Max Frankel, the former executive editor of the Times, once said of his old boss’s son, the future publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., “He’ll never make the same mistake three times.” Depending on who’s counting, that may or may not spell good news for Dean Baquet, the paper’s new executive editor, whom Sulzberger appointed last week, making Baquet the first African-American to hold the position. Baquet takes over from Jill Abramson, the first woman ever to hold the position—and the second chief editor whom Sulzberger can now be said to regret installing. In firing Abramson, on Wednesday, less than three years into her tenure, Sulzberger alluded to “an issue with management in the newsroom.” Sulzberger also appointed Howell Raines, in 2001, only to force him to resign less than two years later, amid scandal, in the wake of Jayson Blair’s fabrications.
The news of Abramson’s firing was so unexpected in the newsroom that a few employees at the paper, upon being summoned to an urgent staff-wide meeting with Sulzberger, worried that someone on the masthead had died. When Abramson was not present at the meeting, the morbid thought even seemed briefly plausible. “We’re not Wall Street,” one veteran employee marvelled later, meaning that the Times is not in the habit of escorting newly terminated employees out the door like insider traders—computers confiscated, e-mail accounts frozen—without a proper sendoff. “That’s so not our culture.”
Abramson, it turned out, had been offered the chance to resign and declined, choosing instead to wage a public-relations battle against the paper, whose emblematic “” she has inked, in Gothic script, on her back. To some, this made her a cautionary tale against tattoos, if nothing else_._ To others, she was a feminist martyr—pushed out for being “pushy,” a gendered critique. This view, given Internet momentum by Abramson’s daughter, who posted to Instagram a rallying picture of the deposed editor in boxing gloves (“Mom’s badass new hobby. #girls #pushy”) that ended up on page 1 of the Post, was more widely held outside the paper than within, where Baquet has long been more popular. (“Dean was probably the first New York Times editor ever to hug me,” a staffer said.) But even nonpartisans were horrified by the so-called optics of the fallout, as the week wore on, given the paper’s long-standing tolerance of difficult male executives. Of the way the firing was handled, one employee said, “The main complaint is: why did this have to be done in such a blunt way?” Another, a prominent reporter, proposed a multiple-choice question: “Tough and abrasive?” (a) Abe Rosenthal (1977-86), (b) Howell Raines (2001-03), (c) Max Frankel (1986-94), (d) Jill Abramson (2011-14), (e) all of the above. “Business is basically good, and the journalism is good, but the culture is bad,” the reporter continued. “But that describes a hundred and fifty years of the paper’s history. It’s always been sociopaths and lunatics running the place. Why step to Jill? People are genuinely upset about that.”
The morning after the firing, Danielle Mattoon, the culture editor, sent out word that she planned to “raise the yellow umbrella”—a reference to an old beer canopy obtained years ago from a wurst operation by some music writers and editors. Ordinarily a Friday-evening tradition, meant to signal the pouring of single malt, the umbrella was raised on Thursday evening, and about forty people convened to compare notes.
Stunned staff members continued to huddle and parse the issues—gender, race, likability. Some highlights of the conversation: “The notion that Jill was widely unpopular is exaggerated, but she didn’t make many people love her, either.” “Dean is an operator. Like a duck that looks smooth on the water and is swimming underneath.” “I think the job turns you into a fascist.” “It got so dark so quickly, with her amazing refusal to go away quietly. She’s become a cult hero.” “Jill couldn’t have been replaced by a white male. It’s the clashing of these two historic lives that makes it possible.”
As it happens, “Improving the Culture” was to be the subject of several talks at the paper’s annual “offsite,” a leadership summit for business and editorial executives, which had been scheduled for Thursday and Friday. As a cost-savings measure, the offsite has lately been held onsite, on the fifteenth floor, above the company cafeteria, but the agenda this year called for a brief escape in the form of a Thursday-night dinner, downtown, with the HBO chief executive, Richard Plepler, as guest speaker. Under the circumstances, Sulzberger abruptly cancelled the summit and disinvited Plepler, but then decided to keep the dinner reservation, as a kind of “Welcome, Dean” affair. So, at 6:30 P.M., approximately thirty Times-women and -men assembled in the basement of Lafayette, a French restaurant. (“The nonromance starts at the door,” Pete Wells, the paper’s chief food critic, wrote last year, of Lafayette. “One night when a private party had taken over the basement, Lafayette let large, unfunny security men with earpieces stop diners on the sidewalk for questioning.”)
Once everyone had been seated, Sulzberger took the floor. “We’ve been through an eclipse,” he said, brandishing a glass. He then urged his employees to focus not on the moon but, rather, on the sun, by which he meant Baquet. A toast was raised “to Dean, our fearless leader,” as one attendee recalled, adding, “But not in a fascist way!” Three senior editors—two men and a woman—got up and told stories about Baquet, including his habit of stealing people’s BlackBerrys and using them to send prank messages. The atmosphere, in which some had detected an air of queasy skepticism, gave way to a sense of calm, and even hopefulness. “There was definitely no gloating,” the guest said. “No ‘the witch is dead.’ Nothing like that.” ♦
