” He
adds, “I don’t recall any Pulitzer reference, though it’s true we won a
lot in those days.”)
Miller ended up writing a series of stories
about Saddam Hussein’s weapons stockpile that turned out to be
exaggerated and erroneous. Raines asserts that Abramson edited several
of the erroneous stories on W.M.D.s. Abramson counters that Judith
Miller “did not work for me.” Douglas Frantz, who was the investigations
editor, and oversaw Miller, agrees that Abramson did not edit Miller’s
stories, and says that “Miller operated outside the normal reporting and
editing channels.”
Abramson, however, accepts some blame. In 2008, she wrote in the
Times, “I failed to push hard enough” to publish an article, written by James Risen, the
Times national-security
reporter, that was skeptical of claims that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction. She also says, “My responsibility as bureau chief is that I
did not pay sufficient attention to the stories Judy was writing. Many
were based on Iraqi defectors. I wish I had been more skeptical.”
Miller, who now works as a commentator for Fox and as a drama critic for
the online magazine
Tablet, declined to comment, saying, “I will be addressing these issues and more in my forthcoming book.”
Many
in the newsroom place the blame for the stories on Raines. “Howell and
Gerald were so excited to have these ‘scoops’ that they bypassed the
normal editing strictures,” Susan Chira says. They took away the checks
and balances that she believes would have spared the
Times some
embarrassing stories about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons. Under
Keller and Abramson, Chira says, “we got back to a desk system where
editors did their jobs.”
Raines says that Chira, who was then working in the
Times’
book-development office, was in no position to know what happened. “Her
statements are made up and false,” Raines told me. He added that he was
stunned by “Chira’s assertion that desk editors did not do their jobs.
My impression was that Jill was the only department head who wouldn’t
take ownership of sensitive stories and difficult personnel matters.”
Another
critique of Abramson’s performance as bureau chief surfaced as well.
Even her most devoted supporters say that she could be short with
people, curtly cutting them off in mid-sentence. Those who failed to
meet her exacting standards were often berated, sometimes publicly; her
critics thought that she played favorites and was mercurial. Some
members of her staff also found her egotistical, inclined to quote her
own work and to say things like “You have to read my book.” From such
complaints and anxieties, ironic whispers began: the woman who had
helped slay the king could be “Howell-like.”
After two years of what Bill Keller refers to as “my happy exile” as an editorial-page columnist and Times Magazine
writer, he won the job denied him in 2001. Keller knew that he had
management issues to address. Internal committees found that better
oversight might have prevented Jayson Blair’s deception. So Keller, for
the first time, chose two managing editors: Abramson for all news
gathering, and John M. Geddes for news operations, including the
production of the newspaper and oversight of the budget. Keller knew
Geddes well, but his relationship with Abramson was new. “In the
beginning, we didn’t know each other,” she says.
Keller had spent
much of his career as a foreign correspondent, Abramson had spent hers
as an investigative reporter. “My scoops are more in the realm of
explaining,” Keller once said. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the
Book Review,
says, “The foreign correspondent at the upper levels is essentially
bearing witness. He is bringing back the story. The investigative
reporter is trying to get to the bottom of a story.”
Keller was
reserved, and in meetings people mistook his silence for passivity;
Abramson didn’t hesitate to announce her opinions. He avoided
confrontation; she did not. When the
Times prepared a front-page investigative report on the investor Steven Rattner, a former
Times
reporter and a close friend of Sulzberger’s, Abramson listened to
Rattner’s complaints but then gave the go-ahead to publish the story on
page one. The article opened a temporary rift between Sulzberger and
Rattner. “What better test is there for an editor than how they handle
the publisher’s best friend?” a former
Times correspondent asks.
And, one could add, what better test is there for a publisher than his
refusal to bully his newsroom to help a friend?
Keller and
Abramson came to treat their different interests and temperaments as
complementary. “It was great to have her as a partner,” Keller says.
“Jill took newsroom meetings to an extraordinary level with her
thoroughness. She would come in most mornings having read everything.”
She pressed editors and reporters to offer more context and to delve
into people’s motives. At the daily 10
A.M. page-one
meeting, Keller mostly listened as his managing editor burrowed in with
questions. “Jill is a little more competitive,” Geddes observes. She
will say, “ ‘XYZ had this story this morning. What are we doing?’ ”
Her
loyalty to Keller went unquestioned. “I was at a gathering where people
bad-mouthed him, and she wouldn’t brook it,” Janet Elder, the editor in
charge of polling and election analysis, says. Keller might be
sphinxlike in newsroom meetings, but he was quick to unleash invective
in e-mail responses to critics. He would let Abramson read his drafts
before he pressed send. Keller says, “I always felt she had my back,
someone who would not just defend you but tell you when you were about
to do something stupid. . . . And not tell anyone else.”
Carolyn
Ryan, who was promoted to Metro editor this past January, first worked
closely with Abramson on the story that forced the resignation of Eliot
Spitzer, the governor of New York. Keller was in Europe, and
Times
reporters were trying to confirm a story that Spitzer was having sex
with prostitutes and possibly hiding the financial transactions through
nefarious means. “A lot of editors would have done the kind of Al Haig
‘We’re gonna bring down the Governor!’ routine,” Ryan says. What struck
her “was the way Jill stayed with us and asked the right questions, but
she did not in any way overwhelm us.” Around midnight on a Friday,
Abramson took the Metro reporters and editors out to a late-night
restaurant near the Port Authority. Abramson related how she had
struggled to get to the bottom of the relationship between President
Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. The
Times broke the Spitzer story the following Monday.
Despite Abramson’s abrupt manner,
Times
reporters and editors also praise her sense of empathy. The editor Dana
Canedy was engaged to Army First Sergeant Charles Monroe King. Their
son, Jordan, was born in 2006—when King was in Iraq—and he started
writing a journal addressed to Jordan, offering life advice in case he
didn’t come back. In October, just a month before King was to return
home, he was killed by an improvised explosive device. At the end of the
year, the
Times planned a series of short profiles of soldiers
killed in Iraq, and Canedy volunteered to write about King. Editors were
nervous about running a first-person account in a newspaper that prides
itself on a dispassionate tone, but Canedy persisted, and says that
Abramson was her champion.
The story, “From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By,” appeared on page one of the
Times
on January 1, 2007. Canedy wrote about King’s lessons: how to behave on
a date and how to treat people who are different. She movingly
described how “as a black man he sometimes felt the sting of
discrimination,” yet “betrayed no bitterness.” Readers flooded the paper
with letters and e-mails. Organizations invited her to speak.
Publishers vied to give her a book contract. Denzel Washington optioned
the movie rights.
At one point, Canedy told Abramson that she was
worried that Jordan did not have proper male role models. Abramson
thought of William Woodson, her son’s best friend and an
African-American, who had been raised by a single mother and had become
almost a member of her family. He had gone on vacations with them, and
she and her husband had helped pay his college tuition. Now he was a
junior executive at Restaurant Associates. He started going to Canedy’s
house every Wednesday evening, reading to Jordan, taking him to the
playground, and staying for dinner.
In May,
2007, in the same week that her son, Will, graduated from N.Y.U.,
Abramson was in midtown, on her way to the Harvard Club for an
early-morning workout. As the light changed at the intersection of
Forty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue, a large truck, racing to beat
the red, knocked her down. Its front tire crushed her right foot. Its
rear tire rolled over her left side and snapped her femur, broke her
pelvis, and left her with extensive internal injuries. An ambulance
rushed her to Bellevue Hospital’s trauma center, where a doctor said
that if the rear wheel had struck her thigh just two inches higher she’d
have been killed. Surgeons administered blood transfusions, inserted a
titanium rod in her leg, and told her that she needed to spend six weeks
in bed. Many months of painkillers, excruciating rehab, and physical
therapy followed, as she progressed from wheelchair to crutches to cane.
Her oldest friend, Jim Lax, who is now a physician, said that she
experienced a kind of “post-traumatic stress,” including bouts of
anxiety and depression.
The columnist and former food critic Frank
Bruni remembers going out to dinner with her after the accident, with
Bill Keller and his wife, Emma. “We were celebrating that she was out of
a wheelchair,” Bruni says, and at the end of dinner Abramson said that
she wanted to walk home. “I remember it took us twenty-five minutes,”
Bruni says. “It was eleven at night. It was the end of a very long day.
But she had an opportunity to get in a little therapy and exercise, and I
remember thinking, She is one fierce, resilient woman.”
Abramson returned to work, in a wheelchair, nine weeks after the accident. By then, the
Times
had moved from its old building, on West Forty-third Street, to the
sleek Renzo Piano building, on Eighth Avenue between West Fortieth and
West Forty-first Streets. The architect had made each editor’s office
the same size, with the same furniture and gray industrial carpet. All
her old furniture was gone. “It was totally not me,” she says. “I went
to Arthur and I said, ‘It would make a difference for me if I could have
my old stuff back.’ He laughed, but he was not going to deny me in my
state.”
Her old furniture came back: a cloth-covered green couch
with a dog pillow, a Persian rug that would cover part of the carpet, a
shelf of books, a Yankees baseball cap, and pictures of Babe Ruth, Keith
Richards, and E. B. White and his Westie.
During Abramson’s tenure as managing editor, many women at the Times
came to see her as their advocate. When women received promotions,
Abramson often hosted a celebratory party for them. These events got to
be so frequent, the European correspondent Suzanne Daley joked, “it
almost became ‘Oh, God, another party!’ I credit her with being the
first woman to hit that level and actually bring other people along.”
But the support that Abramson provides for women makes some men at the Times nervous. One male correspondent says, “She plays favorites, it is said. Especially for women.”
Some
also complained that, as managing editor, Abramson was too close to
Sulzberger and Janet Robinson. In interviews, she would go out of her
way to praise them. William E. Schmidt, the deputy managing editor, puts
it a different way. He says of Abramson, “She’s shrewd in that she
understands the importance of dealing with people upstairs. Many
previous editors treated upstairs as the place that delivered the money
the newsroom needed.” But in the current tough economic times, he says,
Abramson understands that “you need these people.”
As for the
complaint that Abramson is too rough with underlings, some believe that
female executives like her are victimized by stereotypes. Sally Singer,
who worked closely with Anna Wintour, at
Vogue, before joining the
Times as the editor of its magazine
T,
last year, told me, “When women are blunt, maybe it’s seen as ‘tough,’
but actually it’s just efficient. I worked for Anna for eleven years,
and you can hem and haw and pretend to like something, but why? You’re
just going to end up having six more meetings about it—and you’re going
to demoralize someone over days as opposed to in a moment.”
Thirteen
years ago, Abramson and Griggs bought an eighteenth-century house near
Long Island Sound in Madison, Connecticut, where Scout, their golden
retriever, frolics in the water and they can take long walks. In 2009,
Abramson began writing a popular online column for the
Times
about her dog, and she is now publishing a book, “The Puppy Diaries:
Raising a Dog Named Scout.” Like all books that people write about their
dogs, it’s partly about the pet and partly about the owner. In it, she
describes the death of the family’s first dog, Buddy, and says that her
sister calls Scout “needier” than Buddy. “But we were needy, too,” she
writes. “After the departure of our children, Buddy’s death, and my
accident, our home lives had become a little narrow and thin. . . .
Bringing into our empty nest another living being to make happy and take
care of helped put our relationship back on its natural axis.”
“She knew before she did the puppy diaries that she would get a lot of
grief,” Trish Hall, the deputy editorial-page editor who edited the
column, says. “She didn’t care. I like it that she’s got this rich life.
It used to be that women wouldn’t talk about when their kid had a
dentist appointment. Jill doesn’t pretend that work is the only thing in
her life.”
“Being executive editor is a full-time job,” one
masthead editor demurs. “You shouldn’t be writing a book.” Especially
one called “The Puppy Diaries.” Abramson admits that she is
self-conscious about her dog book being published during her second
month as executive editor of the august New York
Times. Say what you will about the grayer days of the
Times in mid-century, but it was always hard to imagine James Reston writing a book about a beloved household pet.
In
the spring of 2010, in an effort to brighten the paper’s future (and,
presumably, her own), Abramson took a leave from the managing-editor
position to supervise news content on the Times’ Web site. She
spent much of her time in a section of the third floor near the Web
team. Her “detour” coincided with a company-wide reëvaluation of how the
Times should charge for its online edition.
Abramson was
surprised at how poorly integrated the two parts of the newsroom were.
The daily meetings devoted to selecting six front-page stories consumed
huge amounts of energy; little time was spent thinking about what
appeared on the Web home page.
Some people in the newsroom
believe that Abramson’s digital knowledge remains skimpy. But, broadly
speaking, she knows that the Web is vital to the
Times’ future,
and she wants Web people working alongside print people in each section
of the newsroom. The page-one meetings now feature the home page of
NYTimes.com on a large overhead screen, and editors decide what stories
to post immediately.
While colleagues respect Abramson’s news
judgment, they are wary of her sometimes brusque manner. In the summer
of 2010, nearly two dozen editors met to plan coverage for the midterm
elections. Although Abramson was still working on the online paper, she
decided to attend. The gathering was chaired by the national editor,
Richard Berke, and the political editor, Richard Stevenson. They began
to talk about stories they wanted covered. Abramson interrupted, without
allowing them to finish the presentation, and began belittling many of
their ideas.
“This was a small earthquake of a meeting,” one
reporter, who was informed about it shortly afterward, says. “She
whacked editors,” a senior editor who heard about the meeting says.
Glenn Kramon, an assistant managing editor, says of Abramson, “The
challenge is to say what she wants, not what she doesn’t like.” A senior
editor says, “She and Howell are remarkably similar. They are big
personalities. They suck the air out of the room. They tell stories
about themselves. . . . Unlike Howell, she is not mean. Jill is a nice,
caring person. . . . She doesn’t enjoy torturing people. So much of her
negativity is unintended.”
Even her supporters were mildly
critical of her behavior at the political meeting. Dean Baquet, the
acting managing editor at the time, says, “I wouldn’t have handled it
that way.” Her criticism “was too sharp.” Abramson now admits, “I think I
was probably too tough,” and “hijacked the meeting in a way that was
not helpful.”
That summer, Bill Keller told his
wife, Emma, that he longed to return to writing. She said that the
timing was wrong, as did Abramson, when he confided in her. “I was
thunderstruck,” Abramson says.
Keller’s tenure had been defined
by three crises—morale, economic, and digital. “He came in at a
challenging time journalistically, with all we had gone through with
Howell, with Jayson Blair,” Sulzberger says, “and Bill really came in
and stabilized the newsroom.” He was a calming presence. The media
columnist David Carr speaks for many in the newsroom when he says,
“There are a lot of people who say that that job slowly drives you
crazy, because you end up moving through an environment that’s without
rigorous feedback. So you end up convinced of your own rectitude. . . . I
never felt like I couldn’t talk to him.”
Keller’s demeanor helped to cushion the economic tsunami that struck the
Times
and newspapers in general. Between 2006 and 2010, the company cut costs
by eight hundred and fifty million dollars. The newsroom budget of two
hundred million dollars was reduced by ten per cent, Geddes says. The
Times
shrank from six daily sections to four. The company was compelled to
sell, and lease back, the floors it occupied in its new building. Its
stock price plunged. Sulzberger consented to take a loan from one of the
world’s richest men, Carlos Slim, paying a usurious rate of fourteen
per cent.
By the time Keller told his wife and Abramson that he
was ready to leave, he had survived the morale and economic crises, but
the company was absorbed in a conversation over how to charge for the
online edition. After speaking with them, he decided that he had to
complete that last debate.
In March, the
Times launched a
Web subscription plan, requiring readers who don’t already subscribe to
pay thirty-five dollars a month for digital access on all devices. Early
indications were encouraging. In the first three months, the
Times attracted two hundred and eighty-one thousand digital subscribers.
In
May, Keller went to see Arthur Sulzberger. As the publisher recalls the
conversation, Keller said, “Arthur, I’ve been the executive editor of
the New York
Times longer than Joe Lelyveld, longer than Max Frankel. I think the time has come for me to hand the reins over to someone else.”
Sulzberger
was surprised, but after a moment he said, “If this is what you want,
you’ve earned it.” They talked about possible successors, and, Keller
says, “I told him I thought it was prudent to consider a range of
candidates, but that he had an obvious candidate in front of him and
Jill was it.”
For a publisher, few decisions rival that of
choosing the editor. Sulzberger asked various editors and executives to
recommend candidates, and to describe the strengths and weaknesses of
each. He quickly concluded that he would not look outside the Times
Company, and settled on three editors whom he knew reasonably well:
Abramson; the Washington bureau chief, Dean Baquet; and the editor of
the Boston
Globe, Martin Baron. (The
Globe is owned by the
Times Company.) He says he knew that each candidate was a proponent of
“good journalism,” so a decisive factor would be the person’s
“willingness and ability to push us down the digital road.”
He
had a meal with each of the three. Abramson was the front-runner.
Sulzberger respected her professional judgment, and they also had a
personal bond. Sulzberger had turned to her in search of guidance and
career advice for his son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, and another
relative, Sam Dolnick, both talented young reporters.
Abramson was
candid with Sulzberger about her weaknesses. She recalls, “I said I
needed to work on listening more and talking less, and not interrupting.
I worried that questions I asked about the substance of journalism can
come off as being critical.” They talked about what she would do as
editor, and she said that she would “be out and about in the newsroom,”
talking to reporters and editors. She composed a memorandum outlining
her mission, if she should get the job. She recalls writing that she
would maintain the paper’s “core mission” of producing excellent
journalism. Unlike Howell Raines, who wanted to transform the newsroom,
Abramson preached newsroom continuity. She would create a new leadership
team with “some new people.” But her real innovations, she vowed, would
be digital.
That’s what Sulzberger wanted to hear. He told me
that he needed an editor who understood “the move from search to social
and what that means for us. Increasingly, people are learning where they
want to go, what they want to consume, how they want to engage with
news or games or a variety of different things from each other.” As he
weighed the three candidates, people in whom he confided say, he saw
negatives in each. He did not pursue Baron, because he had been outside
the
Times for a lengthy period. Dean Baquet, who may be the most
popular editor in the newsroom, did not have digital experience, and
there were questions about his patience for managing the newsroom and
its budget. As for Abramson, there were concerns about her assertiveness
and whether it would stifle discussion and dissent, and about her
presentation skills, including her voice.
Janet Robinson praised
the talents of the three contenders, but clearly leaned toward Abramson.
“At the end of the day,” Robinson says of Sulzberger, “he focussed on
Jill, because of that experience on the digital side and the work she
had done in the organization.” Sulzberger also knew that, if he chose
Baquet, Abramson might leave.
At eight-fifteen one morning, just
two weeks after her meeting with Sulzberger, the phone rang in
Abramson’s loft. Sulzberger was calling from Europe. “I have a
surprise,” he said.
She was, she says, “extremely nervous,” and asked, “Is it a good surprise or a bad surprise?”
When
he offered her the job, she responded, “It would be the honor of my
life.” Before racing uptown, she called her sister. Days later, she
asked Baquet to become the managing editor. She had helped recruit him
to rejoin the
Times, in 2007. They talked often, and swapped
recommendations on novels. He had more national-security experience, and
had the personal skills of an accomplished politician, with none of the
phoniness. “If you take this,” he says she told him, “this is an
appointment that will make the newsroom smile.”
Sulzberger was certainly pleased. Baquet was Abramson’s choice, one executive at the
Times
says, but Sulzberger’s desire to see an African-American lead the paper
with the first woman editor “was unspoken. Arthur wants that to be part
of his legacy, and Jill is smart enough to know that.”
The
announcement was made in the third-floor newsroom on June 2nd. Bill
Keller, standing with his wife and members of Abramson’s family, was
beaming. With his square jaw, neatly parted gray hair, dark suit, and
pocket kerchief, Keller on this day could have passed for what his
father was, the chairman and C.E.O. of Chevron. Yet when he stepped to
the microphone his voice quavered, and he occasionally paused to
restrain tears. “If it’s true that eighty per cent of life is just
showing up, I think the other twenty per cent is knowing when to move
on,” he began. He thanked Sulzberger and Abramson, before holding his
wife in a tight hug as the newsroom awarded him a sustained round of
applause.
Abramson moved to the middle of the newsroom, where,
reading from notes, she spoke into a microphone that reached her
forehead. She singled out some of “my sisters on the business side and
in editorial,” as well as the
Times’ female pioneers. She listed
some of the women who have inspired her and declared, “Strong shoulders
are holding me up right now.”
Over the summer,
Abramson visited many department and masthead editors and asked, “What
does this place need less of, and more of, from the executive editor?”
She received two overwhelming responses: “The first is that they want
editors who will be less remote. A number of people I talked to felt
that in the last couple of years Bill and John Geddes and I were not
walking the floor and talking to people about their work. . . . The
second was more about me. It is learning things I’m already aware of,
which is that I can seem forbidding.”
But doesn’t fear attach
itself to any demanding editor who sets exacting standards? It does, she
says. “But there is some reason that when I am being probing it is seen
as criticism. My kids when they were little would sometimes say to
me—and with my kids I don’t think I ever raised my voice—‘Stop yelling!’
” She planned to apply in the newsroom some of the “positive training”
that she lavished on Scout. She and her husband, she writes in her book,
used “encouragement, not punishment” to train Scout, rewarding her for
good behavior with a piece of kibble. “In one’s relationship with dogs
and with a newsroom, a generous amount of praise and encouragement goes
much better than criticism,” she says. One wonders whether there might,
however, be some editors who are tougher to please than Scout.
In
late June, Abramson and Baquet flew to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where
they spent time with their correspondents and met with government
officials. Neither had been a foreign reporter, and the trip was
intended as a signal of support to the bureaus. Throughout the trip,
they talked about how they might allow another generation of editors to
rise, and how they might inject new energy into the paper by shifting
longtime department heads. They would make those decisions in
consultation with two editors she had asked to continue in their jobs,
John Geddes and William Schmidt.
The first big change came in
late July, when Abramson named David Leonhardt, a thirty-eight-year-old
economics writer and a Pulitzer Prize winner, to replace Baquet as
Washington bureau chief. Calling it the most “out-of-the-box decision
I’ve seen,” the business columnist and Dealbook editor Andrew Ross
Sorkin, who is thirty-four, says, “She took a young guy without so much
management experience and made him Washington bureau chief. It was not
the same old, same old New York
Times.”
Abramson said that
she hoped to make many of the major personnel decisions by her first day
as editor, and insecurity and speculation were common among
Times
editors this summer. “Has Jill really been itching to do something that
hasn’t been done?” Suzanne Daley, the European correspondent, said. “I
don’t know. All of us are waiting to see what it is.” Aside from
Abramson’s core team of four, the six other masthead editors ranged in
age from fifty-six to fifty-eight, and knew that they were in the way if
Abramson wanted to bring along the next generation. The new executive
editor, it was said, did not have a close relationship with the
assistant managing editor, Jim Roberts. She and the culture editor,
Jonathan Landman, “rub each other the wrong way,” a friend of both said.
People noted that there was occasionally tension between her and Susan
Chira, at the time the foreign editor. Then, there were fiefdoms to
contend with. “There are thirty different news departments,” Schmidt,
the deputy managing editor, observes. “Each one, like the Balkans, not
only speaks its own language but thinks it prints its own currency.”
Abramson
says that her editorship will be marked by more investigative
reporting, attention to politics, cultural coverage, and searching for
the story behind the public-relations announcement. One can sense the
kind of contextual reporting that Abramson is looking for from a review
she did, published in the
Times Book Review in 2008, of Bob
Woodward’s “The War Within” and his three previous books on George W.
Bush, and from a review she did in 2010 of campaign books, including
“Game Change,” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. While praising
Woodward’s latest volume, she takes him to task for failing to provide
deeper context and analysis in his earlier books:
Woodward
is famous for his flat, just-the-facts-ma’am style, if one can call it
that. It is the old-fashioned newspaperman’s credo of show, don’t tell.
He rarely pauses in his narratives to synthesize or analyze, let alone
to judge his powerful subjects, especially those who have been his
sources. He has only one angle, the close-up.
In
the essay on campaign books, she compares Heilemann and Halperin’s
best-selling “Game Change” to Theodore H. White’s classic, “The Making
of the President 1960”:
Their
book is so relentlessly entertaining, in part, precisely because the
authors operate so differently from White, rarely pausing between
scooplets to examine political history, to provide broader contextual
information about the country or even to weigh the nuances of the
characters—the candidates and their aides—who dominate their story.
Indeed, as the title suggests, they approach a landmark election as a
grueling sports competition, with the various players jousting and
falling to the ground, and the narrative seems constructed to fit the
24/7 news flow that dominates so much political reporting today: the
tidbits of news, gossip, recent polls and state-by-state odds doled out
continuously on the Internet . . . not to mention the attitude-driven
“reports” on cable TV.
Abramson
found that filling out her executive team took longer than she
anticipated and was less dramatic than she promised. “It’s like a
cascade of related downstream effects, and all of them have to be
considered,” she told me at the end of a long September day. She had to
confer with candidates for every editorial opening, and she had to meet
with every editor who was replaced or promoted. So when she replaced two
editors on the masthead, Gerald Marzorati and Susan Edgerley, with
Richard Berke and Susan Chira, she had to meet with each privately. (The
newsroom noticed that, with Chira, Abramson had promoted someone with
whom she sometimes clashed.) Every decision triggered still more
decisions. After promoting Chira, for example, Abramson had to meet with
the assistant managing editor, Jim Roberts, to tell him that she was
subtracting part of his portfolio and adding something else, supervision
of the online Times. She tried to navigate between goals that
sometimes collided—seeking more diversity and trying to promote a new
generation of editors, yet not depriving the paper of those with
experience and wisdom. While her decisions pleased editors in their
early fifties, like Chira and Berke, they did not please editors who
were closer to sixty and wondered if their age was held against them.
Despite the desire to reduce the number of masthead editors, she had not
done so.
“It’s hard,” Abramson says, of the personnel decisions.
“I approach it with a sense of extreme worry verging on dread. Not
because I think the decisions are wrong or I’m second-guessing myself
but because the conversations are so difficult.” One senior editor at
the paper who was unaffected by the changes observes, “The difference
between Jill and Howell is that Howell executed people he didn’t like.”
In
her first weeks on the job, Abramson frequently wandered around the
three newsroom floors doling out compliments. She stopped at the Metro
desk on September 12th and said, “I just wanted to say fantastic job,”
referring to Robert McFadden’s front-page account of the events that
took place on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. “Would you call me when he
comes in?” She went downstairs and sat down next to a young business
reporter, Louise Story, telling her, “Your front-page story today was
great.” At the 10
A.M. page-one meeting, she went out of
her way to praise editors for their work. “She is really trying,” one
editor says. “How long it will last I don’t know.”
The foremost question for the Times is financial. Can the New York Times Company, which derives more than ninety per cent of its revenues from the Times
and the seventeen other daily newspapers it owns, defy the bleak recent
history of newspapers? The Times Company lost money in two of the past
five years, but saw its operating profit jump to two hundred and
thirty-four million dollars last year; its net debt has been cut nearly
in half since 2006, and it has repaid the loans from Carlos Slim. James
M. Follo, a senior vice-president and the C.F.O., notes that the
company’s digital-news revenue rose fifteen per cent in the second
quarter. “It’s still way too early to declare victory,” Arthur
Sulzberger says about digital subscriptions. “But it’s significantly
gone past our expectations. Yes, it’s working.” Follo predicts further
“subscription growth in this quarter.”
Nevertheless, according to
the company’s latest financial report, which covers the second quarter
of 2011, the company lost a hundred and twenty million dollars, revenues
fell two per cent, and print advertising dropped more than twice as
rapidly as digital advertising rose. With Times Company stock hovering
at about seven dollars per share, the market value of the entire company
is barely a billion dollars, about what the
Times spent to acquire the Boston
Globe, in 1993. In mid-September, Janet Robinson warned investors that the
Times’
third-quarter ad revenues would drop eight per cent, twice the
projected falloff. Last week, Abramson announced that she would be
eliminating about twenty jobs in the newsroom through buyouts. “We’re
still sailing across the Atlantic,” Lawrence Ingrassia, the business
editor, says, “and we don’t know what’s on the other side.”
One
thing that Abramson does know—as she described, generally, in her memo
to Sulzberger—is that she’s going to have to turn the
Times into
something more than a newspaper. She must plan for new multimedia
possibilities—audio, video, archives, and the participation of readers.
Should the
Times create online news programs? Should the
Times work more closely with Twitter and Facebook? Should the
Times
publish e-books? “These are the kinds of strategic questions that Jill
is going to have to grapple with in a way that none of her predecessors
had to,” Gerald Marzorati says. “We’re not just a newspaper anymore.”
Because
Times
reporters appear in both the print and the online editions, they no
longer just file their stories in the early evening for the next day’s
paper. They are expected to file for the Web site several times each
day—and to maintain the paper’s quality even when they’re rushed. “So
the challenge is how to manage people without mistakes, without burning
them out, without losing standards,” Baquet says.
The meshing of online and print introduces another challenge: figuring out how much attitude and opinion to include. The
Times
today offers opinion on its editorial page, in business-section
columns, in political stories only sometimes marked “News Analysis,” and
in the Sunday Review, which falls under the editorial-page editor,
Andrew Rosenthal. (In its previous iteration, as the Week in Review, it
fell under the news department.) More than a few editors worry that
there is too much attitude or opinion in the
Times.
Rosenthal,
whose father, A. M. Rosenthal, once rigorously policed newsroom
opinions as executive editor, is a leading worrier. “Readers are
confused by what we’re doing,” he says. “The news report can be
undermined, particularly in the highly partisan, accusatory time we live
in, if we mingle news and opinion.”
“There is huge apprehension
all through the newsroom about the blurring of lines,” Schmidt says. “On
the other hand, there’s a sense of wanting to be edgier.” In an attempt
to clearly demarcate the two, the
Times has had informal
committees address the subject, but consensus has proved elusive. “Part
of the great competition for audience in the twenty-first century is the
competition to get beyond commodity news,” Bill Keller says. “To add
meaning to it. To help readers organize the information into
understanding.” That’s especially true, he says, in the print newspaper,
because many of the facts have already been available online. “The
tenor of a front-page news story has changed in the last five or ten
years from who, where, when, what, why to more emphasis on how and why.”
Norman Pearlstine, Abramson’s former boss at the
Wall Street Journal and today the chief content officer of Bloomberg L.P., believes that too much opinion seeps into the
Times’
news pages: “Sometimes it’s hard to tell what I’m reading. There are a
lot of stories where it seems there is an editorial voice.” For example,
the first page of the Metro section on September 25th featured an
article by Ginia Bellafante titled “Gunning for Wall Street, with Faulty
Aim.” It was an early account of Occupy Wall Street. Bellafante wrote:
The
group’s lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime
progressivism rather than practice it knowledgeably is unsettling in the
face of the challenges so many of its generation face—finding work,
repaying student loans, figuring out ways to finish college when money
has run out. But what were the chances that its members were going to
receive the attention they so richly deserve carrying signs like “Even
If the World Were to End Tomorrow I’d Still Plant a Tree Today”?
If
it had been on the editorial page or the cultural page or labelled
“News Analysis,” it would not have stood out. Instead, in the print
edition there was a box with the writer’s name and the rubric “Big
City.” Online, the column bore no special markings and had the same
layout as the other stories in the Metro section.
An editorial voice in news stories adds credence to the frequent charge that the
Times’
news reporting often displays a liberal bias—a critique that will not
be lessened by the elevation of a woman brought up in a
liberal-Democratic household on the West Side of Manhattan who worked
for liberal Southern Democrats and wrote a book asserting that Clarence
Thomas probably lied.
Abramson, asked whether the
Times has a liberal bias, says, “I think we try hard not to” be biased, but she adds that the
Times,
as its public editor argued in a column seven years ago, has an insular
urban bias that is sometimes apparent in social stories. She fervently
believes that the
Times is an equal-opportunity prober of
Democrats as well as of Republicans. Asked about her own upbringing, she
responds, “I’m often the one who raises the point in page-one meetings
that our mix of stories is too urban in outlook, too parochial. All my
years in Washington, and in some ways being attacked by conservatives,
made me more conscious of how a story might be seen in the rest of
America.”
In the meantime, she flaunts just how much of a New
Yorker she is. To celebrate her return to the city, in 2003, Abramson
got a small tattoo on her right shoulder that replicates an old subway
token. It was intended, she says, as a tribute to the subway system,
which she rides and which she associates with her home town, and as a
declaration that she had “come back to New York, likely for good.” The
slogan on the coin, she said, was also meant as a reflection of her
philosophy that life is not a dress rehearsal for anything: “Good for
one fare.” It’s also, though, an implicit reminder of the challenge
Abramson faces as she seeks to transform her newspaper. The days of a
young girl’s family receiving two printed copies of the New York
Times
and calling it “our religion” are long gone—as are the days when you
dropped a coin into a slot before pushing through a subway turnstile.
♦
Professor Fredrick Harris has written in his op ed, “Still Waiting for Our First Black President’’ that “Obama has pursued a racially defused electoral and governing strategy, keeping issues of specific interest to African Americans — off the national agenda.”
