Updated at 9 A.M. on May 16th.
In the gossipy world of New York journalism, the firing of Jill Abramson from her position as the executive editor of the Times provoked a veritable explosion of talk, posts, and Instagram pictures of the objects of interest. And a day after her dismissal, even more details are emerging about why Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the paper’s publisher, felt compelled to dismiss yet another executive editor whom he himself had anointed. The first was Howell Raines, who was forced to resign, in 2003, after the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal and because his consistently arrogant approach to management had alienated the newsroom.
Sulzberger and Abramson had a fraught relationship almost from the start of her tenure as executive editor, nearly three years ago. He saw her as difficult, high-handed, and lacking in finesse in her management of people at the paper. She, in turn, was increasingly resentful of his intrusions into her command of editorial operations, and of his increasingly close relationship with Mark Thompson, the company’s C.E.O., who came from England and the BBC to run the business side.
It is always hard to say what causes a final break—a firing, a divorce—but, clearly, a last straw came a few weeks ago, when Abramson, who made little secret of her displeasure with Sulzberger, decided to hire a lawyer to complain that her salary was not equal to that of her predecessor, Bill Keller. She had also been told by reliable sources at the paper that, as managing editor, she had once earned less than the managing editor of news operations, John Geddes. Abramson’s attempt to raise the salary issue at a time when tempers were already frayed seemed wrongheaded to Sulzberger and Thompson, both on its merits and in terms of her approach. Bringing in a lawyer, in particular, seems to have struck them as especially combative. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, argued that there was no real compensation gap, but conceded to me that “this incident was a contributing factor” to the firing of Abramson, because “it was part of a pattern.” (Update: Murphy wrote to me after this post went up to dispute this. Her quote is accurate and in context, as I’ve confirmed in my notes. However, she now e-mails: “I said to you that the issue of bringing a lawyer in was part of a pattern that caused frustration. I NEVER said that it was part of a pattern that led to her firing because that is just not true.”)
Another episode that added to the characterization of Abramson as hard to deal with came after a decision was made to hire a second managing editor to oversee the Times’ digital endeavors. Abramson led that hiring effort. The Times, in its story on Abramson’s dismissal, said that Abramson had offered the job to Janine Gibson, the editor of Guardian U.S., “without consulting” Dean Baquet, then the managing editor and now Abramson’s successor. This implies that Abramson was operating more or less in a vacuum, without consistent consultations with her colleagues, particularly Baquet. Gibson met separately with Sulzberger and Thompson on May 5th, and had lunch with Baquet that same day. What Baquet did not know, until Gibson herself mentioned it to him at lunch, I’m told, is that she was offered a managing-editor job comparable to his own. He was, it is fair to say, unenthusiastic, and even angered.
Abramson clearly should have conferred earlier with Baquet, a failure that contributed to the impression that she could be an unskilled and insensitive executive. But the story is complicated by a previously undisclosed e-mail from April 28th, from Thompson to Abramson:
In addition to confirming that the top management of the Times was, in fact, on the same page as Abramson about this hire, the e-mail raises a question: What happened between April 28th, when Thompson urged Abramson “to sign up for some more years as Editor,” and May 14th, when she was terminated?
There was a dinner meeting between Baquet and Sulzberger on Wednesday, May 7th—two days after Baquet’s lunch with Gibson. Abramson, clearly worried that Baquet was not fully onboard, asked Sulzberger to assure Baquet that when she stepped down he would succeed her, I was told. Abramson wanted Baquet to know that this was her recommendation as well.
But, at the dinner, Baquet, an unfailingly polite and popular editor, did something unusual for him: he complained to Sulzberger. He conveyed to him, I’m told, that he felt undermined by Abramson’s failure to let him know where Gibson would be in the Times hierarchy. He also said that Abramson’s management style was too abrupt and belligerent. The next day, a depressed Sulzberger told Abramson that the meeting did not go well. And the day after that, on May 9th*, Gibson turned down the job, keeping to her plan of moving back to London and working as a deputy editor of the Guardian and the editor of its Web site.
The uncharacteristic eruption by Baquet reinforced an image of Abramson that had always troubled Sulzberger. When I profiled Abramson, in the fall of 2011, he told me that, before he appointed her as executive editor, he hesitated, worried about her managerial style. Sulzberger wondered if he should have chosen Baquet instead. (Either way, it would have been a milestone: Abramson was the first woman executive editor of the Times, and Baquet is now the first African-American.)
Sulzberger grew increasingly concerned that Abramson was a problem. Her personality was an issue for him. She had parried with Thompson over several issues, including how to handle “native advertising,” a form of advertising that can risk hiding an ad in the garb of news copy. (Murphy disputed this: “They actually took a very similar view of it—that total clarity about the difference between Times journalism and advertising was paramount, but that a way could be found to achieve that clarity,” she told me.) Abramson had made a series of management missteps—appointing a new Washington bureau chief and a new national editor—that she ended up reversing. Her style sometimes grated.
Sulzberger wasn’t alone on that point. As one woman reporter on the staff who got along with Abramson told me, “She was definitely polarizing, and I heard stories of how arbitrarily brusque she could be. ‘Mercurial’ is a word you hear used for her a lot.”
And yet, unlike in the case of Raines, there was no scandal, no journalistic disaster. In fact, the Times remains the singular news organization in the United States. As a paper and as a Web site, it has thrived, even if the business, like most publications, is challenged by the crisis in advertising and the tidal shifts in technology. Abrasiveness has never been a firing offense at the Times. Abe Rosenthal, an executive editor during the late seventies and eighties, was never considered a subtle personality, to say the least. And so there is a reason that gender has been widely discussed in relation to Abramson’s firing and how she was judged, even if it was not the decisive factor.
Another development involved Sulzberger’s son, A. G. Sulzberger, who led a task force on the paper’s digital future. Its work culminated in a ninety-six-page internal report, released in late March, that can be read as a rebuke of Abramson’s newsroom management, noting, ”While we receive accolades for our digital efforts like ‘Snowfall,’ we nevertheless are at risk of becoming known as a place that does not fully understand, reward, and celebrate digital skills.”
And there was, again, the question of Abramson’s compensation. There are at least two large, related questions. First, did Abramson’s challenge to Sulzberger on that point, including the manner in which she presented it, contribute to her dismissal? The answer to that seems to be yes, if not in isolation. Second, was she correct—did she actually receive unequal pay for an equal job?
Clearly, Abramson believed that her pay was not the same as that of her male counterparts, and that she had good reason to be difficult. That’s why she hired a lawyer to discuss this with the Times. On Thursday, though, Sulzberger said, in a memo to the staff, that this was “misinformation”:
Let’s look at some numbers I’ve been given: As executive editor, Abramson’s starting salary in 2011 was $475,000, compared to Keller’s salary that year, $559,000. Her salary was raised to $503,000, and—only after she protested—was raised again to $525,000. She learned that her salary as managing editor, $398,000, was less than that of the male managing editor for news operations, John Geddes. She also learned that her salary as Washington bureau chief, from 2000 to 2003, was a hundred thousand dollars less than that of her successor in that position, Phil Taubman.** (Murphy would say only that Abramson’s compensation was “broadly comparable” to that of Taubman and Geddes.)
Murphy cautioned that one shouldn’t look at salary but, rather, at total compensation, which includes, she said, any bonuses, stock grants, and other long-term incentives. This distinction appears to be the basis of Sulzberger’s comment that Abramson was not earning “significantly less.” But it is hard to know how to parse this without more numbers from the Times. For instance, did Abramson’s compensation pass Keller’s because the Times’ stock price rose? Because her bonuses came in up years and his in down years? Because she received a lump-sum long-term payment and he didn’t?
And, if she was wrong, why would Mark Thompson agree, after her protest, to sweeten her compensation from $503,000 to $525,000? (Murphy said, on behalf of Thompson, that Abramson “also raised other issues about her compensation and the adequacy of her pension arrangements, which had nothing to do with the issue of comparability. It was to address these other issues that we suggested an increase in her compensation.”)
What is a fact is that Abramson believed she was being treated unequally. After learning, recently, that her salary was not equal to her male counterparts’, she visited with Sulzberger to complain. And she hired a lawyer because she believed she was not treated fairly.
There is one more question: Why did the Times, which so heralded the hiring of its first female executive editor, terminate Abramson in such a brutal fashion? What else happened between Thompson’s April 28th plea for her to stay longer and her termination by Sulzberger, eleven days later, on Friday, May 9th?
No one is served well by this story—not Sulzberger, Abramson, or Baquet, who cannot have wanted his elevation to come with controversy. Nor is it good for the institution of the Times. One indication of how swiftly events moved at the paper is that Janine Gibson, who as recently as last week was pondering whether to join the staff, has told friends, “No way I would have had conversations with Jill Abramson about coming to the New York Times if I thought she would be leaving.”
*In an earlier version, the date was given as May 8th (although it was also said, correctly, to be two days after the May 7th dinner).
**In an earlier version, Phil Taubman was referred to as Jill Abramson’s predecessor.
Photograph: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty
