WASHINGTON, D.C. May 21 (DPI) – It’s taken a week but the furor over the firing of New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson has finally subsided. And too bad: It was splendid entertainment.
Not only was it the most public dismissal ever of a private employee – certainly of anyone in journalism – it was also the most intimate. We got to hear nearly everything. Jill wanted to hire Janine, which upset Dean, who went to the boss Arthur, who didn’t want to lose Dean and worried Jill would spur an exodus if she stayed.
At least that’s one narrative.
It all devolved into a media community he-said-she-said in which feelings were felt all around, and then shared with us for days in statements and comments and blog posts. And a plot twist: Was Jill Abramson, the newspaper’s first female executive editor, being discriminated against for being a woman?
Jill Abramson is likely an excellent journalist, and she too may be brilliant. But she was, according to all our sources at the world’s best news organization, a preoccupied and somewhat abusive top editor. She was maneuvering to hire a second editor, Janine Gibson, which surprised Abramson’s #2 editor, Dean Baquet, who apparently hadn’t been notified. Amid the confusion Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher and controlling owner, decided to remove her because her presence at the top risked a much larger problem: The flight of newsroom talent, at an especially delicate time as the paper tries to re-define itself in the digital age.
The drama unfolded after Abramson’s sudden firing last week. New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, sounding a bit too much like a dinner-party pal, posted that Abramson may have been removed because she once got a lawyer to inquire about her compensation. That set off CNN and other news outlets, which ran with the gender-bias theme.
Re-enter Sulzberger, who’d hoped to keep things amicable. He had to basically violate his non-disparagement agreement with Abramson by outlining some of her shortcomings as a manager. It’s a move that will cost NYT and its shareholders several million more, most likely.
Through it all commentators all seemed on a first-name basis with everyone, reflecting the cozy top of big media. By Monday, as Abramson gave a quite nearly classy commencement address at Wake Forest (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6o_jWADmC4), grizzled NYT media writer David Carr offered some healing words as well. His column Monday was classic NYT commentary: intelligent, insightful and politically careful.
Carr made two important points: he basically said the publisher had not only the right but the substantive grounds to fire his top editor. And Carr said, somewhat obscured by his nuance, the loss of a single person in a newsroom brimming with smart, ambitious journalists wasn’t the end of the world, wherever he or she appeared on the masthead.
And 500+ posters were largely supportive:
Great article. Something you would probably not see in any other newspaper. I wish the NY Times well – the newspaper business is changing at a quick pace. As long as the Times continues to innovate, and offer its publication at a reasonable price, it will do fine.
I don’t know Jill Abramson personally, and in highly charged public situations you assess people on both their words and conduct. When she first was elevated to succeed Bill Keller in 2011, Abramson came across to me as a bit of a flake: A speaking voice descended from broken bagpipes, which she didn’t seem to care to try to modify, and she seemed to use a tattoo – and later more tattoos – as a kind of personal marketing schtick. In her first months on the job she spent a surprising amount of time promoting a book about her puppy. And apparently she was a no-show in the newsroom for Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, suggesting to me she’d turned into a reporter who didn’t care about hard news, a common affliction in today’s journalism and in older journalists especially.
Corporations, like the military, are nothing if not disciplined hierarchies. They are occupied by many competent people who toil in well-defined roles, and sacrifice themselves for an above-average paycheck. Media corporations aren’t all that different, but they are beholden to their talent, so they must tolerate more eccentricity and individualism. We all love distinctive personalities, after all.
In the end though Jill Abramson just showed the human traits that get corporate executives of all genders in trouble – being temperamental, a bit petulant even, and a bit preoccupied perhaps with her historic place as a top woman editor. On some level she herself likely knows all that. Her sentiments down at Wake Forest – her voice was more free of her trademark nasal bagpipe than ever before – suggested that as well.
As a male outsider I tired of the parade of not-enough-women-in-power articles, which became common of the site in the last three years. And I was really offended when she – the buck stops with her — chose a few weeks ago to convict a Florida State football player of rape when he hadn’t even been charged. I thought it was irresponsible.
But I can see why she promoted all that – she felt strongly about it. We all respond to life’s slights in our own ways, and Jill Abramson’s persona seems the product of more than her share, as a woman battling peers who’ve mostly been men over her career. Ultimately though she was like Conan O’Brien on the Tonight Show: She was just a bad fit.
But she surely will land on her feet. In fact, for all the entertainment surrounding her ouster, she’ll probably be in greater demand now than ever before. –Stephen E. Clark