On June 2nd, Bill Keller, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Dean Baquet, and Jill Abramson gathered for an 11 a.m. address to the New York Times newsroom and announced that Abramson will replace Keller, who is resigning to pursue writing, as the executive editor on September 6th. This is the first time in its 160-year history that a woman will head the newspaper, and for the second time or so the dignified New York Times made a stir in internautical wilds like Twitter.
Jill Abramson, born in New York City and alumna of Harvard University, had worked as a journalist until 2003; after the Jayson Blair news fabrication scandal she was appointed as co-managing editor for the news.
The tasks of a managing editor are to "[oversee] and [coordinate] the publication's editorial activities" and at the Times it is the second-highest post. (Based on pure surmise this presumably means that if the arts editor wants to know whether to publish a contentious story, as is, or with changes, (s)he would refer it to the managing editor; and it would be at Abramson's discretion to consult the paper's lawyers or the top editor or even the publisher, etc., if she can't satisfactorily settle the question herself.) Baquet, now the assistant managing editor and an employee who is highly regarded by his colleagues at the New York and formerly at the Los Angeles Times,* will assume this post.
THE history of women reporters in the Times is venerable but chequered, and it begins with Jane Grant. She was stuck writing articles on "women's issues" and struggled through a rude environment for fifteen years in all. (In 1925 she co-founded the magazine New Yorker with her husband Harold Ross.)
Later women have held high positions in the Times, like the columnists Anna Quindlen and Maureen Dowd, and more recently Gail Collins; Carlotta Gall is charged with the reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan after a similarly tough post for a different paper in Chechnya; and bylines from Ligaya Mishan through Elaine Sciolino to Janet Maslin appear throughout. Dowd won a Pulitzer in 1999 for her columns about the Monica Lewinsky affair, but she has ten predecessors (Ada Louise Huxtable in 1970 for architecture reporting, Nan C. Robertson in 1983 for a medicine feature, Sheryl WuDunn in a shared laurel in 1990, Natalie Angier in 1991, Anna Quindlen in 1992, Isabel Wilkerson in 1994, Margo Jefferson in 1995, Linda Greenhouse and Michiko Kakutani in 1998 ) all the way down to Anne O'Hare McCormick, who in 1937 was honoured for her foreign correspondence. (Since then there have been five others: Gretchen Morgenson, Andrea Elliott, Amy Harmon, Sheri Fink, and Ellen Barry.) There are three women — Lynn G. Dolnick, Susan W. Dryfoos, and Cathy J. Sulzberger — on the Ochs-Sulzberger Trust board, too. Judith Miller certainly left her mark as well.
AS for other American publications, women have already held leading posts. Tina Brown edited Vanity Fair from 1984 to 1992 and The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998, Katharine Graham was the moving spirit behind the Washington Post as its publisher, Anne Marie Lipinski was the editor of the Chicago Tribune from 2001 to 2008, others have headed the Portland Oregonian (Sandra Rowe starting in 1993) and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Julia Wallace starting in 2002). Nancy Hicks Maynard was the first African-American woman to own a large newspaper, the Oakland Tribune, in 1983. In the online press Arianna Huffington and more recently Brown have become formidable figures.
The response of these colleagues, also in the television milieu, has been enthusiastic; PBS's Gwen Ifill, Katie Couric of ABC News, Time's Kate Pickert, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, and Tina Brown joined employees in the Times in expressing their congratulations and appreciation for the shattering of another glass ceiling.
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Jill Abramson has co-written among other books a weighty rebuttal to the defamation of Anita Hill by David Brock in his book The Real Anita Hill, by political allies, and by the media who uncritically repeated the libel. Hill had endangered the confirmation of Supreme Court appointee Clarence Thomas by accusing him of harassment. Jane Mayer (then a colleague at the Wall Street Journal and now a contributor to the magazine New Yorker) was the co-author, and it came out on the bookshelves as Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas in 1994. Since then it has become the final word on the matter. In October Puppy Diaries, a nonpolitical compendium of her series of personal blogs on the Times's website in 2009, will appear in Times Books.
In terms of the press, she worked for Time magazine (1973-1976), NBC News, The American Lawyer during the eighties, and the Legal Times as editor-in-chief from 1986-1988. In 1988 she started her stint at the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau, and when Maureen Dowd nudged her to the Times in 1997 she became Washington bureau chief. While she was with the Times she and Don Van Natta Jr. uncovered part of the network of lawyers and enemies of the Clintons who ferreted out and nudged into press circulation reports of fiscal and amorous impropriety in the 1990s (praised in ex-editor Joseph Lelyveld's 2003 article, "In Clinton's Court," for the New York Review of Books).
Since 1988 she has appeared on television often: 39 times on the political affairs channel C-SPAN and 2 times on Charlie Rose's highly civilized talkshow on PBS. Her voice has a New York edge, and it is a continuous flow of words that stretch into each other, presumably as a way to avoid stumbles or filler like "um," though "you know" presents an island of punctuation intermittently. In short, her speaking style is Harvard-educated Sarah Palin with superior syntax, brain, and no conscious folk vernacular. On television her clothing seems a little stuffy, her tone occasionally patronizing, her emotions and reactions detached by superego, and despite the geniality toward the interviewer her air is a billboard declaring Keep Away. Relative to the rank and file of commentators, she is neither defensive nor aggressive, nor needily impelled to prove herself; she seems as willing to listen and think as to talk and think. She gives a careful interview. When someone challenges the Times's golden calf, viz. the belief in its own immaculate objectivity, her sense of responsibility to the New York Times seems to declare red alert as her autopilot reiterates nuanceless assurances of the Times's impeccable neutrality.
JILL Abramson has been seen as the potential heir to Bill Keller for years, though as she put it to Gabriel Sherman in 2010
"I don’t dwell on it," [. . .] "I think it would be a healthy, nice thing for the country. It is meaningful to have women in positions of leadership at important institutions in society. But, you know, there are wonderful male editors in this place who are just as capable as I am, and they could run this place exquisitely well. If it happens, it happens, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t."She has a relatively benign example to follow. Before Keller became the executive editor he had been passed over for the position in favour of Howell Raines. When Raines was fired two years later in connection with the Blair scandal — nominally; he also raised animosity by insisting on reforms which frankly the Times might need, but perhaps more aggressively than the Times needs — the publisher decided abruptly that he wanted Keller after all.
BESIDES Keller's dispiriting consciousness of being Sulzberger's second-best, his heart lies in the writing which earned him his Pulitzer (though why he would use the lofty writerly skills, which to garner the prize must have rendered the decline and fall of the Soviet Union in vivid colour, to battle the Twitter windmill is beyond me) rather than in editing, particularly when freighted with a high burden of business decisions.
Keller's current employee David Carr characterizes him with excellent conciseness in a recent interview with Baristanet:
He has accomplished amazing things in the job and is probably one of the most talented journalists of our time. Remember, he was not the first choice, and it was an accident of history. And the crown with him never exactly fit. He never was the imperial executive editor of the New York Times, and he turned out to be a fabulous one.Keller himself has surmised,
I think Howell’s view of leadership is martial [. . .]. And mine is more paterfamilias, I guess. You are dependent on this huge reservoir of talent, and your job is to create the circumstances under which they can do their best work, to reward them when they do well, correct them when they do wrong, set some guidelines, and spur their ambitions. But it’s not about me.SO Keller soothed the savage malcontent among the Times reporters. Even if the outrage is not entirely laid (Abramson herself has been gloomily cast as having Raines moments), Sulzberger is fully behind her — even in 2003 he was hoping that she would become the first female executive editor — and despite the controversies over the delay of the National Security Agency wiretap story in 2005 and over the free imaginative rein which Judith Miller held over her reporting on Iraq's putative weapons of mass destruction, etc., she appears to have emerged happily from the froth like a Venus.
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Her father, Norman L. Abramson, is a New Yorker like her mother and "retired president of Irish Looms Associates, New York textile importers." (This is the information in her wedding announcement in the Times. Despite the section's habit of adorning occupations which have an insufficiently patrician air, in this instance embellishment is clearly not required.)
The household were newspaper-readers who harboured a Virginia O'Hanlon faith in the Times's dictates — "In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth," Jill Abramson told the newsroom on Thursday — and it could afford to send her to Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a NYC school and member of the Ivy Preparatory School League.** The school's list of prominent alumni is a fragmentary Who's Who of the American elite, among them Sofia Coppola, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Howard Wolfson, David Denby, Jane Mayer (whom Abramson seems to have met and become friends with at the school), Sheryl WuDunn and, coincidentally, Gil Scott-Heron.
At Harvard she pursued undergraduate studies in History and Literature, and emerged magna cum laude in 1976, to dive straight away into the journalist profession.
Along the road she picked up an interest in fashion — in pursuit of his profile Gabriel Sherman caught her before a Narciso Rodriguez runway show — and in music in the form of Arcade Fire; feminism appears a passion if her early book on the first graduating class of Harvard Law School where women had represented over 10% of the freshman class, the photo of the Times's third female reporter on her office wall, and her paean to her predecessors during her newsroom speech on Thursday are an indication; so, clearly, is raising dogs. She broke her wrist last year during a hike, so corpore sano is evidently not neglected either (except for the wrist).
In 1981 she married fellow New Yorker and Harvard graduate Henry Little Griggs 3rd. As the son of an NBC News producer and employee with a political PR company he was not new to the halls of the Ivy League, journalism, or politics either. They have two children and the hero of the puppy diaries, Scout, and alternate geographically between New York City and Connecticut.
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"Good for one fare only"
Subway token inscription / philosophical metaphor for a human life (presumably it implies carpe diem/dum vivimus vivamus) / part of Jill Abramson's tattoo
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"Jill Abramson" [Wikipedia] (read)
"Carlotta Gall" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011)
"Elaine Sciolino" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011)
"Jane Grant" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011)
"Tina Brown" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011 UTC+2)
"Jill Abramson: 'I'm a battle-scarred veteran'" [Guardian] by Ed Pilkington (June 7, 2011)
"Jill Abramson, Just-Named New York Times Editor, Ready To 'Seize The Future'" [Huffington Post], by Michael Calderone (June 2, 2011)
"New York Times shakes up its masthead" [Politico], by Keach Hagey (June 2, 2011)
"Jill E. Abramson Is Bride Of Henry Little Griggs 3d" [New York Times] (March 15, 1981)
"Ethical Culture Fieldston School" [Wikipedia] Read June 3, 2011
"The New York Times" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011)
"Times Two" [New York Magazine], by Gabriel Sherman (September 26, 2010) [and Page 2]
"New York Times names Jill Abramson as first female executive editor" [Guardian], by Jason Deans (June 2, 2011)
"Coffee With . . . David Carr" [Baristanet] by Debbie Galant (June 5, 2011)
"The United States of America vs. Bill Keller" (p. 2) [New York Magazine], by Joe Hagan (Sept. 10, 2006) [and Pages 4, 7 and 10]
Interview: "Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson in Current Affairs" [Charlierose.com] (Nov. 7, 1994)
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* From Politico's article: "Dean Baquet, the paper’s assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief who became a kind of journalistic folk hero when he refused to cut staff as editor of the Los Angeles Times, will replace Abramson as managing editor."
** To be honest, though the Ivy Preparatory School League sounds prestigious and likely is, even after reading the relevant Wikipedia article the practical ramifications of this affiliation remain obscure.
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